Lake Roosevelt NRA: Administrative History (Chapter 10)

The status of the Lake Roosevelt fishery has always been an important aspect of Park Service management of LARO. When the fish population changes, and sport fishing improves or declines, LARO personnel have adapted their management of the area accordingly. The Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agreed in the 1940s that the state Department of Fish and Wildlife would be responsible for managing the fishery of Lake Roosevelt, but the history of the fishery and of attempts to "improve" it are significant aspects of Park Service management of the area. Although current standard Park Service policies regarding fisheries management encourage the preservation or restoration of natural aquatic habitats and the natural abundance and distribution of native aquatic species, there is latitude in how this is applied, particularly in Park Service units based on artificial reservoirs like Lake Roosevelt. [14]

Two main issues involving the Lake Roosevelt fishery have affected federal and state management of the lake since the 1930s. The first is the loss of salmon in the Upper Columbia River due to the construction of Grand Coulee Dam and mitigation for this loss. The second is efforts to enhance the sport fishery in the lake. Concern over both these issues has led to a rather confusing array of studies and recommended actions over the years.

Four species of Pacific salmon — chinook, coho, sockeye, and chum - plus steelhead trout, are found in the Columbia River. These anadromous fish are born in freshwater, spend three to five years there as fry and juveniles, and then travel to the Pacific Ocean as smolts. There, they feed continuously until they make their way back upstream to mate and die where they were born. The salmon that once spawned above today's Grand Coulee Dam were of very high quality and were highly valued both by American Indians of the region and by commercial fishermen on the lower river. Intensive exploitation of the several species of salmon and of steelhead trout began with the establishment of the salmon canning industry in 1866. Besides salmon and steelhead trout, early fishermen also reported resident rainbow trout, cutthroat trout, and whitefish in the upper Columbia River. [15]

Because it had no fish ladders, Grand Coulee Dam completely blocked fish migration upstream of the dam after 1938. As a result, some twenty-seven thousand salmon and steelhead trout that had been part of the downstream commercial fishery could no longer spawn above the dam. Chief Joseph Dam, completed in 1955, also has no fish ladders. It is located fifty-two miles downstream of Grand Coulee Dam, and it now marks the upper limit of anadromous fish on the Columbia River. [16]

The architects of the new [Columbia] river have been nearly constant in their protestations of concern for salmon, but they have quite consciously made a choice against the conditions that produce salmon. They have wanted the river and its watershed to say electricity, lumber, cattle, and fruit and together these have translated into carp, shad, and squawfish instead of salmon. If ever a death could be unintended and overdetermined, it is the death of the wild runs of the Columbia River salmon.

-- Richard White, Organic Machine, 1995 [18]

Reclamation officials were well aware in the early 1930s that the construction of Grand Coulee Dam would forever block anadromous fish runs to the 1,140 linear miles of upstream spawning grounds. Engineers felt that a 350-foot-high fish ladder for the dam was not economically feasible, and there was no known way for the returning downstream fingerlings to swim safely over such a high spillway. Federal and state biologists turned to hatcheries to enable continued salmon production on the Columbia River. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife proposed an elaborate plan in 1938 that was implemented by the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries and funded by Reclamation. Salmon heading upstream for spawning grounds above Grand Coulee Dam were caught in traps at Rock Island Dam and hauled alive in tank trucks to holding ponds at three hatcheries. There, they were artificially spawned, and the resulting fingerlings were released at the proper time in four tributaries between Grand Coulee Dam and Rock Island Dam. After five years of transporting salmon, the fish had been retrained in what Reclamation engineer Frank Banks called "Uncle Sam's Fish College" to their new spawning grounds below the dam. They subsequently returned on their own to spawn there. [17]

Problems with the relocation of the fish runs surfaced in the 1940s, including high mortality of adult salmon in the hatcheries and natural holding areas. More recently, it has been recognized that hatchery fish damage wild fish productivity through competition for limited food and habitat, transmission of disease, and loss of genetic integrity through interbreeding. They also perform poorly in the wild. Hatcheries, it is now widely believed, are a poor substitute for natural river conditions. In the 1950s and 1960s, however, hatcheries were still seen as an excellent tool for enhancing sport fisheries. Some of the problems at the hatcheries improved in the 1960s as scientists began to understand the nutritional needs of young fish better. Production of resident trout was undertaken at the three federal hatcheries mentioned above, and beginning in 1965, thousands of pounds of resident trout were stocked annually on the Colville Reservation as partial mitigation for the tribes' fish losses (these hatcheries switched back to salmon production in 1974). [19]