🐟 The Fight Over How to Save a Salmon - Special Report

Enjoy the audio edition on Buzzsprout, or look for "Open Gorge" wherever you get your podcasts.

🕯️Cabinet of Curiosities: The Man Who Thought Like a Fish

Before we get into it... a fish story from the foot of Dog Mountain.

In 1928, the Broughton family rented cabins at Sepsican, the point at the bottom of Dog Mountain, and started building fish traps.

Clarence Broughton picked his spots by walking the riverbank and throwing sticks into the water, reading the current for the slow places where salmon rest on their way upstream. People called him "the man who thought like a fish."

A trap was a long fence of pilings and wire that walked the salmon into a box called a spiller. Once one was built, the family called up a diver from Portland, Fred Devine, in a full suit and helmet, to walk the river bottom and check the wire for holes.

And the rules were strict. Every week, the trap had to close from six o'clock Saturday night until six o'clock Sunday night, "come hell or high water." Any fish already in the spiller just had to wait until Monday.

In 1933, deep in the Depression, the Broughton brothers gave away a ton of fish to the people of Stevenson. Clarence's daughters sold bluebacks out of the trunk of the family car in Stevenson and Carson. A dollar for a big one. Seventy-five cents for a medium. Fifty cents for a small.

The next year, Washington voters outlawed the traps.

Ninety-one years later, they came back. In the fall of 2025, three small traps fished the lower Columbia under a state test program, and one of their biggest champions is the Wild Fish Conservancy, one of the groups now suing over the hatcheries. The new traps are built to keep the hatchery fish and let the wild ones swim free.

On this river, how we catch salmon, and who gets to, has always been a fight. Which brings us to today.

A Debate as Wide as the River

You can feel it at the boat launches and in the tackle shops. People are worried about the hatcheries, and they have reason to be. Two wild-fish groups are suing the federal government over the Mitchell Act hatcheries, which NOAA says support roughly a third of all hatchery production on the Columbia. If they win, it will matter to anglers, to the commercial fleet, and to the tribes whose treaty fisheries catch many of these fish.

When I first wrote this piece, I dug into the lawsuits because it had been so difficult to find other coverage of what seemed like an existential matter for one of the essential economies of area (indeed in my own neighborhood). Then I went back through a year of our own county meetings and followed the one hatchery near us that WDFW decided in 2025 to close. It turned out to be more of a financial than legal story.

So this is the updated version. It still covers the lawsuits, because they are real and they do reach the Washougal. But the bigger story is money, and the two are more tangled together than either side likes to admit.

A court didn't close the Skamania Hatchery. Money did.

The Skamania Hatchery sits on the North Fork of the Washougal River. It has raised steelhead for the Washougal, for the tribal and sport fishery on the Klickitat, and for rivers across Southwest Washington. In 2025 the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife decided to close it.

The reason was money: flat federal Mitchell Act dollars and a state budget that didn't make up the difference. WDFW asked the Legislature for $1.9 million for 2025 to 2027 to keep two hatcheries running, Skamania and North Toutle. It got $750,000, enough for one. The agency kept North Toutle, which raises fall Chinook and coho, and began a three-year closure of Skamania. That works out to about 161,000 fewer steelhead a year once some production is moved elsewhere.

Our county commissioners have been on this since at least August 2025. At the August 26, 2025 meeting, a commissioner reported that WDFW was planning to close the hatchery and blamed a federal hatchery fund that had been "flat since 2020." On March 10, 2026, the board voted unanimously to send a letter of support for the steelhead hatchery, according to the board's minutes. On April 7, 2026, Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez toured the hatchery with Commission Chair Brian Nichols and urged the Legislature to fund reopening it.

When our commissioners discussed the closure, they talked about money, not lawsuits. The congresswoman's release did point at lawsuits, blaming the closure on "budget cuts and increased regulatory costs from lawsuits." The lawsuit did reach this hatchery, though, in a narrower way. More on that below.

