730 | Saving Wild Salmon and Steelhead with Rick Williams – Managed Extinction, Snake Rivers

Dave (2s): Salmon Without Rivers was an amazing book written by Jim IC that explained how we got to where we are with the salmon and steelhead numbers today. This book talks about all the issues including dams, harvesting, climate change, and everything else that has impacted and to get us where we are today. And on this episode today, we have Jim’s new co-author on to talk about their new book Managed Extinction. And today, this is gonna help you understand what you can do this year and how you can help protect the salmon and steelhead species we all love. This is the Wet Fly Swing podcast where I show you the best places to travel to for fly fishing, how to find the best resources and tools to prepare for that big trip And what you can do to give back to the fish species. Dave (42s): We all love. How you doing today? This is Dave host of the We Fly Swing podcast. Grew up around a little fly shop and have created one of the largest fly fishing podcasts in this country. Rick Williams has been helping save salmon and finding solutions since the 1980s. We dig into his new book today and find out why he’s optimistic, given our current status And what we can do today to help move things around. We find out what the status is of the four Snake River dams and some actions you can take to help move this towards recovery. And also we’re gonna hear about what the total numbers would look like before all the dams got started and how that looks in species. We talk about co-host salmon distribution. Dave (1m 23s): This is a fun one. Plus we’re gonna get his best exercise to improve your fly cast today. Rick was also a master certified FFI instructor and you’re gonna get a bonus casting tip as well. All right, let’s get into it right now. Here he is, Rick Williams. How you doing Rick? Rick (1m 41s): Fine, thank you. Good to be here, Dave. Dave (1m 42s): Yeah. Appreciate you coming on here today to shed some light on an important topic or probably a lot of topics here. You have a book out there, managed Extinction. Jim Ow is your, I think, co-author on this. You guys have a lot of experience, not only in, You know, the subjects we’re gonna talk about today, but steelhead fishing, just like everything that we have a lot of listeners that are interested in. So we’re gonna get into all this today. Before we jump into the book, maybe take us back first, You know, kind of into the book itself, fly fishing. Have you been doing this for a while? Rick (2m 15s): Well, I’ve been a fly fisher since I was a kid. And I, and a pretty hardcore steelhead fisherman since the 1980s when I ended up in Portland, Oregon and worked for Kaufman’s Stream. Born for a couple of years, well, after I’d finished my PhD in conservation biology and, and before I found kinda academic work, my wife was in a surgical training program in Portland. And so most of our free time was spent up on the Deschutes or the Lias. So we both caught our first steelhead on fly rods over on the Deschutes, they’re back in the eighties. And then picked up two hand fishing in the, in the nineties. I got fascinated by the two hand rods and I’m a flight casting instructor. Rick (2m 58s): And so I dove into that pretty deep and have been ever since. Dave (3m 1s): Nice, nice. And I think we will probably be talking about some of that today. ’cause I’m interested, we’ve got a, a casting challenge going for our listeners right now, so we can talk a little more about that. But let’s, let’s jump right into the book and manage extinction. You know, that title I think is, is catchy. You know, anytime you say extinction, that definitely is a word that catches the attention. And then, but the managed part, maybe describe that, what does that mean exactly? And then talk a little about how you frame describe the book to a new audience. Rick (3m 30s): Well, it’s, it’s funny because, You know, Jim and I have worked together for over 30 years on salmon issues. And his original thought for the title for the book was Managed Annihilation. But we backed him off to manage extinction, which we thought was a little more accurate. And what we mean by that is, and it could apply to not just salmon and steelhead, but to any natural resource. It’s managing it from a, And what we call a paradigm, a management paradigm, which we refer to as a conceptual foundation, kinda how you think the ecosystem works, which then drives your actions and your assumptions. And then that leads you to what you’re gonna try to do. And if that paradigm or conceptual foundation is erroneous, and then it can lead you down a path to where you’re trying to, in all good faith trying to manage the resource, but it isn’t working. Rick (4m 22s): And that resource just keeps declining and has gone to extinction. And we’ve had, You know, there were 350 or so stocks of salmon steelhead in the Columbia River and, and we’re well down from that now. So a lot of ’em have gone to populations have gone to extinction, some species have, but for instance, the Snake River coho, a lot of people don’t even know there was a coho that came clear up into the Snake River basin and it one extinct in the late eighties. The, the tribes have been really actively trying to reintroduce it over the last 15 years or So. Dave (4m 58s): What was the original historic distribution of coho in the Columbia? Well, Rick (5m 3s): We think of ’em more as coastal rivers and lower rivers, You know, lower river fish, You know, that are widespread all up and down the, the whole Pacific coast, You know, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and they spawn in smaller streams and You know, they don’t get these huge coho runs. Like you get Chinook runs, like we used to get Chinook back to the Maine Columbia and the Hanford reach and into the Weezer River here in Idaho cohort are a little more widespread. And so, but they’re highly productive. But their production comes from kind of an aggregate of all of these smaller populations. But they extended clear up into the Snake River basin, probably utilizing the lower Salmon River and the lower clear water primarily. Rick (5m 45s): The last one was observed in 1986. They were declared extinct in 1989. And then the runs, You know, the runs all kind of collapsed right about that point. And all through the 1990s were, were very, very low. And that’s when all the ESA listings started to happen for all the up river. Dave (6m 4s): Yeah, that was kinda in that late nineties, early two thousands. Right. When things was that just a, I mean, obviously it was a culmination of a lot of things, but that was that mainly just also a big drop in ocean conditions that hit that and then because things bounced back up, right. We had the 2000 tens where things like jumped Right. You know, back and we had great fishing, You know, but what was going on in that early nineties when all the ESA listings started? Rick (6m 26s): Well, it’s a combination of all the impacts over the many years. Habitat degradation, over harvest, initially, all those things. But, and ocean conditions played a role in it too. But probably the biggest role relative to the Snake Basin where I live and all these endangered species has been the, the, the completion of the lower Snake River dams. Lower Granite Dam was the last one that was completed in, in 19 74, 75. And the runs dropped right after that. In hindsight, it was, it was coincident with the downturn in ocean conditions. Dave (6m 60s): Okay. Yeah, granite was the last one. So in 1974, that one’s completed. And then essentially, You know, 20 15, 20 years later, then you have the ESA li was it just like a slow trickle? Why did it take 15 years to see that, You know, that ESA listing? Rick (7m 18s): That’s a great question because the environmental groups and the fishing and conservation groups, they were, they were watching the fish runs decline, You know, back in the sixties, before the late fifties and sixties, before the lo before lower Snake River dams came in, the, the fish had to come up the Columbia River and go through three or four dams. And we were getting returns good enough in Idaho that, You know, Ted Trueblood is a famous western fishing writer, turned conservationist, preservationist was writing about going into Hell’s Canyon and just having these heydays catching steelhead. Dave (7m 50s): Oh, like, so before, are we talking before Hells Canyon was put? When was Hells Canyon? No, Rick (7m 56s): No, they, they were about the same time, but, so, but, but he was down lower in Hells Canyon, below the Idaho Power Hell Canyon complex. But the point was that, You know, with the fish transiting three or four dams, they were doing well enough that we had a sustainable fishery both for Harv Recreational and Harvest, which we don’t have now. Yeah. And the other four dams went in and that Dave (8m 21s): Took care of it, Rick (8m 21s): Right? Yeah, pretty well took care of it. Yeah. Dave (8m 23s): I mean I think it