Upper Salmon River Chinook update - 6/11/2026

Below is the third pre-season update for the upper Salmon River Chinook return and upcoming fishery that will open on June 18th. As you are aware the IDFG Commission approved the proposals for Chinook fisheries in the upper Salmon River, South Fork Salmon River, and Lochsa River on 5/29. More details can be found here.

Sawtooth Return

Since my last update on May 27th, we've only seen one additional Sawtooth PIT tag cross over Bonneville Dam, bringing the current estimate to 1,902 adult Sawtooth Chinook over Bonneville. The lack of PIT tags observed over the past two weeks means that the run will likely come in somewhere between 2,000 and 2,200 fish. And as you would expect, that reduces our harvest share in the upcoming fishery. We had previously been expecting a harvest share somewhere between 300 and 500 fish, where it is now looking like the harvest share will be between 200 and 300 fish.

Below is the updated run timing figure, with the current Sawtooth adult Chinook return (thick black line) at Bonneville Dam in comparison to the average return from 2009 - 2025 (red line). The gray line shows the 2016 return as an example of an earlier and larger return, the blue line represents 2025 as a later arriving average return, and the dotted horizontal line is the 2026 pre-season forecast. You can see how the run has leveled off since the previous two updates. This graph seems to indicate that things are winding down, and we likely won't see much more out of the Sawtooth run, but we have been surprised in the past when we've seen a late push of Sawtooth fish crossing Bonneville Dam through the latter half of June. I'm not giving up all hope just yet but I am being realistic about this return fizzling out like many of the Idaho stocks this year.