Who is suing, and what they say they want

The plaintiffs are the Wild Fish Conservancy (WFC), based in Washington, and The Conservation Angler (TCA), a Washington nonprofit with a Portland mailing address, which files in court under the name Wild Salmon Rivers. They argue that millions of hatchery fish compete with wild salmon for food, interbreed with them and weaken their fitness, and draw fishing fleets that catch wild fish along with the hatchery ones.

They are open about where they want this to go. WFC's own priorities page talks about a transition away from fish hatcheries. They describe their lawsuits as enforcement. Critics, including Alaska's Sen. Dan Sullivan, have accused groups like these of weaponizing the Endangered Species Act. Both descriptions are out there. These groups find places where the government's own legal paperwork has lapsed or fallen short, and they sue over that gap. In both cases below, they were right about the gap.

Idaho is the classic example. In October 2018, TCA, WFC and three other groups (Idaho Rivers United, Friends of the Clearwater and Snake River Waterkeeper) sent Idaho a notice of intent to sue, because the state's federal permit for its steelhead fishery had lapsed in 2010, and NOAA, citing a backlog, still had not processed Idaho's renewal application. On November 14, Idaho's Fish and Game Commission voted to suspend the state's steelhead season starting December 7. The full closure never happened. On the day it was set to begin, the state reached an agreement that closed two stretches where wild fish gather and kept the rest of the season open. NOAA approved the state's steelhead fishing plan on March 15, 2019.

Alaska is the other. WFC sued over the Southeast Alaska Chinook troll fishery on behalf of Southern Resident orcas, won in district court, and got an order that would have shut the summer and winter seasons. The Ninth Circuit reversed that part in 2024, and the fishery stayed open. In November 2025 the court still awarded WFC about $1.6 million in attorney fees, paid by the government. The Alaska Trollers Association raised about $217,000 for the defense, mostly from local governments, tribes and businesses, and had no way to recover it.

What the Mitchell Act case actually asks for

Congress passed the Mitchell Act in 1938 to conserve the Columbia's salmon as dams, irrigation and other federal projects cut into the runs. It has paid for hatcheries on the river every year since 1946. NOAA Fisheries hands out that money. Because the funding is a federal action, the Endangered Species Act requires a review, called a biological opinion, finding that the hatcheries it pays for are not likely to jeopardize listed wild fish. One opinion covers the funding for years, until something changes enough to require a new one. Those reviews, and whether the hatcheries live up to them, are what keep getting sued.

The 2024 case ended in a settlement that hit Skamania. In April 2024, WFC and TCA sued NOAA, WDFW, Oregon's fish agency and Clatsop County in federal court in Tacoma. Washington settled that fall, and the court entered the consent decree on October 10, 2024. It ended the Deep River net-pen coho program and the Washougal winter steelhead program raised at the Skamania Hatchery. WDFW planned to replace it with a smaller program that mixes in wild broodstock. Its federal plan allowed up to 60,000 smolts, and the settlement capped releases at 40,000 a year while the decree is in force. Then the budget closure cancelled the replacement too. The lawsuit took one program, and the money took the whole building.

NOAA issued new biological opinions in December 2024 and March 2025. After that, the groups agreed to drop their remaining claims, and the court dismissed them in April 2025.

The 2025 case is in federal court in Portland. On November 21, 2025, the same two groups filed a new suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon. This time they sued only the federal government: NOAA Fisheries and the Commerce Department, which oversees it. No state agency is a defendant. The complaint says the new opinions are arbitrary and don't protect listed fish. It also takes aim at the opinion covering the Select Area Fisheries Enhancement (SAFE) net-pen programs, whose off-channel fisheries include Youngs Bay near Astoria, and says NOAA owed a new environmental review. The groups filed an amended complaint in March 2026; as of early October 2026, its text had not been made public.

Two days before the filing, NOAA wrote to the groups. The agency said some "clarification to the 2024 Opinion may be advisable" and that it planned to re-issue it. The same letter says NOAA does "not share your general views of alleged flaws." WFC's press release called that a concession. NOAA's own words are more careful. In early 2026, NOAA produced a revised incidental take statement for the 2024 opinion, which WDFW posted in March.

