Upper Salmon River Chinook update - 6/17/2026

Below is the fourth and final pre-season update for the upper Salmon River Chinook return and fishery that will open tomorrow Thursday June 18th.  This one will be brief, but I wanted to get a quick update posted prior to the opener. After this, we’ll post weekly updates on angler harvest throughout the fishery as it progresses. 

Since my last update on June 10th, we observed one additional Sawtooth PIT tag cross over Bonneville Dam on Saturday June 13th, bringing the current estimate to 2,012 adult Sawtooth Chinook over Bonneville. This puts the total season run projection at ~2,100 adults. As mentioned last week, survival through the Columbia and Snake River systems has been lower than average, but with a few PIT-tagged fish still moving through the system we’ll continue to track those and update our harvest share accordingly. Currently our harvest share is 204 adult hatchery Chinook. That will move up or down slightly, depending on the survival of the last few PIT-tagged Sawtooth fish migrating upstream.

Currently, over half (1,232) of the Sawtooth hatchery run has made it over Lower Granite Dam. 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) as those fish move upstream. 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. We have now detected five PIT-tagged hatchery fish, with the first four crossing about a week ago. This suggests a little less than half (~400 - 500 fish) of the fish that are over Granite are already upstream of Elevenmile and are either in the fishery area or close to it.

As noted last week, it generally takes those fish detected at Elevenmile about a week to 10 days to migrate to the Stanley area. Flows in the Salmon River are lower than average and dropping which tells me that the conditions should be good, and fish should be in the area, so I expect fish to be caught during the opening weekend. Given the low harvest share, the good river conditions, and fish already in the system, I’d be fishing the upper Salmon River early as this fishery may not last as long as we’ve seen in previous years.

We still know very little about the Pahsimeroi return with no additional tags crossing Bonneville since my last update.  That being said, Pahsimeroi hatchery staff installed their trap last week and to date have trapped 6 adult Chinook already. This, as well as Sawtooth trapping numbers will be updated on our website here, as traps are checked and the data is uploaded.  

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.