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. 

For the Sawtooth fish that are moving their way up through the Columbia and Snake River systems, conversion (survival) from Bonneville to Lower Granite Dam has been below what we normally see. On average, about 78% of the Sawtooth stock converts from Bonneville to Granite, whereas this year’s conversion is 60%.  There are still a few PIT-tagged fish in the system that may show at Granite over the next week or so, which would help our survival estimates, thus increasing our harvest share.  All that said, over half (1,120) of the adult Sawtooth hatchery Chinook have made it above Lower Granite Dam. Those fish are continuing their march upstream, and we’ve observed some of those fish at the instream PIT tag array in the Salmon River near Elevenmile (approximately eleven miles upstream of the town of Salmon). 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 through this morning. You can see we’ve seen a handful of wild fish as well as a few hatchery fish over the past couple of days. Using our PIT tag expansion for that Sawtooth release group we would estimate those tags represent about 350 hatchery fish.

Based on historic travel times we estimate that hatchery fish spend ~7 – 10 days to migrate from the Elevenmile array to the Stanley area. Given that (combined with the lower-than-average stream flows this spring), I expect there to be adult Chinook in the fishery area when it opens next Thursday. 

Pahsimeroi return

Like last week, we still don’t know much about the Pahsimeroi return either. There were only 2 additional PIT tags from this group observed since the last update and only 6 total PIT tagged fish to represent this return to date. We should now be about halfway through the Pahsimeroi run at Bonneville, so the run is either much smaller than expected, or running a bit later than normal. We will continue to keep an eye on the Pahsimeroi run and include them in the weekly updates. 

I'll get another update posted next week prior to Thursday's opener with the latest PIT tag numbers and harvest share estimate. Thanks, and as usual, if you have questions, comments, or would like to be added to my email update list, please reach out to me at: greg.schoby@idfg.idaho.gov or call the Salmon Regional Office at (208) 756-2271.

Best,

Greg