The complaint does not ask the court, in so many words, to stop the money. It asks the judge to declare that NOAA's funding of hatcheries below Bonneville Dam violates the Endangered Species Act, to throw out the opinions covering those programs, and to order NOAA to follow the law. It also reserves the right to ask for more as the case goes on. A win could leave those programs without legal cover until NOAA rewrites the paperwork, and that could put the money on hold. It has happened before. In 2016, after an earlier WFC suit, NOAA agreed to hold back Mitchell Act funds from ten hatcheries until it finished a new opinion.

Where it stands. As of the October 2, 2026 docket, the government had filed the administrative record, the stack of agency documents the judge will review, and had added to it as recently as late September. The parties have asked for, and been given, more time on the deadline to propose a summary-judgment schedule several times. Another extension request was filed on October 2. No briefing schedule had been set, no hearing was on the court's calendar, and nothing had been decided. No tribe, state, or fishing group had joined the case.

Most of our hatcheries sit above the line this lawsuit draws

This is the part I most wanted to get right for our stretch of the river. The Oregon case asks the court to set aside the opinion only for programs below Bonneville. Most of the big hatcheries in Skamania and Klickitat counties are above it, and the biggest of them, Spring Creek, isn't a Mitchell Act hatchery at all.

Hatchery	What it raises	Who pays	Inside the lawsuit?
Spring Creek NFH (Underwood)	tule fall Chinook	Army Corps of Engineers (USFWS operates; Mitchell Act money ended in 2015)	No
Little White Salmon NFH (Cook)	upriver bright fall Chinook	Army Corps of Engineers (USFWS operates)*	No
Little White Salmon NFH	spring Chinook	Mitchell Act	No (above Bonneville)
Carson NFH	spring Chinook	Mitchell Act	No (above Bonneville)
Willard NFH	fall Chinook	Mitchell Act	No (above Bonneville)
Klickitat programs (with the Yakama Nation)	salmon and steelhead	Mitchell Act	No (above Bonneville)
Skamania Hatchery (North Fork Washougal)	steelhead	Mitchell Act and state	Yes, and closing for budget reasons
Washougal Hatchery	fall Chinook and coho (plus summer steelhead moved from Skamania)	Mitchell Act	Yes

*Mitchell Act money pays for upriver bright eggs sent from Little White Salmon to Willard and the Klickitat. Sources: NOAA's 2024 Mitchell Act biological opinion funding tables, and the USFWS 2023 John Day mitigation report.

The lawsuit doesn't reach Spring Creek or Carson. What can reach them is money: Mitchell Act dollars for Carson, and Fish and Wildlife Service staffing and budgets for both.

The money is where the river is getting squeezed

The Mitchell Act was flat for years. It ran around $23.5 million a year, while WDFW said the hatcheries needed about $34 million. Washington, Oregon and four tribes later asked Congress for $34.5 million for 2027. In January 2026, Congress added $4 million for the whole region, and Rep. Gluesenkamp Perez helped secure it. That is the "$4 million" our commissioners have been talking about. It was not set aside for the Skamania Hatchery. WDFW estimated Washington's share at $1.36 million; the Clark County Council put it at $2.2 million. WDFW Director Kelly Susewind expects most of Washington's share to go to conditions in the December 2024 opinion, such as weirs, smolt monitoring and genetic testing. He wrote that those requirements "must be implemented or (NMFS) and the operators could be subject to litigation." This is where the lawsuits and the budget meet. The legal pressure shapes what much of the new money has to be spent on.

The next budget proposes a deep cut. NOAA's own budget request for 2027 would cut the Mitchell Act to $15.8 million. By NOAA's own table, the hatchery programs it supports would drop from 50 to 34, and production from 39 million fish a year to 22 million. The House Appropriations Committee recommended $28 million instead. A stopgap law signed September 2, 2026 funds the government at fiscal 2026 rates through December 11, 2026, while Congress works on the full 2027 budget.

