Get a historical perspective on salmon and steelhead runs in the Sandy River Basin, from the 1800s to present.
PGE commissioned a local writer, Barbara Taylor, to document the rich history of the Sandy basin. The resulting book, Salmon and Steelhead Runs and Related Events on the Sandy River Basin — A Historical Perspective, is available in PDF* form, as a book-length document and as individual chapters. See the executive summary below.
Sandy River Basin history — individual chapters
*Note: You will need the Adobe® Acrobat® Reader to view and print PDF files. Visit the Adobe Web site for downloading instructions.
Executive Summary
The Sandy River, stretching from the flanks of Mt. Hood to the Columbia River, has attracted crowds of anglers and picnickers to its banks for more than 100 years. Fishing for spring chinook on the lower Sandy became popular during the late 1800s. More people came in the early 1900s as railroad and road development brought the banks of the scenic lower river within reach of area residents. On warm summer days in the mid-1920s, the railroad often carried hundreds of visitors from the nearby Portland area to picnic along the river’s sandy shores, such as at Dodge Park. Visitors also came to fish for steelhead, trout and, at one time, the smelt that returned in large numbers to the river’s mouth.
For centuries before these people arrived, the Sandy River Basin supported large runs of salmon and steelhead. Contained by pristine forests and gathering a seemingly endless supply of snowmelt and rainfall, most of its rivers ran cool and steady year-round (ODFW 1997). Fish thrived in its long shallow rapids and deep pools. Historically, the runs ranged as high as 15,000 coho, 20,000 winter steelhead, 10,000 fall chinook and 8,000 to 10,000 spring chinook (Mattson 1955). A small run of chum salmon also returned to the lower river.
Today, the Sandy continues to attract many visitors to fish along its banks or watch spawning fall chinook at Oxbow Park; however, the basin’s anadromous fish runs are not what they once were. Salmon and steelhead, except for chum, still return to the river – but the runs have fallen far below historic levels. Comparisons of records from an old hatchery within the Salmon River watershed, along with recent spawning surveys in the Salmon and Zigzag watersheds, suggest that current adult returns are only 10 to 25 percent of 1890 levels, which were already reduced by decades of heavy fishing (USFS 1996). In addition, hatchery-reared fish now dominate the runs.
In many ways, the decline of these runs has been linked to a steady, rapid growth of activity over the last 150 years and a subsequent demand for more timber, water, power, salmon and other resources. The runs began declining in the mid-1800s, primarily due to overharvest by fisheries in the Columbia River. By the late 1870s the spring chinook run to the Columbia River — the preferred fish at the time — had already started dropping. This decline led fish propagators in the Northwest to experiment with fish culture as a means to improve the runs. In 1887, fish propagators built stations on the Sandy and Salmon rivers to collect eggs for hatchery production. These collections, which persisted in the drainage until the late 1950s, captured many would-be-spawners as brood stock for hatcheries in the Sandy Basin and elsewhere. Other Sandy River salmon and steelhead were harvested in the commercial fisheries that remained steady on the Columbia River and grew heavy over time on the ocean and Sandy River.
Modification of the watershed’s pristine spawning and rearing conditions also reduced salmon and steelhead production. During the late 1800s, the booming population of the Willamette Valley and Portland metropolitan area turned toward the Cascades to provide for its growing needs. Logging companies cut large amounts of timber in lower, more accessible parts of the watershed and moved upstream as new roads and railroads permitted access to upper basin forests. Early settlers also removed instream logs and reshaped stream channels to ease the driving of timber downstream to mills or markets and mined lower stream reaches for sand and gravel. Other settlers cultivated the basin’s fertile lowlands and plateaus for agricultural production.
Construction and operation of several dams in the basin during the early 1900s further tested the strength of the basin’s fish runs. In 1912 and 1913, hydroelectric companies began operating two dams in the Sandy watershed to help meet the region’s growing energy demands. They completed the Bull Run project in 1912, which included a powerhouse on the Bull Run River at river mile (RM) 1.5 and a diversion dam on the Little Sandy River (RM 1.7), a lower Bull Run tributary. While the powerhouse created little or no problems for fish passage, the diversion dam on the Little Sandy blocked fish passage to about 6.5 miles of habitat in the upper Little Sandy drainage and reduced production between the dam and the river’s mouth. Hydro-related impacts on the basin’s fish runs intensified the next year after completion of Marmot Dam on the Sandy River (RM 30). The dam included a fish ladder, but it was usually blocked to capture brood stock for hatchery production. The ladder also suffered repeated flood damage and required regular repair. Additional fish losses occurred when downstream migrating fish were swept into the dam’s diversion canal. Streamflow diversions also affected fish migration and production below the dam for many years.
More habitat was lost in 1922 when the city of Portland built Headworks Dam on the Bull Run River (RM 6). While the Bull Run drainage had been earmarked in 1892 to provide high quality drinking water for Portland — and a small dam had existed on the river since 1895 — fish are believed to have continued migrating into the upper drainage until blocked by Headworks Dam. The dam, 22 feet high, stopped all fish migration to the upper Bull Run. In addition, the City began diverting large quantities of water from the river, significantly affecting fish production in the lower river.
By the late 1940s, the historically abundant runs of salmon and steelhead no longer returned to the Sandy River Basin. Spring chinook escapement to the main Sandy River and tributaries is believed to have dropped to no more than 1,500 adults. The coho salmon run had declined to about 2,000-3,000 adult fish and winter steelhead escapement to areas above Marmot Dam had dropped to about 2,200 fish (Mattson 1955). Fall chinook production had also fallen.
Several developments after 1950 influenced efforts to rebuild the runs. Some developments — such as improving fish passage at the Marmot Dam, maintaining minimum streamflows in the lower Sandy River, reducing egg takes, and tightening regulations for fishing and habitat disturbing activities — enhanced salmon and steelhead production and survival. Other developments — such as escalating road construction and timber harvest in the upper basin, stream mining, and channelization of the Sandy and several major tributaries following the flood of 1964 — caused new hardship. Fish managers also started releasing more hatchery fish in the basin at this time to supplement declining native stocks and support fisheries, including a new summer steelhead fishery.
Today, large numbers of winter steelhead, spring and fall chinook, coho and summer steelhead still return to the Sandy River. However, the proportion of native fish in these runs has dropped considerably over the years. Consequently, fish and habitat managers and other interested parties are working together to improve native salmon and steelhead production. Such actions, in concert with changes being made at the regional level, should help rebuild the basin’s native fish populations in years to come.
