Upper Salmon River Chinook update - 7/1/2026

Here's the latest update for the upper Salmon River Chinook fishery, with the most recent numbers through Sunday June 28, 2026.

Through the first two weeks of the fishery, we estimate:

• Anglers harvested 68 hatchery adult salmon and released an estimated 17 unclipped adult salmon.
• Angler effort over the past week was 2,019 hours (a slight increase from the 1,343 hours estimated during the opening Thursday - Sunday)
• Angler catch rates improved from 73 hours per salmon caught during the opening weekend to 36 hours per salmon caught this past week.
• Harvest share remains at 204, so with an estimated season harvest to date of 68 we have only harvested about 33% of our harvest share.

RUN TIMING and HARVEST SHARE UPDATE

We have not observed any additional PIT tags at Bonneville Dam over the past week, so our estimate of 2,012 Sawtooth Hatchery adults remains unchanged. Our harvest share for the fishery is 204 fish, and as mentioned above, we still have about 67% of that left (136 adult hatchery chinook).

Of the estimated 2,012 adult hatchery Chinook returning to Sawtooth Hatchery:

• Approximately 1,454 Sawtooth Chinook have crossed over Lower Granite Dam (LGD).
• Two PIT tagged fish that remained at large were observed at LGD last week, bringing our season conversion (survival) from Bonneville to LGD (77%) right in line with the 5-year average conversion rate (78%).

We continue to see Sawtooth bound fish at the instream PIT tag array on the Salmon River near Elevenmile (approximately eleven miles upstream of the town of Salmon). The top panel of the figure below shows streamflow (blue line) at the Salmon River gauge at Salmon for the last thirty days, as well as adult Chinook PIT tag detections for both hatchery (green bars) and wild (black bars) Chinook at the Elevenmile array. I've added the daily trapping totals at Sawtooth hatchery to the bottom panel of the figure.