sounds like it’s a slow, it’s whatever you call that, right? The slow creep or something’s going on, You know it and you just keep going with it and then all of a sudden it’s like, oh wow, there’s nothing left. Do you feel like with the four snake dams, that’s such a big issue, it seems like something that’s doable. Do you think if we remove the four snake dams in 15 years, we would have a rebound of the steelhead? Rick (8m 46s): Oh, no question about it. The fish numbers would bounce back. Now the uncertainty is, You know, how far will they come back? What other factors are going on? Will they recover to levels that will support the kind of recreational fishery and, and some harvest like we saw in the, in the fifties and sixties? And the answer is we don’t know. Yeah. But You know, I’ve looked pretty hard into the, there’s a metric we use called sar and it stands for SMT to adult return ratios. And to really simplify it out of a hundred SMS going out down river two need to come back to replace the male or female that de spawned them. So 2% SAR. And we can measure these by putting little pit tags in the fish, they little right grain or rock sized tags that as they go through the, the dams and the locks and the fish ladders and things, they can get it. Rick (9m 36s): And the, there’s an electronic interrogation and we get feedback from ’em so we can track the fish down and back up. So we can use those to es estimate sar and 2% is kind of the threshold for just maintaining. Okay. And the, and the Idaho fish are below 2% de spring, chinook and steelhead and have been for 20 years, which is about the time period we’re talking about. And in contrast, You know, the fish down in the Yakima and the Deschutes are, You know, two point five to four point half percent. And the regional goals for recovery are SAR in the four to 6% range. And so if you look at the transit through the eight dams, the fish down at the, in the bottom end of the system are coming in somewhere around three point a five to five 6%, and you lose about a half. Rick (10m 26s): It appears that you lose about a half a percent SAR six tenths of a percent at each dam. And so the Yakima, I think system’s the highest that go through three or four dams there, and they’re, they’re sitting about 3%. Well, you start taking half off or four more dams, that puts you down to about 1%. And that’s where we are. Yeah. That’s where we are. Yeah, that makes sense. Populations downward trajectory. So extrapolating from that, if you take the lower all four of the lower snake dams out, we should get about a 2% bump up and that would put ’em into a rebuilding, a low rebuilding range. You know, a question I get asked a lot of times is, well, couldn’t we just take one or two of ’em out? And I mean, that’s a societal choice, but it’s not gonna do what the fish need. Rick (11m 10s): Yeah. And the four dams are down in River Canyon anyway, so they’re, each of ’em are about a hundred feet tall. So they provide almost no flood control. You can’t hold much water back on a hundred foot tall dam that’s down in the canyon. They produce, You know, depending on what the calculations are, two to 4% of the electricity that comes outta the whole basin averaging about two, 2%, two to 3%. You know, that is probably replaceable through conservation efforts and other kinds of electrical generation that’s coming online. You know, the other impacts that people are concerned about are the, the farms there. But You know, the rivers and the dams are down in a canyon. Rick (11m 52s): There’s a, a few farms along the, along the riparian zone and along the river corridor, but most of the farms and most of the water is used up on the canyon tops up on the rims. So it has to be pumped anyway. Dave (12m 5s): Yeah. It has to be pumped. Rick (12m 6s): The last thing, not, not to interrupt, but the last thing that people are concerned about is moving goods down outta Lewiston by barge. Yeah. And that’s the rain and the wood chip products. Yeah, Dave (12m 16s): That’s the barges. Rick (12m 17s): And the barges are very, are small, very small compared to the barges on the Columbia. So the thought there is to, You know, move, move those subsidies and, and expand the ability to move things by truck and then expand some of the rail lines. Yeah. So that goods from Theus area can get down to the Tri-City. It’s where they can get on the big Columbia River bar. Dave (12m 38s): Oh, right. Yeah. I feel like the argument is, You know, like you just said, it is so easy there, it seems like that’s like such an easy thing to get over, especially. And now that like, You know, after Elah and the Klamath dams now have been removed, I mean it’s different probably right. With the tribal, You know, folks down there. But like why is this still such a thing? I mean we’ve been talking about this for like, like you said, probably the eighties about removing these dams. Do you, first of all, why has it been so long and do you have any positive thinking that we’re gonna get these removed in in your lifetime? Rick (13m 10s): Well, yeah, I certainly hope so. I, I think the concern that I and other fisheries biologists have is we’re, we’re very optimistic and hopeful for the fish because they have such incredible reproductive capacity to rebound. And we’re, You know, the El wa has shown us some of that, the steelhead of the population in the elah, You know, when they were taken out 12 years ago or about a hundred fish, but they’re up over a thousand now going back up into the headwaters. So they’ve, they’ve gone up and order magnitude in a, in a decade. The coho numbers, they’re, again, they’re, they’re, the elah is unique because it has a couple of canyons with some very, very heavy water in them that are hard for the fish to navigate. Rick (13m 51s): The steelhead have the ability coho used the lower and middle parts of the river in some of the tributary systems and that, and they seem to be coming back and doing well in that part of the system. There’s no expectation that they’re gonna get up in the headwaters. The Chinook used to go up into the headwaters and spawn and, and the elwa Chinook were renowned. They were large fish, early run spring run fish. Yeah. They don’t seem to be showing that rebound and being able to, to navigate the really heavy water, but they don’t have the size. And John McMillan, who was, You know, the steelhead biologist for tro, he’s, he’s now the director of the Conservation angler. Rick (14m 31s): And I work with him quite a bit on a variety of things. He, he’s, he’s speculated, and I think he’s probably right, that there’s been such a long hatchery influence on the Chinook, on the Lwa and their population got so small that they may have lost the genetic capacity. Right. Get that size and be able to navigate that heavy water and get back up in the headwaters. You know, we, we do know if, if, You know, because of natural selection, if a few of ’em can get up there and survive it, then they’re gonna reproduce and, and it would kickstart that, that life history again. But we haven’t seen it yet. Yeah. You know? Dave (15m 7s): Yeah. Gotcha. Rick (15m 7s): But the, the bottom line outta all of that is that these fish are remarkable. They’re capable of colonizing. The Klamath dams came out in October of 2024 and six to eight weeks later I was looking at videos on my computer of f Chinook up river of where the dams were digging reds exploring habitat. So their capacity to jump back into these renewed systems is just incredible. Dave (15m 35s): Yeah. They can do it. They can do it. That’s awesome. And yeah, Rick (15m 37s): So we gotta give ’em a chance. Dave (15m 39s): Yeah. We gotta give him a chance. Exactly. And, and John McMill, we love John. He’s been on the podcast. He we’re actually doing a trip with him up to, up to the ski of Spay Lodge and we’re gonna be talking more steelhead up there. That’s the interesting thing. ’cause there are these places around, well, the ski has been struggling too, but there are some places that, I mean, maybe talk, let let, let’s talk about that. So around the Pacific Rim, You know, talking about steelhead, did you guys cover in the book a lot of these different areas other than the Columbia? Did you cover everything? Rick (16m 8s): No, our book was really focused on, on the Columbia River and in the Pacific Northwest. You know, we do bring in some examples from BC and, and one of the Habitat chapters. We point to the salmon productivity and habitat heterogeneity that’s found over up in Alaska, in the Bristol Bay area and over in, in the Russian near East. And Kamchatka as the last really highly productive areas and areas where we, we really can learn a lot from the salmon themselves about what they need to be successful. Jim wrote a book in 1999 called Salmon Without Rivers. Dave (16m 45s): Yeah, I was gonna say that book is, I read that a while ago. And that, that is a great book. Is that book like a this is like part two to that book? Pretty Rick (16m 53s): Much. Yeah, it