Friday August 12, 2022
Le Grande Observer —
As we move toward the opening of steelhead season I thought I’d provide an update on the ongoing run and provide some thoughts on current fishing opportunities along with some hot water topics.
Additionally, there are some cool upcoming opportunities to help with some fisheries management and important land acquisitions.
While it’s still early in the steelhead run, enough steelhead have passed Bonneville Dam to start looking at the crystal ball of fisheries management to see what our upcoming fishery might look like.
First, I can tell you it’s looking a fair bit better than the last few years. In the steelhead fisheries plan, we provided a framework for how we would manage the steelhead fisheries in Northeast Oregon based on passage at the mainstem dams. The primary metric we provided to determine if fisheries might be curtailed was passage of 2,724 wild steelhead at Ice Harbor Dam (ICE) between June 15 and Sept. 24. On average, by Aug. 4 about 8% of the run has passed ICE.