Little Salmon / South Fork Salmon Update - June 17, 2025

Hi everyone. 

Fishing for Chinook Salmon will continue on the Little Salmon River this weekend (Thursday through Sunday), and the South Fork Salmon River fishery opens this Thursday, June 19. If you haven’t been out yet, now is the time! Read on below for more detailed information about these fisheries. 

Little Salmon River Fishery Update

I’m going to start out this update with some relatively bad news – Rapid River harvest share has decreased based on the most recent data. As most of you know, we estimate harvest share for our fisheries in a few different ways. Early in the season we estimate harvest shares based on PIT tagged fish coming over the dams. This gives us our first look at how many adults are expected to return to the various fisheries in the state. In recent years, we’ve been using genetic data collected at Lower Granite Dam during the run to adjust harvest share estimates – as this is the best available data. This has often resulted in an increase to our harvest share which it did again this year. Unfortunately, the most recent genetic analysis we conducted this week has reduced our harvest share by about 370 adults, resulting in a Rapid River harvest share of 1,572 (still substantially better than the 900 adults based solely on PIT tags). The Lower Salmon River fishery closed on June 8, with a final estimate of 1,088 adults harvested, which means we’re targeting a season total of 484 adults on the Little Salmon River this year. 

Chinook Salmon fishing on the Little Salmon River was a little slower than expected over the past 4-day fishing interval (Thursday through Sunday), and we estimated 147 adults were harvested (Table 1). That puts our season total up to 370 adults harvested in the Little Salmon River, so we’ve still got about 114 adults to go before our harvest share is reached. The Little Salmon River will remain open 4 days per week (Thursday through Sunday) with a 1 adult per day limit for at least one more fishing interval. I’ll provide another update next week so stay tuned.   

I wanted to take a moment to talk about our harvest estimates on the Little Salmon River. There is always some skepticism about our harvest estimates and that is to be expected. After all – they are estimates. In the case of the Little Salmon River, I feel very confident about the accuracy of our harvest estimates. Those of you who fish the Little Salmon River know that we have a lot of staff out there conducting interviews. This fishery has the best monitoring coverage of all of our Chinook fisheries in the state. We know we don’t handle every single fish that is harvested during this fishery, but we get really close. To illustrate this, I wanted to show you the daily numbers of fish we actually handled during our surveys, and how those numbers compare to our estimates. As you can see, we physically handled 118 harvested adult Chinook during the last interval which is 80% of the total estimated catch.

I feel very confident in our harvest estimates on the Little Salmon River, and I hope this helps illustrate why. We are always looking for ways to improve and our goal is to get the most accurate estimate of harvest so that we can provide as much fishing and harvest opportunity as possible for all of you. 

South Fork Salmon River Update

The South Fork Salmon River fishery opens this Thursday, June 19. The fishery is open 7 days per week with a 1 adult per day limit. Unfortunately, this run has not materialized as strongly as we had hoped. Last week I reported an anticipated harvest share of around 800 adults. That estimate was based on the assumption that there were still nearly 1,000 South Fork fish coming over Bonneville Dam. However, only 1 PIT tagged adult destined for the South Fork Salmon has crossed the Bonneville PIT tag array since that time. The estimated harvest share is now closer to 700 adults, and that number may continue to drop depending on the tail end of the run and conversion rates from Bonneville Dam to Lower Granite Dam. As an avid South Fork Chinook angler, it pains me to say that harvest share may end up being closer to 500 adults, and the South Fork fishery will likely be pretty short-lived this year. The harvest matrix (Table 3) uses a cutoff of 750 adults to determine whether we should have a 7 day per week fishery or a 4 day per week fishery (Thursday-Sunday). At this time we don’t intend to reduce the days per week to 4, but I won’t say it’s out of the question. Be sure to check fishing seasons and rules before you head out. 

As of yesterday, there have been an estimated 1,700 adipose-clipped adults destined for the South Fork Salmon over Lower Granite Dam. We estimate that approximately 450 of those fish have already crossed over the South Fork Guard Station array on the lower South Fork Salmon, and about 60 of those fish have already crossed the Krassel array which is just below the lower fishery boundary. There will certainly be some fish present in the fishery area for the upcoming opening weekend, and there are lots more on the way. 

With the current anticipated harvest share of about 700 adults (or less), this fishery will not last very long. I predict that catch rates will pick up throughout next week, and fishing will be pretty good the following weekend (June 27-29) when many anglers come to fish the South Fork. If you want a guarantee for opportunity to fish the South Fork Salmon this year, I would suggest not waiting too long.