is. That’s awesome. And so we invited some other people to join us and, and contribute portions of the book. We have a section, a chapter on the relationship of Chinook and the Southern resident Killer Whales that Misty McDuffy wrote. Nick Eski wrote a chapter on the, on the steelhead declines we’re seeing in the Frazier River and how they’re paralleling, they’re actually a really good example of what we call managed extinction. And Jack Stanford been around a long time, done a huge large river habitat guy, wonderful friend. And he contributed to the habitat part of the book. And many of us had all collaborated together in other scientific writings. Rick (17m 33s): Our, or the earlier book that I did called Return to the River, which was about the Columbia River Salmon, You know, the whole Columbia River decline and how it was being managed through the two thousands. And, and then Jim’s book, salmon Without Rivers, which explored the idea, the title comes from an observation, a friend of his maid when Jim was explaining about hatcheries and how they were being used. And the guy said, well, we will have Salmon without Rivers. Then Jim grabbed that title, God. So this book Managed Extinction, we wanted to write as kind of a follow up what we’ve learned and what the salmon have taught us. And we wanted to write it very much in the style that Jim wrote that book, which was with kind of heavily documented with Endnotes, but not cluttering the narrative up with a lot of scientific references. Rick (18m 23s): So, and a lot of attention to editing and writing so that it reads really smoothly in a, as in a story. We tried to interject personal stories from our career and I have a few little, You know, family stories of growing up in we, You know, Western Idaho and the Payette at Salmon River Drainages. Yep. Try to make it a little more interesting to the readers. But so we, we aimed the book at, You know, probably the kind of folks that are listening to your podcast, but we also documented it enough through the endnotes and things that we’re hoping that the fisheries professionals will use it. And like Jim’s book, salmon Without Rivers, that it would get used extensively in undergraduate and graduate fisheries and, and environmental science courses Dave (19m 10s): When it comes to high quality flies that truly elevate your fly fishing game. Drift hook.com is a trusted source you need. I’ve been using Drift hook’s expertly selected flies for a while now and they never disappoint. Plus they stand behind their products with a money back guarantee. Are you ready to upgrade your fly box? Head over to drift hook.com today and use the code swing at checkout to get 15% off your first order. That’s Drift hook D-R-I-F-T-H-O-O k.com. Don’t miss out. Since 19 72, 4 Wheel Campers has been building tough, lightweight campers designed to fit almost any truck. Whether you’re after something minimal like me with the Project M or looking for a fully equipped camper ready for your next off-grid adventure. Dave (19m 52s): Four wheel campers has a solution for every outdoor enthusiast. You can head over to four wheel campers.com right now and use the builder tool to see which topper slide in or flatbed is ideal for you. Back to the dams, the four Snake River dams, like you said, as people are listening now, are you on top of that? Is that something, where are we close to getting things moving forward, but what would you tell somebody listening, how can we help this process? Rick (20m 17s): Well, the last time we had a real shot at this was in the late nineties and, and it kind of got shut down politically and it also happened when California had a bunch of brownouts. So every bit of electricity was needed and that pretty well just quelled that movement. I think we’re back to that point right now and we’re hopeful. I think it’s been, You know, representative Mike Simpson came out about three years ago with a, a very visionary and ambitious plan to take the Lord Snake River dams out. And I think it was like three, it was a huge amount of money. It was like $330 billion, but only about 20 or 30% of it was actually aimed at Fish and Wildlife. The rest of it was all money going into the communities and the infrastructure to replace the services that the dams held. Rick (21m 3s): And it didn’t gain much traction. And I think it’s been working its way, kind of through the background of some of the stuff that Senator Murray and Governor Insley did on their work in the last few years. The, the tribes have become much more vocal and active and I, I think that’s a really good thing. They, You know, salmon were a huge, huge important part of the tribal culture and their diet as well as, I mean the diet you can’t under, you can’t underestimate how important that was with the incidents of diabetes and health issues that they have the co-evolved with salmon and so they wanted salmon back and, and they wanted them back soon. So as a result they moved pretty hard into hatcheries and aquaculture to assist that. Rick (21m 47s): But I think that some of the tribes, particularly the Nez per tribe, I think they’re also kind of tired of waiting. And we’ve also seen over the last 30 or 40 years that, You know, the hatcheries have given us fish to fish for, but they’re not rebuilding wild runs. And in fact, when hatchery fish and wild fish interact, wild fish suffer and we can’t use the hatcheries to keep our wild fish in the system. In fact, they’re detrimental to the wild fish. Right, Dave (22m 15s): Right. And and you always, I kind of go back to like the four H’s, right? The Yep. The Columbia’s a good example of it because you’ve got, You know, the hatcheries harvesting hydroelectric and habitat, right? And so you got all those things going on. It feels like the X factor is kind of, seems to be now, You know, the ocean condition. Sure. That is always there, but also climate change. Right. What do you think about that? That seems again, like it’s just another gigantic thing that is part of it and gets people stymied because we’re like, oh man, what do we do now we got this other thing. Like how do we deal with this? How do you manage that? Rick (22m 49s): Well, climate change is, You know, it’s intimately tied into the ocean conditions and the food web and the marine survival is really critical. It’s a major driver of salmon productivity. But all of that said, there’s not much that we as humans can do to reset those things. Dave (23m 6s): There isn’t. So you don’t think if we just like said quit driving all gas cars and we go to electric cars, that’s gonna save, right? That’s not gonna save the day fully. Rick (23m 15s): No. It’ll all help Of course. And we, we need to do more of all of that. But, but I think the, the flip side of is, is it underscores that are a real opportunity to, to interact with these fish and to really help them is, is in providing ’em access to historical habitat, trying to keep the water quality high and trying to restore them into some of their historical systems wherever we can and wherever we have the opportunity to. The was just a phenomenal example. Those dams were in there for a hundred years and we, we took ’em out and part of the reason the steelhead have rebounded so well is that they were landlocked up above, You know, for years people talk about the extraordinary rainbow trout fishing Right. Rick (24m 0s): Part of the awa system if you were willing to hike up there. But You know, those were landlocked steelhead. So all the genetics was there, all the life history was there waiting and we pulled the plug and boom boom go. Real surprise. They came back theist facial, which were down below and we had kind of had on life support through hatcheries and everything. They’re having a little tougher go. And and part of that is ’cause they probably lost genetic diversity. Some of the habitat had been degraded in the lower part of the river, but the majority of the habitats there. And it’s been astonishing how fast the river and the riparian zone have come back. And in even in fact how much the estuary has rebuilt and it’s providing, it went from like two acres to over a hundred acres and it’s providing rearing habitat for the juvenile monts going out of the elah as well as near shore marine fishes that have moved in there and are also rearing and using it against everyone’s expectation about all, all the problems with all the sediment in there within two and a half years it kind of sorted itself out. Rick (25m 2s): It’s still evolving, still changing. Right, Dave (25m 4s): Right. And it’s gonna do that, that that’s, that’s the great thing about Mother Nature is that if we just give it room, it’s going to recover. You mentioned, so like the four Hs we mentioned the habitat, you’re, you’re kind of talking about habitat hydro, you mentioned hatcheries. The harvest is the other thing. And I, I guess I turn to like the Chinook and I know this is kind of more Jim’s wheelhouse, but You know, we’ve talked about this, we’ve had the Salmon state, we’ve