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Idaho’s spring Chinook season: A reminder of what we’ve lost and what we can still restore
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…
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Watch Meateater’s Cal investigate the Snake River dams
In the latest MeatEater video, Ryan “Cal” Callaghan heads to the Snake River to investigate the four lower dams and what they mean to salmon, steelhead and local communities. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thd1OZ8QjUI Anglers, farmers, blue collar guys just drinking their morning coffee — everyone has an opinion on what these dams mean. But here’s the simple truth:…
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Solving a math problem for Snake River Chinook
Two recent studies demonstrate how dam breach paired with increased spill in the mid-Columbia would allow many Snake River spring/summer Chinook populations to reach various management goals I am sitting on my parent’s porch on a Sunday afternoon in July when the neighbors stop by to say hi. “Oh! You are a fish biologist,” they…
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Numbers look good, but are they really?
If you’ve seen the recent news regarding Snake River steelhead returns, you’ve likely asked yourself, what’s the issue with the four lower Snake River dams? With returns totaling nearly 100,000 steelhead over Lower Granite dam one would believe brighter days are ahead. But if history repeats itself, this is just a blip on the radar…
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Time to go all in
Current efforts are no longer cutting it for salmon and steelhead survival on the lower Snake It’s high time we admit we got it wrong; salmon and steelhead cannot survive in a highly modified river system like the lower Snake River. Despite our best intentions, the facts remain the same: Chinook salmon, steelhead and sockeye…
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Clearwater Daze
A pair of Great Lakes spey anglers share their love for Idaho’s Clearwater River, its big steelhead, and their support for breaching the Lower Snake River Dams Idaho steelhead are just built differently. They have a special kind of folk hero status in my brain, partly driven by their “Mariners and Mountaineers” reputation. Even the…
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A National Network of Priority Waters
Tom Sawyer was made to whitewash the fence as a punishment for being mischievous, but he appeared to be having such a good time with the chore that soon all his friends were bribing him with apples, feathers and other trinkets so they could paint, too. There’s a lesson in Mark Twain’s story that speaks…
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