DRAFT — WORKING DOCUMENT, NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION

A VISION FOR THE COWLITZ RIVER FISHERY

What a healthy, well-managed Cowlitz looks like

This is a statement of what we are working toward — not a complaint, not a filing, and not a list of grievances. It is our answer to a simple question: what would a healthy, well-managed Cowlitz River fishery look like, for the people who fish it and the fish that return to it? The Cowlitz River can once again be one of the most productive fisheries in the Pacific Northwest, and a model for how hatchery and fisheries management should be done.

The return goals below were first developed several years ago in discussion with Friends of the Cowlitz. The numbers have held up. They remain the benchmark we believe a properly managed Cowlitz can and should meet.

Sustainable Adult Return Goals

Harvestable return goals for the mid-river, Barrier Dam, and up-river reaches of the Cowlitz (Tacoma’s responsibility). Each goal includes a natural-origin component where applicable and a trophy-class target reflecting a fishery managed for quality, not just volume.

Run	Timing / Peak	Harvestable Target	Natural Origin Component- Harvestable	Trophy Component
Steelhead — Late Winter	Feb–Apr, peak March	15,000	4,500	15% trophy, 15–25 lb
Steelhead — Summer	Jun–Aug, peak July	25,000	—	15% trophy, 15–25 lb
Chinook — Spring (“Springer”)	Apr–Jun, peak May	25,000	10,000	15% trophy, 20–35 lb
Chinook — Fall	Aug–Oct, peak mid-Sept	25,000	12,000	15% trophy, 30–70 lb
Coho	Oct–Dec, peak late Oct/early Nov	30,000	12,000	15% trophy, 15–30 lb
Sea-Run Cutthroat	Fall–Winter	25,000	—	15% trophy, 3–5 lb
Rainbow Trout	Year-round, throughout river	150,000	—	—

Active goals total: 145,000 harvestable adults river-wide.

A Run We Want Back

The early winter steelhead run no longer returns to the Cowlitz. It is not included in the active total above because it does not currently exist as a fishery to manage. But its restoration is a goal shared widely across the river community, and we list it here deliberately — as a marker of what was lost, and what we would like to see rebuilt:

Run	Timing / Peak	Harvestable Target	Natural Origin Component	Trophy Component
Steelhead — Early Winter*	Nov–Feb, peak mid–late Dec	15,000 (historic)	–	15% trophy, 17–30 lb

*Historic target shown for reference; this run is not currently returning to the river.

Understanding SARs — A Measuring Tool, Not the Goal

Smolt-to-Adult Return rates — SARs — are frequently discussed in Cowlitz hatchery management. It is important to understand what SARs are, and what they are not.

SARs are a measuring tool. They are not a target, and they are not the goal. The goal is adult returns — fish in the river, available for harvest and recovery.

A SAR is simply the percentage of smolts released from a hatchery that return as adults. If a hatchery releases 1,000,000 smolts and 10,000 adults return, the SAR is 1.0%. The SAR tells you how efficiently the program is converting smolt releases into adult returns.

The Northwest Power and Conservation Council (NPCC) has established a long-term SAR goal of 2–6% above Bonneville Dam for Columbia Basin salmon and steelhead populations. This range is the scientific benchmark for what a recovering population needs to sustain itself and support harvest. It is not an arbitrary number — it is derived from decades of Columbia Basin population modeling and represents the minimum threshold for avoiding continued decline.

SARs serve two distinct measurement purposes for the Cowlitz:

1. They measure hatchery efficiency — whether the hatchery program is converting its smolt releases into the adult returns it is obligated to produce under the FERC license and Settlement Agreement.
2. They measure natural-origin recovery success — whether natural-origin fish are returning at rates sufficient to sustain and grow the wild population, which is the long-term goal of both ESA recovery planning and the mitigation framework the Cowlitz hatcheries exist to support.

What SARs are not: a substitute for adult return goals. A program can report a SAR and still be failing to produce the adult returns the community was promised. The SAR tells you the rate. The adult return goal tells you the outcome. Both matter — but the outcome is what the community fishes for, what the tribes harvest, and what the wildlife agencies count when they evaluate whether a population is recovering.

The following table shows where the Cowlitz hatchery programs currently stand against the NPCC’s 2–6% SAR rebuilding target:

Species	Cowlitz Return Data	NPCC Target	Status
Spring Chinook	99.72% DNR (0.28% SAR)	2–6%	Below replacement floor
Fall Chinook	99.97% DNR (0.033% SAR)	2–6%	Directed fishery eliminated
Coho	98.45% DNR (1.55% SAR)	2–6%	Below replacement floor
Late Winter Steelhead	99.10% DNR (0.90% SAR)	2–6%	Below replacement floor
Summer Steelhead	99.14% DNR (0.86% SAR)	2–6%	Below replacement floor

Source: WDFW/Tacoma Power Annual Program Review data. Spring Chinook: 4-yr avg. Fall Chinook: most recent year. Coho: 3-yr avg. Late Winter and Summer Steelhead: 4-yr avg. NPCC target: Marmorek et al. 1998; McCann et al. 2018.

Every Cowlitz species is currently operating below the NPCC’s 2% replacement floor — the minimum threshold below which populations continue to decline. Spring Chinook, at 0.28%, are operating at less than one-eighth of the minimum needed for replacement. This is not a measurement debate. It is the central performance fact about the Cowlitz hatchery program.

SARs Equal Harvest Plus Escapement — Not Just Fish at the Hatchery

A critical point that is often lost in Cowlitz hatchery discussions: a SAR measures the total adult return — which means all adults that survived to return to the river, including both those harvested by anglers and tribes along the way and those that escaped past the fishery to reach the hatchery separator.