had some episodes where we’ve talked about the Chinook up in Alaska, which is really scary because I think this has been a, this has been happening for a while, but now we’re at this point where wow, this is like, we’re seeing it and they’re talking a lot about ocean trawlers, right. And things that are harvesting fish. What do you think is the Chinook and is there a big difference between what’s going on with Chinook and Steelhead? Dave (25m 45s): Or do you see the same, You know, the same solution to fixing it? Rick (25m 49s): Well, we’re seeing an overall similar decline, but I think different things are going on probably. And the Chinook you’re talking about, they’re primarily up in the bearing sea, although many of them come down here and Greg Rou, I don’t know if you’ve had him on, he’s a first class scientist. He’s done a ton of work up in the Bering Sea and he’s looking at the interaction of Chinook pink salmon and sockeye. And there’s some preliminary data that he and he and all of his colleagues have gotten together that suggests that part of the reason for the Chinook drop is that there’s a mortality at about age two in the marine out part of their lifecycle. And that’s when they’re about the same size in feeding on the same prey base as sockeye and pinks who are more efficient at feeding on that, that prey base at that particular size and time. Rick (26m 40s): And so there’s a suggestion that that’s contributing to the drop in the Chinook. And Of course then that takes you into, okay, so we got all these pink salmon hatcheries up there needed, You know, right now there’s a ton of salmon up in the, up in the bearing sea, but they’re not necessarily the chinook that we’re, that we’d like to see. And some of the, You know, Alaska rivers and, and the tribes who who’ve relied on them. So for subsistence are paying a, a really tough price. Dave (27m 10s): Right. Right. So that’s it. So yeah, we’ve, and we heard that in our, in the Bucket podcast series. I think John mentioned that the pink, that issue. So we’ll put a link out to that episode in the bucket where we talked about that the, lemme Rick (27m 22s): Lemme describe, yeah, if you don’t mind kind of the Arcy of our book Managed Extinction. Dave (27m 27s): Yeah, yeah, let’s hear it. We’re kind Rick (27m 28s): Of hitting pieces of it. And if I can describe the Arcy of it briefly, then I, then I think it’ll fit into a lot of the questions you’re asking. Like I said, it was a follow up to Jim’s book, salmon Without Rivers that looked at the history of the decline of the Columbia River Salmon. And we revisit a lot of that in the first couple of parts of the book. We’d go through the history of the decline, some of the big mitigation programs like the Lower Snake River Comp program and the Lower Columbia River Fisheries Development Program. All of these hatchery based programs that were designed to mitigate for the losses caused by development of the hydro system and, and why they haven’t worked and leading to the situation we’re in now, which is kind of the definition of managed extinction. Rick (28m 12s): And then, and then we say, okay, we got a lot of good science, so why, why has it been so hard to get science into management? And so we’d first draw a distinction between fisheries science, which is a field I work in versus fisheries management. And then, and then out of fisheries management, you get actions and then you have fisheries policy and administration sitting over the top of that. And as you can imagine, there’s some tension between those three fields. So science can come out, but it may not be reflected in the policy depending on, You know, perspectives, often political perspectives. And then, so then we talk about the barriers to getting good science into fisheries management, which was really fascinating. Rick (28m 54s): I went clear back and read the original Phish surveys done out of the Stanford group in the 1890s by Gilbert Everman Jordan and that bunch. And I think one of the things that knocked me over in researching for that chapter and subsequently writing it was, You know, our early work, we looked at the cannery effects, the huge canneries down in the lower Columbia River that were catching everything that was going up the river. And the, we have graphs on the landings, they weren’t counting fish, but they were counting the number landed and the pounds and so forth. And the P harvest down in the lower part of Columbia was 1886 through 1888. Rick (29m 34s): And Jordan and Everman came up into Idaho, Gilbert and Everman. I, I mean, and they got here in 92, 93 and 94 and they looked at the Clearwater, the Payette, the Salmon River and the main Snake River up near Twin Falls. And everywhere they went, people said, yeah, we still got really big runs, but you should have seen them seven years ago. That’s exactly that time period, five to seven years ago. So the, the amount of fish they were harvesting at the mouth of the Columbia was noticeably impacting the number of fish that were making into the upper base and 140 years ago. Dave (30m 7s): Yeah. And this is 1886. Rick (30m 9s): Yeah, that’s when the peak harvest was. And then Jordan and Gilbert Everman surveys were 92, 93 and 94. And, and reading those original reports was just, was astounding. These river systems that I grew up fishing and hiking around the, the fisher that salmon steel are absent from now, like in the pa Right. Bayat river system. They’ve been absent since the early 19 hundreds. Dave (30m 31s): Right. They’ve been gone. And Rick (30m 32s): I grew up in that system and our family, You know, our family’s been there since the 1920s. There’s no, no stories in our family about salmon and steel ever being in the Payette system. Right. Dave (30m 42s): But Rick (30m 42s): We would get in the car and drive up over the hill into the salmon system and trout fish and chase steelhead around and things, but nobody even knew that they’d been in the Payette system because some guy down in Horseshoe Bend just north of Boise put a little dam in about 1904 and it just knocked the whole run out. Dave (30m 59s): Right. And those dams are still all over, obviously all over the state. All over the, the country. Yeah. Yeah. All over. What do you think the historic, do you have any idea, let’s just go back to 1700 or pre whatever, how many millions of salmon were there? Do we have an idea versus now? Rick (31m 16s): Well, historical estimates of, of salmon runs back into the Columbia River range from about 9 million annually to 16 million. Recognizing there was annual variation. Of course this is work that the Council Northwest Power and Conservation Council funded to try to establish a historical baseline on what numbers might be. When we started working on salmon recovery, You know, Jim and I, I was appointed in 1989 when the council and BPA first formed an independent scientific advisory board to advise BPA and the council on implementing their fish and wildlife program. And it was done because issues would come up before the council members. Rick (31m 58s): These are council members, two from each state, from Idaho, Oregon, Washington, Montana. And that issue would come up and one set of biologists would come in from an agency and describe something, and then another set of biologists would come in and describe the same thing, but in a way different way. And then the council members and administrators and policy makers couldn’t make heads or tails of it. So they asked for an independent scientific advisory group be formed that could act as a referee. Yeah. Referee or filter on all this stuff. And so I was appointed to that in 1989 and Jim joined that group two years later and that’s when we started working together. So anyway, that, so that all, all came out of that. Rick (32m 39s): Yeah. Dave (32m 39s): That’s it. So so nine to 16 million, that’s total all five Pacific salmon and steelhead. That was the total or is that just one? Rick (32m 46s): No, that’s all of them. Aggregate. Yeah, aggregate. And then about the time Jim and I were put on that group, that’s when the run started to collapse. And they got down one year, I think below a million. And the council’s original goal was to double the run to about 2 million. And they did kind of come up to about that. And then the council come up, You know, decided they’d have a new goal of, of 5 million. And we’ve never come close to it. They, they’re still h close to it, they’re still kind of hovering between 1.5 and 2.5 million. Gotcha. 