Throughout the Club's history we have fought dams on rivers, participated in FERC relicensing of existing dams, supported international treaties, participated in enhancement, research and monitoring activities, marked hatchery fish, and opposed development that threatens steelhead and their habitat.
•During the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, the Club helped wrestle control from county commissioners who let their relatives gillnet steelehad, initiated a stream bank access program, asked for closures to protect our steelhead resource and have fought efforts to dam our rivers.
•During the '50s and early '60s, the Club spearheaded the effort that successfully passed a citizens initiative to prohibit damming the Cowlitz River, although political maneuvering allowed that development to occur in spite of the will of the people.
•During the '60s and '70s, the Club lead efforts to expand the Stream Bank Access program. We secured access easements and facilitated land purchases for many Puget Sound area and Southwest Washington Rivers access points, including some of the current WDFW locations. Many popular steelheading access point are the legacy of those efforts.
• For many years, the Club seasonally maintained a smolt imprint site on the North Fork of the Skykomish River. There, for two months each spring, hatchery steelhead smolts acclimated to the river environment in a natural setting, adopted protective coloring, and adjusted to the perils of life in the wild. Increased efforts to better maintain separation of hatchery and wild steelhead stocks brought this program to an end in 2006.
•Beginning in 2003, the Club became an early source of funding for an acoustic tagging program on the Green River in King County. This is part of a larger study encompassing several major rivers entering Puget Sound. The purpose of this study was to gain an understanding of the migration survival rates of both wild steelhead and hatchery steelhead smolts from their natal rivers through Puget Sound to the Pacific Ocean.
You can get a better look at some of our history and involvement in steelhead issues by looking over the
50 year booklet produced in 1978.
50 yr v2.pdf
©2003 -– 2011 Steelhead Trout Club of Washington