Getting fish back to the hatchery separator is not the goal. Getting fish back to the river — where they can be harvested, spawn naturally, and contribute to recovery — is the goal.

The formula is straightforward:

Total Adult Return  =  Harvest  +  Hatchery Separator Escapement  +  Natural Spawner Escapement

When a hatchery manager reports that spring Chinook are ‘returning to the hatchery,’ that tells you only what reached the separator. It tells you nothing about how many were harvested along the way — or how few. On the Cowlitz, the creel data for April through June 2026 shows 5% adult spring Chinook retention across 2,252 angler checks, while the separator was recording thousands of adults. A healthy hatchery fishery should produce substantial harvest before fish ever reach the separator. A fishery where almost no fish are caught on the way in is a fishery that is failing the community — regardless of what the separator count shows.

Harvest and Recovery — The Real Goals

The adult return goals in this document are harvestable return goals — not separator escapement goals. That distinction matters enormously. Here is what a properly managed Cowlitz fishery should produce from its adult returns:

Category	Harvest Goal	Hatchery Escapement	Natural Spawner Goal	Recovery Purpose
Hatchery-Origin Returns (HOR)	75–85% harvested	15–25% to broodstock	Minimize — reduce pHOS	Harvest; sustain program
Natural-Origin Returns (NOR)	25–40% harvested	N/A	60–75% to natural spawning	Population recovery

Note: Harvest percentages are illustrative targets consistent with mark-selective fishery practice and Washington state management standards. Specific rates by species and run should be established through the FTC’s directed decision process and reflected in approved HGMPs.

The hatchery separator is the endpoint for broodstock collection — it is where the program sustains itself. But it should not be the primary measure of program success. A program that gets 10,000 adults to the separator while anglers and tribes harvest almost nothing along the way is not producing what it is supposed to produce. It is producing broodstock. The community was not promised broodstock. It was promised a fishery.

For natural-origin fish, the goal is population recovery — measurable growth in self-sustaining wild populations that can eventually support harvest independent of the hatchery program. A healthy Cowlitz should be moving toward that goal, with each brood year showing natural-origin escapement above the level needed for replacement. That progress should be measured, documented, and reported — not buried in APR production discussions focused almost entirely on hatchery separator counts.

The Cowlitz hatchery program exists to produce a fishery and to recover wild fish. Getting fish back to the separator is the minimum — not the measure of success.

Improving SARs is necessary — but it is the means, not the end. The end is 145,000 harvestable adults returning to the Cowlitz River each year, with measurable progress toward wild fish recovery. Every management decision should be evaluated against that outcome.

The Goals Are Achievable — Not Aspirational

A common objection to any adult return goal is that it is unrealistic — that hitting these numbers would require producing far more fish than the Cowlitz can support. The numbers say otherwise.

In 2025, the Cowlitz hatchery programs released 6,975,767 smolts across Spring Chinook, Fall Chinook, Coho, Late Winter Steelhead, and Summer Steelhead combined. The combined harvestable adult return goal for those same five species in this document is 120,000 adults.

Reaching that goal requires a blended smolt-to-adult return rate of just 1.72% (120,000 ÷ 6,975,767) — a rate below the low end of the NPCC’s own 2–6% SAR rebuilding target, using smolts that are already being released each year. Reaching NPCC survival standards with the fish we already release would make the Cowlitz a benchmark for hatchery performance across the region.”

Put another way: if Cowlitz hatchery programs performed at the midpoint of the NPCC’s own standard — a 4% average SAR — the same 6,975,767 smolts released in 2025 would produce approximately 279,000 adults, more than double the combined adult return goal in this document.

This 1.72% figure is a blended average across five species with different current SARs (see table above); the improvement needed varies by species, and Spring Chinook in particular would require a larger relative gain than Coho. But the aggregate conclusion — that current release volumes already exceed what is needed to hit the combined adult return goal — holds regardless of how that improvement is distributed across species.

The adult return goals in this document are not aspirational. They ask for less than what the region’s own scientific standard says a properly performing hatchery program should produce from the fish already in the water.

Managed for the Whole River

A good Cowlitz fishery is not just a good hatchery outfall. Management and monitoring today are concentrated almost entirely around the point where hatchery-origin fish are released and recovered. We want to see a shift toward managing — and measuring success — for the whole river: the mainstem, the tributaries, and the reaches upstream and downstream of the hatchery complex alike.

A river managed only at the point of release is not a managed river. It is a managed outfall.

The scale of what is already happening on the Cowlitz demonstrates what the river can support: producing current wild coho returns of 10,000–14,000 adults has required transporting more than 30,000 adults above Cowlitz Falls Dam annually, collecting an estimated 150,000–200,000 or more outmigrating coho smolts each year. That is a scale of upstream passage and collection that is comparable to what spring Chinook and steelhead returning to Cowlitz Salmon Hatchery already require. The infrastructure, the biology, and the management capacity are there. The question is whether the will to manage for the whole river — and to measure success across all of it — is there as well.

Why This Document

Much of our work right now is about holding the current program accountable for what isn’t working. This document is the other half: a clear, positive statement of what we’re asking for instead. It is meant to be shared as our vision for the river — separate from, and not dependent on, any specific compliance or regulatory process.

The Cowlitz River was one of the most productive salmon and steelhead rivers on the Pacific Coast before the dams and after. The mitigation program was designed to replace what the dams took. It has not done that. This document describes what replacing it actually looks like, a river and fisheries management the Northwest looks to as the standard.”

Draft — Northwest Fisheries Enhancement Group  |  Larry Pryor, Chairman  |  lpryor@nwfe.org  |  509-292-6410