80% of those hatchery origin. So Dave (33m 17s): Yeah. I see. Okay. So, so again, going back to 1886, that’s a good, probably Italian ’cause that’s when dams probably is that, when, when did the, I guess the whole history of the country, there’s been dams put in, but when were the, the massive, wasn’t it between then and like the 1950s when we really put these giant, well Rick (33m 32s): The first big dams on the Columbia went in in the early thirties. Dave (33m 36s): Thirties, yeah. Rick (33m 36s): Yeah. So the impacts prior to that were primarily over harvest and then just habitat development in the tributary systems. You know, there were lots of small dams put in for towns for, and then they would logging, You know, they would use these things called splash dams, which were just horrific. You know, they build a dam across the river and then fill the whole river up with trees and then cut it loose in the spring when the floods came down. And then all the, it would take all this timber down. But you can imagine what it did to the riverbed in the riparian zone. Right. Dave (34m 7s): God, that’s crazy. So, so pretty much that’s, if you look at the big picture, it’s the dam start going in and, You know, 18 86, 19 all the way through the 19 hundreds. And then there’s this slow process, and then you have hatcheries probably that add fish. So maybe that Rick (34m 22s): Yeah. That, that’s kind of the story, You know, it was, it was over harvested. First coincident with habitat development is, is the, You know, Pacific Northwest populated and then it subsequently became the, the large dams that went in that started to put constraints on the fish and then those were going to be ameliorated everyone thought with using hatchers. Yeah, Dave (34m 42s): Right. Rick (34m 42s): Which didn’t work and, and actually turned out to be kind of detrimental to this. So it’s this kind of slow attrition addition of factors, You know, so the, the sequence has allowed some people to say, well, You know, the, it’s not the Lord Snake River dams. Those are not what a constraining, You know, it’s all this other stuff that happened first. And to some extent they’re right. That’s what set the stage, You know, that caused a lot of the problem. But the SARS tell us unequivocally right now, Dave (35m 10s): Yeah, the dams, Rick (35m 11s): That what is constraining wild salmon and steelhead in Idaho are the mortality through eight dams going down and then having to come back up through eight. So they passed 16 projects in their life history. Dave (35m 25s): Trout routes is the most comprehensive mapping app for trout anglers. With over 50,000 trout streams, 350,000 access points, public land maps and more trout routes is the number one resource for navigating, researching, and exploring trout streams. And it deserves a place in every anglers toolkit. I was in New York fishing recently, my first time in New York fishing. I had the Trout Routes app and I was able to check out and access public access points through the maze of private property on the rivers we were fishing. And after I got into the stream and was fishing down through a run, I wasn’t quite sure I saw a house down below. I wasn’t quite sure where the property lines ended, but given that I had trout routes, I was confident where I was fishing and I was able to assure that I wasn’t trespassing, you’ll be fully prepared with offline maps. Dave (36m 14s): You can get driving directions to points of interest, drop pins, add your notes in the app all while keeping all of your data private to your account. Only you can visit trout routes.com right now to learn more and download the Trout Routes app for free in the app store today. That’s trout routes. T-R-O-U-T-R-O-U-T-E-S start exploring today. What is the, like right now, is there a person, a group like that’s working on getting those removed? Where could we direct people to like jump into this fight? Like what could we do today? Rick (36m 51s): Well, I think, You know, let me take a small tangent back through the book then, because we, we have a section after we describe all the history where we give examples of what, what we’re calling this current conceptual foundation or paradigm where we continue to develop, we continue to extract services, we continue to try to use hatcheries to solve things. It’s not working. And those are the managed extinction examples. Then we have a section in the book where we say, okay, here are some examples where we took a lot of those constraints away and see what the fish did. And there’s a fabulous story that Dan Bottom writes in the book about the Salmon River over on the Oregon coast right near Lincoln City, where they took that or a coho hatchery out and then took a lot of the tide gates and things out and reconnected all the tidal estuary and the coho numbers bounced back up and they’d seen life histories. Rick (37m 43s): Life histories showed up they’d never seen before, didn’t have any record of, now they may have been there historically, we don’t know. But it, it just shows you how fast and how what we call plastic, meaning that the, the fish are capable of doing lots of different things when they have the opportunity. And then we have a big chapter on the elah, which goes through that. So we have these restoration examples and they show how dramatic and how quickly the fish can bounce back when the constraints are removed. And so, and then, then we’d have a section where we go through at a very high level, the four Hs you just talked about, trying not to get down the weeds, but say, okay, here’s harvest, here’s hydro, here’s habitat, here’s the big factors, here’s the big impact, here’s what’s causing things today, here’s the concerns. Rick (38m 30s): Then the last part of the book, Jim and I talked a great deal about this because as scientists, You know, we look at the graph I’ve just described to you about the SARS going downhill like a ski run, when you go through the eight dams, to us, it’s telling us a really compelling story that within 20 or 30 years we, if nothing changes, we’ll probably lose the vast majority of wild steelhead and salmon in here in Idaho, in the Snake River basin. And that’s compelling to us to want to cause action, but it doesn’t seem to be changing the minds of those people who kind of have their hands on the levers. Dave (39m 7s): Right. That make the decision, which are who, who are the people that are making the decisions? Who, who can move the needle on this? Is this like more of a, Rick (39m 13s): The northwest governors, the northwest congressional delegations, You know, state legislatures, all of that. Dave (39m 20s): Yeah. Could the federal government come in and say that? Could they come in and say, You know, at the highest levels, the president, whatever, like, all right, let’s do this, You know, like go to the moon, You know, like, let’s take these things out. Could that get done at a higher level? Rick (39m 32s): Yeah, they could, but they’re not going to, unless the Northwest delegation stands up and says, we need to do this. Dave (39m 37s): Yeah. They need support. Rick (39m 39s): And that’s not gonna happen unless people in the northwest become concerned enough and start putting pressure on their politicians that this is needed. Now the, the tribes, the tribes are actually putting as much pressure as anybody right now, and they have, You know, very strong their sovereign nations and there’s a lot of legal system behind them. But it needs to be more than that. It needs to be more of an effort than that. So, and I mean, and You know, I’ll be really candid, Idaho’s really frustrating politically, Dave (40m 9s): Right, right, right. Rick (40m 10s): We’ve got the last remaining wild runs of spring Chinook and steelhead, including the big B run fish. Right. And we’ve got the last remaining best habitat and a lot of it is at higher elevation. So it’s a little bit protected against climate change. Ought be going full blast right now on trying to get the, these fish to have as much access as we can back into this system because this is their refuge. This is where they can probably continue to survive through plane changing, You know, environment that we’re going through. And other than Simpson, all the rest of the Idaho delegation governor are just dead set against it, which is a little hard to understand. Rick (40m 52s): To be honest, the lore four Snake river dams are in Washington. So the water, the water’s already already left. I, the water’s already left Idaho and the electrical generation that supports a lot of, of Southwest Idaho comes from the Hell’s Canyon complex in Idaho power. Right. So you’re kind of going, okay, what else is there? You got the barging out of Lewiston, but like we talked about, You know, if you shift subsidies around and try to work with people instead of saying no, then that one’s solvable too. So I, I actually think it kind of boils down to a little bit of just in transience and, and this this some, this kind of perverse idea that we’re protecting some kind of western lifestyle legacy Dave (41m 34s): Yeah. That that’s what it is. That that’s the bigger, it’s the, which is the hard stuff to combat, right. Where you’ve got this like generational stuff of like, hey, these are, these are our dams, they’ve been there, it’s part of what we do. Yeah. Rick (41m 47s): Well, You know, I, I understand it. My grandparents immigrated here 1908. Yeah, Dave (41m 53s): Yeah. They probably, they, they probably built some of those dams, right? They, they probably