By JOHN DE YONGE
Voices of the Valley


On April 10, The Skagit Valley Herald’s front-page lead headline read: “Skagit salmon runs healthy.”

If only that were true. It’s not. The opposite is true. Two Skagit River salmon(id) runs are in bad shape: wild chinook and wild steelhead, the latter of which the article did not mention. Others are not much better.

Spring and fall chinook runs in the Skagit system are listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act as threatened. Also so listed is the river system’s run of wild steelhead. Threatened means threatened with extinction.

The article under the headline never characterized the Skagit’s salmonid runs as healthy, but state officials’ quotes and numbers — estimates or more accurately, educated guesses — glowed with rosy optimism in light of huge crashes in salmon stocks in California, Oregon and parts of Washington.

Let’s take a look at those numbers and contrast them with catch numbers for the lower Skagit River in 1909. The 1909 numbers from the old U.S. Bureau of Fisheries represent only caught fish and probably should be multiplied by two or three for reckoning the total runs a century ago.

State officials estimate that this year a paltry 1,700 spring chinook and 23,800 summer and fall chinook will return to the Skagit system — in all, 25,500 fish.

In 1909, commercial netters and trappers working from just upstream of Mount Vernon down to the mouth of the Skagit caught 57,000 chinook. Assuming an overall run only twice that large, 1909’s Skagit chinook numbered 114,000 fish. That’s more than four times as many fish as the state guesses will return this year — if we’re lucky.

State managers estimate that wild steelhead returning right now in the Skagit — closed to angling because so few fish are turning up — may total 5,500 fish.

In 1909, nets and traps captured 16,500 steelhead — then the prized salmonid to catch commercially because steelhead stay fresh longer than chinook and other salmon. Assume a total steelhead run then of 33,000, and you can see why this year’s guess of 5,500 steelhead (again, if we’re lucky) signals why the United States lists Skagit wild steelhead as threatened.

Puget Sound Energy runs the Baker River hydroelectric dams, around which the utility trucks salmonids trapped ahead of the dams. PSE vaunts the sockeye (red) salmon run it struggles to keep alive not just by ferrying the fish but by creating artificial spawning areas for them. Touring groups of politicians and reporters go goo-goo eyed at the red salmon groveling in the gravels while guides spiel about how wonderful that is.

But is it? No. According to the Skagit Valley Herald article, the state estimates that 25,429 sockeye may return to the Baker River this summer, far more than usual.

Compare that with the Skagit’s 1909 catch: 979,000 sockeye, indicating a total sockeye run of probably 2 million fish or more.

In 1909, nobody wanted to catch pink (humpy) salmon or chum (dog) salmon for sale: Nobody would buy them. Chinook salmon were so cheap and plentiful they were called the poor man’s food. Who would want to eat inferior pinks or chum?

In 1909, Skagit commercials caught 336,000 pinks anyway, despite using net meshes big enough to let the pinks slip through. The pink run that year was perhaps 772,000 fish and probably closer to 3 million. This year, the state opines a pittance of pinks — 90,481 — may fin into the Skagit. Commercials also took 265,000 chum in 1909, indicating a total run then of at least 530,000. The state hopes this year’s run will be 131,000.

Not long ago, coho (silver) salmon caused the Skagit to be covered with sports anglers’ boats in the fall, a sight no longer seen.

The state predicts 61,444 coho may show this year. In 1909 commercial fishers dragged 194,000 coho out of the lower Skagit. The total run probably was about 400,000 coho, or six times more than we’ll see in 2008.

It has to be remembered that by 1909, Skagit Valley residents were doing their best to destroy salmon and steelhead habitat in the Skagit Valley.

Commercial and sports anglers took salmonids by the wagonloads.

Farmers cultivated right down to water’s edge (as they do now) and dredged (as they do now) the creeks that salmon use to spawn in and live in as juveniles for as long as three years. Manure poisoned the waters, as it still does.

Dikes went up to create more farmland and protect towns and private properties, walling the river with rocks that slaughter little salmonids migrating down to the saltwater. This walling or diking or riprapping never ceases, though much of it is illegal. By 1909, governments already had cleared most of the log jams and woody debris out of the river and dredges gouged the river’s gravels so that paddle wheelers could navigate.

Loggers tore down sheltering forests, silted the creeks and riversides, and their log drives bulldozed the river’s islands and sloughs where juvenile salmonids sheltered.

Towns poured raw sewage and chemical poisons into the river. Log mills and other industrial plants dumped their poisons into the river. So 1909, despite its still large returns of salmonids, did not offer a pristine environment for the fish to spawn and rear in.

Today, we see the results of a century’s further degradations. We’ve added giant increases in the exploiting human population, fish-killing hydroelectric dams on the Baker River and the Upper Skagit and salmon and steelhead hatcheries to excuse killing off the wild, God-given fish.

As science shows, the hatcheries destroy wild fish runs. So does the public’s indifference and ignorance about what’s happening. So does the state’s grudging, complacent and backward management of wild salmonid stocks.

Salmon runs healthy in the Skagit? Only in dreams, alas.

* John de Yonge is the Skagit River representative for the Steelhead Committee of the Federation of Fly Fishers, an international organization based in the United States.