Can you imagine what it would be like to wake up in Seattle on a misty March morning and struggle to decide which of Puget Sound’s prolific 49 wild steelhead rivers and streams to fish that day? Can you imagine what it would be like to catch two wild steelhead and be disappointed by how slow the day was? And can you imagine what it would feel like to wade waist-deep into the Snohomish River knowing that 225,000 wild steelhead were swimming through those same waters?
Today, that reads like a steelhead fairytale – a “once upon a time story” that rivals the reality of Snow White. Because these days, Washington’s steelhead story feels more like a bad dream. But that magical reality existed not too long ago in the home of the Skagit Cast and the Skykomish Sunrise.
Back then, more steelhead returned to Washington’s waters than any region on earth. Back then, Washington was Steelhead Country, a wondrous place where our rivers ran silver and wild steelhead outnumbered Washington residents by orders of magnitude. Back then, the idea of leaving Washington and making the trek north to the Skeena, Dean, or Bulkley to chase steelhead was absurd.
At the turn of the 20th Century, Washington’s legendary rivers were producing mind-blowing numbers of wild steelhead: Nooksack – 169,00, Skagit – 149,000, Stillaguamish – 100,000, Snohomish (including the Skykomish, Snoqualmie and Pilchuck rivers) – 224,000. Taken together, the size of the Puget Sound wild steelhead run at the turn of the century was 929,070 fish per year, with actual run totals surely topping one million fish when smaller creeks and watersheds are included. That’s a crazy number of wild steelhead, and that’s just Puget Sound! That number doesn’t include any wild steelhead from other prolific Washington steelhead systems out on the Olympic Peninsula and the mighty Columbia River Watershed.