built some of those barriers, right? They were probably part of that whole process. Rick (42m 0s): Yeah, I get all that. I mean, they, they homesteaded up, You know, some of the totally Idaho desert, the water was brought through irrigation network from Arrow Rock Dam. Right. You know? Yeah, yeah, I understand all that. But, but You know, that whole legacy is 200 years old at the max. Not even that 160 and the salmon have been here for tens of thousands of years. The Native American cultures coexisted with the salmon runs in the, in the Columbia and some of the archeological work that’s been done through the Columbia and the coastal areas looking at middens and, and artifacts and so suggest that Native Americans may have had harvest impacts on the Columbia River runs that were almost to the magnitude of what the canning harvest were. Rick (42m 53s): But the habitat was all there. The fish still had access, enough fish got through the gauntlets of collections at Sali Falls and other places that they made it back to the headwaters and replaced themselves. And in coastal systems where they were smaller, the tribes operated with a bit, little bit of a different paradigm and they, they kind of knew when they were big runs or small runs, and they would harvest for a, You know, a finite period of time and then, and then pull the wes out understanding that they needed to let the fish go back into the upper. If they overdid it now, they would pay for it in the future Concept. We don’t have very, well Dave (43m 30s): No, no, we don’t. That’s not our concept. You, you mentioned tens of thousands year, do we know on steel or just salmon in general? Are they, have they been around for millions of years? Like do we know that geologic timescale? Rick (43m 41s): Well, the salmon are, are, You know, have, are millions and millions of years old, but we also had the whole, You know, cord ice sheet and the glacial, You know, time period and so forth. So, so we think that salmon have been in the Pacific Northwest probably for tens of thousands a year. And they may, they may have as the glaciers receded, they started, they were in the ocean, they colonized the rivers and I don’t know if you’ve ever been on a, on a big section of, of a river that’s has a lot of salmon in it. They move habitat around, they’re digging reds and chasing each other. And so they’re kind of engineering too. Tom Jay is a northwest writer and sculptor and he is written really eloquently about salmon and northwest and he, he talks about a co-evolution between habitat and the coniferous trees and riparian willows and things and salmon all evolving together to shape these landscapes and to shape the salmon into the species they are are today. Rick (44m 45s): I think it’s a really beautiful way to look at things and it, it captures a phrase Jim and I worked a lot with, which is a phrase called place-based. So salmon or place-based species have place-based relationships, meaning that they’re a reflection of the habitat that they evolved in and came out of that sustains them and supports them. Dave (45m 6s): Right. So they can, they can evolve and change over time based on changes. Rick (45m 11s): Yeah. There’s interaction actually between the habitat and the fish themselves with the habitat probably having a stronger influence on shaping the fish than the other way around, Of course. Right, Dave (45m 21s): Right, right. And and probably the best example of that might be the steelhead and rainbow, right? The fact that rainbow can become steelhead and vice versa based on environmental changes. Rick (45m 32s): Absolutely, yeah. And that’s a great example of that, that term plasticity I was talking about either ultimately their goal is to reproduce and have offspring that that also survive and reproduce and there’s multiple ways to get there. Dave (45m 45s): Yeah. Do you feel like steelhead, again, steelhead versus chinook, we talk a lot about these because these are the, the two swinging species, You know, I, I obviously could fish for all of ’em, but they’re the big ones. Steelhead have, they feel like they’re more resilient, right? If something happens, a rainbow like we just said can become a steelhead, but chinook, You know, are they as resilient as a steelhead? Do you think they have a, a chance up in Alaska with all the changes and the closures and stuff to come back? Like steelhead could if you removed dams? Rick (46m 10s): You know, it’s, it’s strange. This is gonna sound really weird. I think in some ways I think steels are both more fragile than Chinook and more resilient all at the same time. And the resilient, I think part of it comes from the fact that I think they, they have more plasticity, they can do more things. They’re a little more adaptable to new opportunities and new changes. But the Chinook are pretty robust animal, so I don’t know if that makes any sense to you Dave (46m 36s): Just being like big, I mean, because they’re diverse too. They’ve got lots of life history types, right? Ocean lengthy. Rick (46m 41s): Oh, absolutely they do. Yeah. For races and all, You Dave (46m 44s): Know. Yeah. Oh, and there actually are kind of freshwater, right? You do have fish that stay in freshwater, right. And and don’t, yeah. Migrate. Yeah. Rick (46m 51s): Yeah. So I, I think, You know, I’m just, I’m speculating at that point, Dave (46m 54s): So I like to stay optimistic on this stuff. I always, I hate these episodes to be really like, You know, terrible like the collapse of the world. Right? I feel like there are some things we can do. It feels like you can call your, You know, representatives right. For your state and let them know. And, and to you, does it feel like, You know, there’s, we got a shot at this thing. It sounds like you’re still optimistic. Oh, Rick (47m 14s): I think we do. Certainly the, the recent political changes haven’t probably have slowed things down, is probably the right way to put it. Yep. And, and we, and we have to play a longer game, but I do think that, You know, for the average angler that’s listening, if they want to help, You know, get involved in your local clubs, try to limited club or or whoever and start writing letters, go into meetings, You know, make your voice heard. Let the people in the political seats know this is an important issue. Yeah. They’re gonna do anything. It’s clear from, You know, Mike Simpson’s proposal and the kind of lack of response from the whole Pacific Northwest delegation, not just Idaho, but almost without exception to, there were a couple of people that that jumped in too. Rick (48m 1s): But I think we’re in a day and age where I think it’d be really hard to be a politician. Everyone’s running scared for whatever reason. I know. And so we have to provide both the impetus and the courage for the, the politicians to be able to stand up for things that we say are important. Yep. Without a combination of, of kind of pressure and support all at the same time. It seems unlikely that things would change, but they could. Dave (48m 27s): Yeah, they could. They could. I think, I think they definitely could. I mean, I feel like the social media, it’s interesting, right? Because you’re not on social media, you don’t have a lot of it, it’s really, there’s a lot of negatives right. To that social media. I mean, that’s part of the reason why we have these, You know, bipolar politics going on right now because all this stuff that’s going on, it’s ma it’s not making it easier to talk across the table and find solutions, You know, the big thing. So I feel like it, that is a struggle right now. We got some work to do there for sure. But I wanna take it outta here, here in a few minutes, Rick, we got, we got the casting challenge. This is our fly casting challenge and you’re a, you’re a certified instructor. So I, I’m gonna ask you a question here in a sec, but this one today is presented by Togiak River Lodge. We’re actually going up there to fish swing for Chinook, You know, in one of those places that’s still open this year we’re gonna have a group of people going up there. Dave (49m 13s): Togiak is actually giving away a custom rod for anybody who completes the challenge, which is gonna be a series of 10 exercises that people do in fly casting to improve their cast. So it sounds like you’re more spay, is that your casting history? No, Rick (49m 27s): I’m a, I’m a master single hand. Oh, Dave (49m 28s): You got both. Okay. Rick (49m 30s): Yeah, so I teach Dave (49m 31s): Both. Good. Good. Well, well let’s keep it on the single hand. If you had somebody who was listening now casting’s a struggle for me at struggle for a lot of people. What would be one exercise they could do today that can help them get better at the cast? Rick (49m 43s): You know, it’s funny because everybody is always worried about their forward cast and the line not going out and turning over. And so I get this a lot from people who wanna cast farther or going on saltwater trips. And what I work on ’em with is their back cast. You know, learn