Fishery advocates estimate the number of adult fall-run Chinook salmon returning to the Sacramento Valley will likely not be enough to allow a salmon fishing season in 2024. Returns of adult fall-run spawning fish to the upper Sacramento Valley are dismal so far in 2023 and are far below the target of 180,000 fish set for the 2022 fishing season (Because of low anticipated returns, no target was set for 2023). The low number of Sacramento River Basin fall-run spawners traces back to the most recent drought and water management decisions that killed most salmon eggs with overheated water and finished off the few surviving juvenile salmon with inadequate springtime flows needed to safely transport them to the ocean. Fall-run salmon are the fish that support California’s, and much of Oregon’s, salmon fishery.
The Mokelumne Fish Hatchery on the Mokelumne River has reported a record return of over 20,000 salmon this year. Anecdotal reports say that good numbers of trucked hatchery fish have also returned to the American and Feather rivers. Tributaries with hatcheries are seeing healthy to record returns of fish due to the fact the hatchery fish were trucked around drought-stricken Central Valley rivers and released near the ocean or directly into the San Francisco Bay.
In contrast, the upper Sacramento River has witnessed disastrous numbers as only an estimated 500 fall-run adult salmon have returned so far, which is fewer than the number of federally protected and endangered winter-run Chinook salmon that also call the upper Sacramento home. The total collapse of this core part of the Central Valley fall-run was hastened by water management rules put in place under the Trump Administration in 2019 affecting dams and reservoirs in the federal Central Valley Project, which includes the Shasta Dam in the upper Sacramento Basin. These Trump rules, embraced by California Governor Newsom, allowed the total wipeout of winter-run salmon for three years in a row. They also took a lethal toll on the fall-run salmon that supports the West Coast salmon fishery.
Unfortunately, educated guesses in late 2023 put the number of total returning fall-run fish to the Sacramento Valley in the 90,000 range. Returns of naturally spawning salmon in the upper Sacramento Valley alone in recent years made up 40 percent of all returning salmon – including the American, Feather, Yuba and other streams – and in some years could easily top 100,000 fish.
Fishery managers only count returning adult salmon in the Sacramento Valley when determining California’s salmon fishing season. Fish returning to the San Joaquin and Mokelumne rivers are notcounted toward this total.
California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin River system supports four distinct Chinook salmon runs: fall, late-fall, winter and spring. The winter- and spring-runs have seen periods of alarmingly low numbers and are designated as endangered and threatened, respectively, under the Endangered Species Act. The late-fall run has been eliminated from most of its native spawning habitat. The fall-run is currently the only commercially and recreationally fishable stock, but its fishing season was closed in 2023 for the third year in California’s history, due to low numbers of salmon that survived the hostile conditions encountered in Central Valley rivers. Salmon typically exit the river of their birth at age one and return to spawn and then die at age three.