Thursday September 3, 2026
The Trinity Journal —
For weeks, fisheries managers watched the lower Klamath River run low and warm.
Flows had been several hundred cubic feet per second below a 2,800 cfs threshold used to gauge risk to migrating salmon. Water temperatures had routinely climbed above 23 degrees Celsius. Still, managers held off on sending more water down the Trinity River.
The fish changed that.
Hoopa Valley and Yurok tribal fisheries crews found a sharp increase in ich, a parasite that attacks the skin and gills of fish. Mike Orcutt, fisheries director for the Hoopa Valley Tribe, said all 12 chinook salmon examined in one recent Hoopa sample were infected.
The finding helped trigger a decision to increase releases from Lewiston Dam from 450 cfs to as much as 1,200 cfs beginning Aug. 28.
“We saw most recently 12 fish were taken directly from one of our fisheries, and every one of them was infected,” Orcutt said in an interview Thursday, Aug. 27.
In a follow-up email, Orcutt described what tribal fisheries staff were seeing as high levels of ich on the gills of chinook sampled on the Hoopa Valley Reservation.