The federal hatcheries lost people. In 2025, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lost about a third of the staff at five Gorge hatcheries, four of them in Skamania County, through early retirements, deferred-resignation offers and the firing of probationary workers, according to the Spokesman-Review. State crews, tribal crews and volunteers filled in on spawning days. The agency said the hatcheries were adequately staffed for day-to-day work. Its 2027 request cuts the national hatchery operations budget by $16.5 million, though most of that comes from a fish health center and Klamath restoration work.

SAFE nearly lost its funding from the power side. In June 2026, the Bonneville Power Administration told Oregon it would stop paying its share of SAFE, saying the program hadn't shown it reduces harvest of weak wild runs and didn't fit BPA's mitigation mission. Oregon put the gap at $2.4 million and the fish at stake at more than 7 million. In September, Gov. Tina Kotek announced one more year of BPA funding. The plaintiffs had challenged SAFE in court. A power agency's funding decision nearly ended it first, and may still.

Hatchery fish are treaty fish

The Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission (CRITFC) represents the Yakama, Nez Perce, Umatilla and Warm Springs tribes. Their 1855 treaties reserved the right to fish at all usual and accustomed places, in common with other citizens, and the dams destroyed much of the habitat those runs needed. Hatcheries are part of how the federal government has tried to make good on that.

The tribes depend on them. The federal government's own 2023 commitments say that harvest of most Columbia Basin stocks, treaty and non-treaty, "is fueled primarily by Federal hatcheries." A fish-facts sheet from the Six Sovereigns (the four tribes plus Oregon and Washington) puts hatchery fish at about two-thirds of the average Columbia return, and 75 to over 90 percent for spring Chinook, summer Chinook and coho. "Hatchery fish are treaty fish," CRITFC's Zach Penney told the Spokesman-Review in 2025.

Nez Perce people once ate more than 300 pounds of salmon per person a year, the tribe's harvest director Joe Oatman told Columbia Insight in 2022. Now, the article said, a tribal member might be lucky to catch two or three fish a year.

The tribes also run some of the basin's most closely studied conservation hatcheries. The Nez Perce Tribe's Johnson Creek program, which uses only wild fish as broodstock, found that each wild fish taken into the hatchery produced on average about four and a half times as many returning adults as one left to spawn in the creek. Hatchery fish that spawned with wild mates did about as well as wild pairs, though hatchery fish overall tended to leave fewer offspring than wild ones. The Yakama Nation and WDFW run a long-term side-by-side test at Cle Elum, comparing a program that mixes in wild broodstock with one that doesn't.

Tribal leaders don't treat hatcheries as the whole answer. When WFC sued in 2016, CRITFC said the litigation put regional salmon fisheries at risk, and that those serious about recovery should put their effort into "restoring the wild rivers that salmon need." Farther north, a Nisqually council member told Hakai Magazine that depending on hatcheries feels like "being cornered into the back of the room."

I asked CRITFC and NOAA Fisheries for comment in May 2026 and have not yet received a response. I will update this post if and when that becomes available.

Where the tribes are exposed is, again, mostly money and agreements. The federal government withdrew in June 2025 from the 2023 Columbia Basin agreement, which had included $60 million for Mitchell Act hatchery needs and consultations with the tribes on $240 million in hatchery funding. The U.S. v. Oregon management agreement, which sets harvest shares and hatchery production for the upriver runs, has harvest terms that expire at the end of 2027. That agreement lists 90,000 summer steelhead smolts reared at the Skamania Hatchery for release in the Klickitat, a Mitchell Act program on a river where the Yakama Nation fishes. Under WDFW's closure plan, that release stays at 90,000 and moves to other hatcheries.

And there's the river itself. Zone 6, the 147 miles between Bonneville and McNary dams, holds 31 treaty fishing access sites. On our side of the river they include North Bonneville, Wind River, Little White Salmon, Cooks Landing, Underwood, White Salmon and Lyle. Those are the places where the hatchery question becomes dinner, ceremony and income.

