In late March, after a series of public meetings, the Idaho Fish and Game Commission announced Idaho’s 2026 spring Chinook season.
Let’s be clear, as important as it is to have an opportunity to fish and harvest hatchery salmon, the limited spring Chinook season in Snake River basin is not a sign of recovered wild populations. These fish are still far from healthy and harvestable goals and nowhere near delisting.
If anything, these limited seasons reflect just how constrained and fragile these runs have become.
So, in this challenging scenario, how are fishing seasons allowed? The answer is straightforward: carefully managed fishing seasons are not what limits recovery. The ongoing impacts from the hydrosystem is, particularly the four lower Snake River dams.
How we got here
To understand today’s fisheries, you must look to history. After completion of the last of the four lower Snake dams, Lower Granite Dam, Snake River Chinook returns declined sharply, just as many scientists and managers had warned. The federal response came quickly.
In 1980, Congress passed the Northwest Power Act, requiring the Bonneville Power Administration and the region’s power system to mitigate the impacts of federal hydropower dams on fish and wildlife. In the Snake River Basin, that mitigation largely took the form of hatchery production (Lower Snake River Compensation) intended to replace fish lost because of the federal dams.
This approach mirrored an earlier effort under the Mitchell Act, which funded hatcheries to offset losses in the Columbia River Basin caused by federal dam construction. In both cases, the federal government acknowledged the same reality: the hydrosystem was driving salmon declines.
Mitigation is not recovery
A functioning river system did and still does require more than hatchery mitigation. Hatchery fish struggle to navigate the same series of reservoirs, turbines and altered flow conditions as wild fish and often with lower survival rates. They are more susceptible to stress, predation and delayed mortality through the hydrosystem and into the ocean.
While hatcheries provide a limited buffer, creating fishing opportunities and supporting some fisheries, they do not rebuild the resilient, self-sustaining wild populations that once returned and thrived in the Snake River basin in the hundreds of thousands. What we have today are fragments of that legacy; a system propped up by mitigation, not restored through recovery.
Why seasons still happen
Despite these challenges, carefully managed recreational, tribal and commercial fisheries are still allowed, and for good reason.
From the moment spring Chinook cross Bonneville Dam, they are counted, tracked and managed in real time. State, tribal and federal managers use run forecasts, dam counts and in-season updates to shape fisheries from the ocean all the way to Idaho’s headwaters.
This adaptive management operates under long-standing legal frameworks like U.S. v. Oregon and the Boldt Decision, which ensure conservation limits are met while honoring tribal treaty rights.
By the time fish reach Idaho, multiple layers of precaution have already been applied, found in Fisheries Management Evaluation Plans permitted through NOAA. Seasons are structured around hatchery returns, with strict impact limits on wild fish. If returns come in lower than expected, fisheries are scaled back or closed entirely. This is precision management designed to protect what little remains of wild runs while providing opportunities to harvest hatchery fish.
A fishery defined by limitation
And that’s exactly the point. These are not fisheries built on abundance. They are fisheries constrained by scarcity. Openings are short. Limits are tight. Closures are common. Every management decision is made with the understanding that wild Snake River spring Chinook remain on the brink.
Anglers and communities that depend upon salmon are left with the scraps of the abundance that once existed before the lower Snake was dammed, remnants of one of the most productive salmon systems in the lower 48.
Why it still matters
Still, these runs matter, diminished as they are. They matter to anglers who mark their year by the return of these fish. They matter to rural Idaho communities where a few weeks of fishing can support local economies. And they matter deeply to tribal nations, for whom salmon are not just a resource, but a foundation of culture, identity and treaty-reserved rights.
These fish connect everyone in the region to place, to history and to what’s still possible.
The work ahead
Ultimately, this isn’t just about whether a fishing season opens on April 25. It’s about whether we are willing to address the real problem and restore a free-flowing lower Snake River by breaching the four dams, rebuilding the conditions needed for healthy, harvestable wild salmon and steelhead to return.
Until we do that, these seasons will remain what they are today: carefully managed opportunities built on mitigation, not recovery. And a reminder, not of success, but of how much more is possible.
Help Wild Salmon and Steelhead Return
Learn more and support TU’s efforts to remove the Lower four Snake River dams.