how to put power into your first back cast and it, have it go straight back. If you get a powered up back cast, the rod’s loaded and the line has line speed, then your forward cast is gonna take care of itself. But if you do a soft or weak back cast, then you almost can’t catch up with it and get the forward cast to work again. So I spent a lot of time teaching people how to haul and how to power up that bad cast and how to keep it on a straight line path. Dave (50m 26s): Yeah. Straight line path. Yeah. We, we have really excited, we’ve got Bruce Richards coming on to do a, a webinar and he’s gonna be talking about his six step method and some of that stuff, but, and I’m sure this probably there’s a lot of overlap there, but what would be that to power up or to get that straight line? Would there be a, You know, something you would tell me today to go out and work on that? Rick (50m 45s): Okay, so yeah, this is gonna get a little more technical but, You know, aligns down on the ground, make sure there’s no slack, and when you start to pick up into the back cast, don’t rotate your wrist early pull straight back. Oh. Almost to where your hand comes past your shoulder. Yep. And then right as it gets your shoulder, do a sharp downward haul with your left hand and then rotate and almost pitch the line back like you’re throwing a Frisbee, but don’t pitch it down. Right. Pitch it back straight. And if you do that, you get a burst of line speed that the line goes back and it’s straight. And then the forward cast is just pull straight forward into that, turn over and let it go. Oh, Dave (51m 25s): I love that. Rick (51m 26s): And it’s so easy, the forecast becomes so easy if you set the back cast upright. Dave (51m 30s): Yeah, that’s right. Wow. That, I love that. It’s, it’s always fun to do this in audio because You know, you’re picturing it and I’m picturing Exactly. So yeah, you’re keep that wrist, don’t twist it until you get to your shoulder. Everybody Rick (51m 41s): Wants to rotate up into the back cast. Yeah, you do. Before you pull straight back and don’t rotate till you get your shoulder. Then you’ve got the line speed. You’ve Gotcha. So the end of the line is gonna go where you’re pulling, and the fact that you’ve pulled straight back for so long has the line going and that straight line path, and then you just accelerate it through the end of it. So Dave (52m 2s): That’s huge. Love that. Yeah. That is a really good exercise. And you can practice that right now, even with your hand, you can just practice like going up, going straight Right. Without doing any twists or turns. Rick (52m 10s): Yeah. And like I said, I’m, You know, kind of a two hand junkie. Yeah. Dave (52m 14s): You wanna give us a bonus, a bonus, two hand exercise or tip here? Rick (52m 17s): Well, the tip I would be was, was my casting buddy, Todd Sammel and I, who are, he’s another master, we actually developed a new Scandy long line Oh wow. Last year. We worked on it for about four years called Pacific Northwest Bay Lines. And it’s an advanced scandy long because a, a lot of us like to fish up on the upper part of the water column, either swinging soft tackles or space flies, or even skating. And this is a brilliant line. It just turns over really well, and yet it’s got a long back taper so you can shoot, so it’ll fish at regular scandy kind of distances of about 42 foot head. Or you can take it out and throw it to a hundred. Dave (52m 58s): Oh wow. Yeah. Rick (52m 59s): Gosh. But you can check that out called Pacific Northwest Bay Lines, P and w Dave (53m 3s): Bayline. Okay. Yeah, p and w. And so this is a new, that’s actually the, the brand. That’s Rick (53m 7s): The brand, yeah. Yeah. We’ve got a website with those lines on it and Oh, good. F FAQs and a couple of little videos and we’re just getting started. Dave (53m 14s): Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’ll get a, we’ll get a link out to that one for sure. Yeah, we’ve got lots of, lots of hardcore spay anglers listening, so that, that’s really good. Okay. Rick (53m 22s): And then if anybody wants a deeper dive in the book, Daniel Ritz, who was the conservation coordinator for the Idaho Wildlife Group, did a really nice review of it for Swing the Fly Magazine. You type in Managed Extinction, swing the Fly, you get a re a review of the book that goes through in a lot more detail. And we got into, Dave (53m 42s): Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And I saw that review and Swing The Fly is, yeah, they’re doing awesome stuff. I think the, the call to action today is for people to go out and get your book. You know, I think that that’s would be awesome. People can take a look and maybe even get that first book if they haven’t read it. The first one Jim had out there, which was Salmon Without Rivers, right? Yep. Rick (54m 1s): Absolutely. So Dave (54m 2s): We got those two books. Okay, cool. Well, I got a couple random ones to talk to you about here, and then we’ll take it away in a little bit. But, You know, the first one was just on today. I mean, anything we left out here on species or areas that you think people should know before we head out? Rick (54m 18s): No, I think, I think the last thing I wanted to say about the book though is that in the last three chapters, what Jim and I tried to do was to tell a new kind of what we called a new salmon story. We got thinking about other ecological writers who’ve had impact and they’ve, they’ve impacted people and gotten people to care because they tell a story that people care about. And you, when you care about or love something, that that’s when you’re gonna rise up and do action on it. So rather than trying to point people toward all the data, we have some in the book, Of course, we really wanted to try to connect people to the salmon and steelhead and their habitat, and how trying to work on that place-based concept of taking it back to local fisheries and local connections, maybe that’s what’s needed to get people involved and caring enough to be able to then reach out to community members and politicians to share that and make a difference. Rick (55m 15s): Yeah, Dave (55m 16s): I agree. I think that, I think part of it is, like we was saying, You know, talking to each other. I think that’s part of the struggle right now is that they’re, so, it’s polarized with the politics that people aren’t even talking. But I feel like when you get at the table with somebody, it’s even like my friends, I’ve got some good friends that have different political views than me, You know, and, and we text and we fight sometimes, but then whenever we’re in person, it’s like, oh, what were we fighting about? Right. That seems ridiculous. We’re actually talking, You know, you can find solutions. I feel like we’re, we’re at that place where nobody’s really talking and we’re just like, You know, kind of battling. Is that kind of how you see it right now? Oh, Rick (55m 51s): Absolutely. I’d love to see people come to the table with an attitude of can instead of can’t. And I think like, like all the lower Snake River dams, I mean, it really kind of comes down to, aside from the kind of legacy thing we talked about, which I think is a false, the real legacy or the salmon runs themselves, but, You know, we approach these things as, You know, well, we can’t do this because you’ll take this away. And I think if we all came together and said, okay, these are the services that come out of those dams, how can we, how can we change things and try to either offset whatever impact that’s gonna have on you, or keep you whole and, and we’re just, if we were just, You know, more creative and kinder, I’d go a long ways. Dave (56m 34s): Do you think the people that are have the different view or maybe are just there, that aren’t at the table saying, Hey, let’s remove these dams for whatever reason. Do you think they’re thinking? You know, I mean, because I, I can’t imagine somebody’s thinking like, Hey, I’m in Idaho. I live in Idaho and I’m okay if the day, if all the steelhead go extinct. You know what I mean? My guess is that’s a very small portion of people. Do you think the people are thinking like, I just think, You know, they think something else is gonna happen to save the day? Or do you think they just don’t care about salmon and steelhead? Rick (57m 2s): I don’t think most of ’em are connected. I don’t think they care, You know, in the Pacific Northwest, I’m not sure where you live, but in, but through Oregon or Washington, You know, you still have salmon and steelhead in those systems, so their numbers may be down, but the people in the state are connected to the fact that there are seds in those river systems that are inus here in Idaho. We’ve had dam blockages so long, my example in the Payette system. Dave (57m 26s): Oh, right, yeah, Rick (57m 27s): Yeah. The Payette, You know, was, was singled out by David Star Jordan as one of the two or three most productive salmon and steelhead river systems in all of Idaho. And that’s why