Salmon Return

Sport fishermen benefit from short tribal fishery

Sharp cuts in fishing by the Puyallup Tribe of Indians this year will allow sport fishermen to start fishing for chinook on the Puyallup River two weeks early. "The tribe is going to be off the water more this year to reduce impacts on returning chinook, and this gave more opportunity for sport fishermen," said Chris Phinney, the tribe's salmon fisheries management biologist. The cuts by the tribe were agreed to last spring during the tribal and state salmon fisheries management process.

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Coho return to Upper Skagit reservation

The Skagit Valley Herald:

For the first time in 50 years, the coho salmon have returned to the Upper Skagit Reservation.

To get them there, crews had to tear out a series of stacked culverts and remove 300 dump-truck loads of sediment that blocked the cohos’ path upstream.

The tribe and Skagit County also worked together to restore a lower section of Red Creek and one of its tributaries, channeling the water into two streams. This makes it easier for the 6- to 8-pound fish that had been forced to swim across a flooded field to reach the creek to spawn.

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Listen To The Salmon

OLYMPIA, WA (March 7, 2006) — This week I am turning 75 years young—time for me to think about what to do with the next half of my life.

But seriously, everyone who knows me knows I’ll continue to fight, to the last breath, to help restore salmon to the rivers of the Pacific Northwest—at harvestable levels. If I am remembered by anyone in future generations, let it be as a fisherman.

Cutting back our fisheries so sharply over the past quarter century to protect declining runs has been painful to Northwest Indians. The salmon’s decline has in no way been the fault of the tribes, but because our historic roots run so deep here we feel an ongoing responsibility, to our ancestors and the generations to come, to help solve the problem.

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Tribe, Coalition Working With Landowners To Survey Salt Creek Watershed

SALT CREEK (July 30, 2003) – In the late 1940s, low water levels in Salt Creek left juvenile coho salmon marooned along a stretch of the stream running through John McFall’s property. Using buckets and a wheelbarrow, McFall scooped up the small salmon and transferred them to a nearby tributary flowing with water.

“Three years later, I started seeing salmon return to the tributary where I placed those fish,” said McFall, whose family has owned and worked land in the Salt Creek watershed for about a century. “To this day, I can take you up there around Thanksgiving time and show you spawning salmon.”

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Tribes Study Salmon Migration On The Hamma Hamma River

ELDON (June 16, 2003) — Using a small net, Greg Sullivan scoops the remaining salmon from a smolt trap’s holding tank and counts his catch before releasing the juvenile fish back into the river. “That’s the last of them for today,” says the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe’s natural resources technician, who checks the trap on the Hamma Hamma River twice a week. “That makes 1,253 juvenile salmon. By far the most I’ve seen here at one time.”

And that’s a good sign. The more fish that show up in the smolt trap’s tank, the more accurate of a count the tribe can get on how many juvenile salmon, or smolts, are migrating from the freshwater of the Hamma Hamma River into the saltwater of Hood Canal. The smolt trap is part of a project conducted by the Port Gamble and Skokomish tribes, a local landowner, Long Live the Kings, the Hood Canal Salmon Enhancement Group and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

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