Dont know about the Cowlitz but in the 60's while fishing the N fork siletz we found the river full of dead eels. when we asked the game department about it we were told that they had electocuted the river in an attempt to eradicate them from that system.

Cowlitzfisherman
I don't really know the reason, am not very familar with that system. What is your guess?

For the Cowlitz, it could be that their habitat has been blocked by the dams and the main Cowlitz below the dams is lacking in their habitat needs - likely spawning gravels.

How many lampreys a year are you seeing on the Toutle/Green? A handful, 100s, or 1,000s? As far as that system goes it may have been that unaffected tributaries supplied a refuge from the devastation. As with the steelhead they may have been able to take advantage of the recovering habitats over the last 20 years.

My quick thoughts based on almost no first hand information.

Tight lines
Smalma

come to think of it, i haven't seen lamprey marks on salmon/steelhead i've caught in a long time...used to see one snagged every now and then on the cowlitz. nastly looking buggers, but haven't seen one in years

The habitat was not destroyed on the Toutle system, only temporarily impacted, except of course for the man-made sediment detention dam The habitat on the Cowlitz is pretty much totally destroyed by damming and diking. You have been there 18 years CFM, but I fished it in the 50's when it was still free-flowing, and I remember lots of lampreys along with lots of monster wild steelhead. The Toutle experience was one of the most enlightening events in fisheries management - basically the system was closed to fishing after the eruption and left to it's own devices, and by 1985 there were more wild steelhead in the system than ever recorded prior to the eruption. Then we planted fish, opened it to fishing, and the runs went back down to mediocre at best. Pretty good case for hands-off steelhead management if you ask me. Given the same scenario on our few remaining rivers without dams or significant channel alterations I suspect that wild steelhead would recover in a couple of generations, enough to provide C&R on a limited basis. In a perfect world we would limit hatchery steelhead to dammed and ruined rivers and limit free-flowing rivers to C&R with no competition from hatchery plants. I know which rivers I'd choose to fish on

I have seen them on the sol duc in pretty good numbers in the past.Used to see them just above the honey hole above the Iverson hole They were making reds.I remember being freaked out as one of the locals had just butchered some cattle and dumped there heads in the river.Eels spawning amongst a bunch of rotten cattle head.

I also see them in the spring in the canyon above the gauging station on the s. fork of the skoke.

Spawnout you say;

And then you say;

If that was true, where could they have possibly come from?

I am curious how you have come to that conclusion.

It would seem to be almost impossible for the Toutle to have those kind of numbers of wild steelhead 5 years after the eruption (1985). Since the eruption, and the completion of the sediment dam, there has been like 0 habitats for steelhead to successfully spawn in the main steam Toutle, and another 0 in the entire North Fork of the Toutle. When you look at the picture below that was taken in 1985, you can kind see what I mean!








To this day, the main steam and the North Fork it is still 100% silted in, and only the upper reaches of the South fork and a few tiny feeder creeks has any spawning habitat left for steelhead to even spawn in.

So where in the world did all those "wild" steelhead come from back in 1985?

One must draw the conclusion that any meaningful production of "wild" steelhead must be occurring from the secondary feeder tributaries such as the green. Or maybe all of that "wild" steelhead production that you were talking about that you saw in 1985 was just nothing more then just unmarked hatchery steelhead. If memory serves me, they were not marking the hatchery steelhead in 1980-1990.


This information even further brings into question that any wild natural production was the reason for any such numbers of wild steelhead returning to the Toutle system at that time period:

"More than 150 cross-sections of river channels are surveyed regularly to determine areas of erosion and deposition along rivers draining Mount St. Helens. These repetitive surveys measure bank and channel erosion and channel deposition at specific locations. Repeated aerial photographs also are used to identify sediment sources and sinks. In many places since the 1980 eruptions, channel modifications have been equal to or greater than those resulting directly from the damaging lahars on May 18. Generally, erosion and sediment transport by channel widening and downcutting dominate the upper reaches of the drainage basins, and aggradation and sediment transport dominate the lower reaches"

So do you still believe in what you said when to stated this?
If so, can you explain how a river that has no spawning gravel, has high water temps, and has huge turbidity problems can possibly produce more wild steelhead then it did when it was in almost pristine condition?


Cowlitzfisherman