Have hatchery fish established a natural run of summer steelhead?
It seems not. Virtually all of the hatchery summers are fin-clipped for positive identification, and so that anglers can keep hatchery fish but release any wild steelhead they may catch. It turns out that only a handful of unmarked summers show up each year – and some of these are actually hatchery fish that escaped the marking process. Curiously – A small number of unmarked “summer” steelhead show up each year. I have caught a handful of these unmarked summers in May and June, but these fish are more often seen in the fall – later than we expect Skamania summer fish and before we expect the native winter steelhead. I have looked closely at these fish. Some are obviously hatchery fish that eluded the adipose fin-clip. Their dorsal fins are eroded. They show a lot of weird scale regeneration patterns, perhaps a symptom of de-scaling in a hatchery environment. Two of the unmarked steelhead I have seen, however, had perfect fins and perfect scales. I think that these two fish were born in