Both sides are arguing about conservation

This case is a microcosm of the larger debate happening throughout the world on the philosophy and practice of how we conserve critical species in a rapidly-changing climate. Do we intervene, or purposefully resist intervention?

The case against hatcheries has scientific literature behind it. A well-known study of Hood River steelhead found that each generation spent in a hatchery cut a fish's reproductive success in the wild by about 40 percent, and the loss carried over to its wild-born offspring. A 2014 review found that early-generation hatchery fish average about half the wild reproductive success. In Norway, wild Atlantic salmon carrying genes from escaped farmed salmon survived at far lower rates as juveniles, although farmed salmon have been bred for fish-farm traits since the 1970s, which makes them far more domesticated than most Columbia hatchery fish. The region's own science advisers have urged an explicit look at the collective effects of all the hatchery releases in the basin, including whether together they outrun the food available from the tributaries down to the estuary and the river's plume at sea.

The case for hatcheries is about numbers and time. The Columbia is dammed, engineered and warming. Wild runs in many places are a fraction of what they were. A well-run hatchery can keep a population from blinking out, hold its genes in reserve, and boost the number of spawners, which is what Johnson Creek and the Snake River sockeye captive broodstock program set out to do. Managers already limit how many hatchery fish may spawn in the wild. NOAA sets those limits river by river in its biological opinions, guided by the Hatchery Scientific Review Group, an independent science panel Congress set up.

Salmon are an essential link in our local food web, and have likewise began to enter the category of a "conservation dependent" species. Without a hatchery program, it's likely the population of salmon would collapse far below the levels that make them a sustainable food source not just for people, but many other animals.

So the real disagreement is about risk. One side asks how much hatchery influence wild fish can stand. The other asks how many fish would be left without hatcheries. The defenders, including the tribes, the states and our own county commissioners, argue that conservation has to work on the river we actually have. The plaintiffs say the river we have will keep losing wild fish until the hatchery numbers come down. Neither side is pretending.

The tribes don't sit neatly on either side of that line, though. Their hatcheries are hands-on management, but aimed at bringing wild runs back to their own rivers, and grounded in treaty rights and obligations. The Potawatomi philosopher Kyle Whyte has written about how the idea of "wilderness" itself was used to push aside Indigenous land management. Seen that way, the question was never whether people should shape the river. It's who gets to, and toward what.

This argument won't stay on the Columbia. The same question, whether to hold a species to what it was or help it survive what the world has become, is coming up for spotted owls in Northwest forests and for one species after another as the climate warms. How we answer it for salmon over the next decade will shape how we answer it for everything else.

What to watch

• The Portland case. Watch the docket for a summary-judgment briefing schedule. That will tell us when each side files its arguments. Nothing had been set as of October 2, 2026.
• The 2027 federal budget. The Mitchell Act's final 2027 number (NOAA asked for $15.8 million; the House committee recommended $28 million) matters more to Carson and Little White Salmon than the lawsuit does.
• SAFE after its one-year reprieve. BPA has promised one more year, not a permanent fix.
• U.S. v. Oregon. The agreement's harvest terms expire at the end of 2027. I found no public record of talks on a new one.
• The Skamania Hatchery. WDFW began a three-year closure in fiscal 2026 and estimates full decommissioning at about $8 million. As of October 2026, the new federal money had not reopened it.

Next: the people on the water

The voices this story still needs are the people who fish for a living or for dinner. Guides on Drano Lake and the Wind. Gillnetters at Astoria. Tribal fishers on the platforms at Lyle. Families who have driven to the Washougal every winter for steelhead. I'd like to hear from you, about what the hatcheries mean to how you make a living, eat, or spend your Saturdays, and what you think the lawsuits and budget cuts will change. Send an email to skamaniadispatch at gmail dot com.

Thank you for reading, and for caring about this river with me. Your support makes it possible for us to grow this publication beyond public meetings archiving to homegrown reporting. We're very grateful.