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Chinook Salmon Fishing Starts April 22 on Snake River by Jayson Jacoby Baker City Herald, April 16, 2023

ENTERPRISE -- Anglers can try to hook a hatchery spring chinook salmon in the Snake River in Hells Canyon starting Saturday, April 22.

The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife announced the spring chinook season will open that day and continue through Aug. 10.

The river is open to salmon angling from the deadline below Hells Canyon Dam downriver to the boat ramp at Dug Bar.

The daily bag limit is four hatchery chinook, of which only two can be adults over 24 inches long. Once anglers have kept either two adult chinook, or a total of four hatchery salmon, they must stop fishing for the day. Barbless hooks are also required.

According to pre-season projections, more than 2,000 hatchery spring chinook are expected to return to the base of Hells Canyon Dam. Of these, approximately 400 adult hatchery-origin fish will be collected for broodstock, leaving surplus fish available for treaty and non-treaty fisheries.

"This is one of the most consistent salmon fishing opportunities in the area," said Kyle Bratcher, ODFW's district fish biologist in Enterprise. "The run usually peaks in late May to early June and fishing early will be slow, but we like to give anglers a chance at these fish when they arrive."

Spring chinook are so named because they typically move from the Pacific Ocean into the Columbia River starting in early spring to begin their upstream migration.

Anglers are reminded that bull trout may be in the river, but they can't be kept. Anglers can refer to page 14 of the 2023 Oregon Sport Fishing Regulations for further information on identifying and releasing bull trout.

This year's spring chinook season in Hells Canyon is more typical than the 2022 version. Last year, ODFW didn't open the season until May 17, the latest start in more than a decade.

In 2022, biologists expected relatively few spring chinook to arrive, Bratcher said. But the problem actually dated to 2018, when there was a meager return of spring chinook to the fish trap that Idaho Power Company operates just below Hells Canyon Dam.

Workers harvest eggs and sperm from those fish, and the eggs are reared at Idaho Power's Rapid River hatchery near Riggins, Idaho. Two years later, when the juvenile fish are known as smolts, workers release them so they can migrate downriver to the Pacific.

Most of the hatchery salmon make the return journey two years later, as four-year-olds, Bratcher said. Each year's run also includes fish three or five years old as well. The younger fish are known as "jacks."

With so few adult spring chinook returning to the trap at Hells Canyon Dam in 2018, officials from the ODFW, the Idaho Fish and Game Department, in consultation with Native American tribes, decided not to release any spring chinook smolts below Hells Canyon Dam in 2020.

And that meant that in 2022, the year when the majority of the surviving smolts, by then four-year-old adults, would return to the Snake, the number of hatchery spring chinook moving upriver from Dug Bar was projected to be lower than usual, Bratcher said.

The 2020 smolts were released at Rapid River, near Riggins, Idaho, and migrated down the Salmon River to the Snake and then the Columbia. Bratcher said Rapid River is the priority release site for smolts, as a result of a federal court case dating to 1968 that is intended to preserve threatened and endangered salmon and steelhead and also balance sportfishing and tribal fishing rights.

Last year the daily bag limit allowed anglers to keep only one adult, rather of the two allowed this year.

Smolt releases resumed at Hells Canyon Dam in 2021, so this year's season is more typical, with a start in late April rather than mid-May, and the 2024 season should be as well.