he, oh, that’s why he sent Gilbert Neverman up here to survey it. And even my family who’s going on four generations here now, had no memory of ADEs in that system. Inus fish. And so I think most people here, over here, especially with the influx of people we’ve had into Idaho recently, from everywhere else in the nation, they have no clue, no concept that Sam Dave (58m 1s): Steelhead. No, that’s it. Rick (58m 2s): Wow. You know, they were swimming right through downtown Boise and the Boise River. Dave (58m 5s): Oh man. Gosh. Yeah. I mean, it’s hard to imagine. And even like Hell’s Canyon, right? You could even go back to that. Like at some point, I mean, when was Hell’s Canyon put in there? Rick (58m 15s): Oh, those dams were in the fifties and sixties. If you’re talking about the dams. Yeah, Dave (58m 18s): Yeah. Like the big, like Hells Canyon Dam, like that one that, that has no, yeah. Rick (58m 21s): Three the, it’s the complex and three dams, Bradley Oxbow and, and Hells Dave (58m 25s): Canyon. Yeah. So you got the Yeah. You threw, yeah. So those going too. So without those are fish going all the way up to what American Falls? Or they going even further? Rick (58m 32s): Well, Shoshone would’ve blocked him. Shoshone would’ve blocked him, but Dave (58m 35s): Oh, where’s that? Is that in there somewhere? Rick (58m 36s): Oh, that’s near Twin Falls. But, but okay. Everman, when he was here, I mean, he described a section of the Snake River just below Twin Falls as probably the major spawning habitat in all of the Snake Basin. Right. And nobody knows about that. Dave (58m 53s): No. Rick (58m 53s): It’s just gone. Dave (58m 55s): Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this point is so, You know, valid, because we’ve talked about this a little bit. You go up to the Skagit River and some of these places where they close fishing. And the struggle is, is that, man, you close it after a certain number of time, five years, 10 years, people forget about the river. And they’re like, oh, I I That’s what you’re saying, like the pet’s Exactly. Rick (59m 13s): On here. I mean, if we, well they, in Idaho, I mean, once you get outta Hell’s Canyon, you open up into this farmland kind of country that’s down here. I mean, you had all these rivers, you have the Yhe, the garbage, the Wheezer, the Payette, the Boise, all of these tributary systems had all of the salmon in them, plus the main Sam Snake River going all the way up to, I mean, there’s, there’s a, I remember if you go to Twin Falls and drive down into Nevada, like you’re going down to jackpot to go gamble or something, a sign out there in the middle of the road that says Salmon Falls Creek. And I remember driving by it back in the eighties Right. And thinking, why would that name be there? Well, it was below Shoshone Falls. Rick (59m 53s): It was a Tributary Creek and a very large run of Chinook went back in there. Yeah. It was stopped by Little Falls on the creek. And that’s where they spawned, geez. Out in the middle of just this desert habitat Dave (1h 0m 5s): Desert. Rick (1h 0m 5s): Incredible. Dave (1h 0m 6s): Right, right, right. Gotcha. So I have a couple of random ones for you and then we’ll take it outta here. One is, and this is on this same line. So you’ve got these runs, closures for steelhead, let’s say, You know, hopefully we don’t get there, but on the salmon or some of these, the clear water things get so bad that it’s, they have to close them or they say, You know what, you can fish but just, you have to use, you have to cut your hook off so you can use with feather. Right. So you can’t actually hook the fish. Would you still be out there swinging for these fish? Rick (1h 0m 34s): Actually, I’d probably go more than I have. Dave (1h 0m 37s): You would? Rick (1h 0m 38s): Yeah. I mean, I teach, I teach all kinds of people to hand cast. Oh, right. Out there all the time. All fall. Getting everybody ready for the season. I’ve steelhead fished once in the last five years. There Dave (1h 0m 48s): You go. Rick (1h 0m 48s): Right. For two and a half hours. Yep. Up on the Salmon River for two reasons. One, the, the numbers of fish are so low and because it’s gotten low and precious, You know, you go up there and, and I see, I’ve seen a lot of bad behavior. I don’t wanna go up there and Yeah. Argue with people about who has access to a run. And so I just haven’t done it. But if, if we got to the point where I’d have to take a bomber on or a skater and cut the Yep. Hook, the others wouldn’t go. So I’d probably go Dave (1h 1m 19s): Right. You’d have the whole river to yourself. That’s the positive outlook on the, the Rick (1h 1m 24s): Well it’s, it’s the take anyway. Yeah. It’s the take. It’s not possible. We all love the land of fish and see it and they’re so absolutely stunningly beautiful. But yeah, we’re all out, we’re all out there for that tug and the take, You know? Yeah, Dave (1h 1m 36s): I know. I know. And everything else good on your, your outdoor, so you’re in, you’re in Boise, right? Is that where you are now? Rick (1h 1m 43s): Yeah, we live in Eagle, just west of Boise. Just Dave (1h 1m 45s): West of Boise. Oh, gotcha. And how is the looking, how’s the ski, how’s the skiing? Are you guys getting a good snow pack for the year? Rick (1h 1m 50s): Okay. A great year. And You know, just north of Boise is a area called Brundage at McCall. Yep. They hit 200 inches of snow frequently by late March. They hit it the last weekend of January this year. Dave (1h 2m 2s): Oh good. So that, that’s a positive. Right. So that means all the streams are gonna be better off this year. Rick (1h 2m 6s): Well, maybe. We hope. Yeah. Right. I mean, it can always end up with a dry spring, you don’t know. But right now it looks great. Dave (1h 2m 13s): It looks great. Back to just leaving a message. So the one thing right now, again, the call to action for somebody, right. Other than buying your book, ’cause ’cause everybody’s gonna buy your book today. What, what is another call to action somebody can do to help what we’re talking about? Maybe help get these dams or just do something? Rick (1h 2m 27s): There’s a lot of concerned anglers and groups all through the Pacific West. So I would say the first thing, if somebody’s not hooked into their local fly fishing club, I mean, I’ve been going out, I’ve been going out and talking and presenting the book and talking to people at various fishing clubs and the local EU chapter. I’ve done some zoom stuff. So, nice. Get involved, get educated and start writing some letters. Dave (1h 2m 47s): Perfect. Well Blake will love that too. We’ll get everybody hooked into FFI if they aren’t already. The great thing is FFI is amazing and not only all the conservation stuff, but like you said, all the casting, You know, You know, certifications and, and knowledge there. So, great resource. Rick (1h 3m 2s): Well, I’ve been tied in there since actually I came in to the FFI for conservation. I’m the one, one of their two senior conservation advisors. Oh, you are? And have been for Yeah, I’m the conservation advisor kind of people with the west, all the west coast stuff and all the ISTs and, Dave (1h 3m 17s): Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, he’d been there since the beginning. So Rick (1h 3m 19s): I’ve been doing that for almost 30 years. But, but I also just love all the casting stuff. That’s been great fun. Bruce Richards was one of my early mentors. Dave (1h 3m 27s): Oh, he was? Yeah, he has been, yeah, his, his his sixth step method. I mean, he’s had a lot of stuff that’s influenced. Right. But is that, is that a big thing that a big document? Rick (1h 3m 37s): Oh, it’s a big thing. In fact, I did a, I did a continuing education webinar earlier this year, probably tracked down on the FFI site where I took his six step method and applied it to two hand casting. Oh, Dave (1h 3m 49s): Amazing. Okay. We gotta get that for sure. There you go. So the sixth step. Okay, good. Good. Yeah. And you’ve had, so back when you started with FFI, who were the, who was on the board? Who were the, was Mel Krieger there at that time? Rick (1h 4m 2s): Oh yeah, yeah. Mel and Joan. And, and, and Bruce, You know, Bruce was early on McCaulay Lorde, You know, and then Tom Jindra and Floyd Frankie. And it started, You know, it really started with it with a, You know, the major I teachers, lefty and Yeah. But a lot of celebrities. But what they found over the next decade was that the board was served a little bit better, perhaps by having less well-known people who were more willing to dig in and do work. Dave (1h 4m 30s): Do the work. Yeah. There you go. Love that. Yeah. The, the unnamed people, the people doing all the hard work that you don’t hear about. Right. That’s, that’s Rick (1h 4m 36s): What moves it. Yeah. But like I’ve been, I’ve been involved in the, in the casting board program. We’ve, we’ve restructured it recently for over 20 years now. And I mean, I, I authored our new, along with a couple other people, Todd Somil being one of ’em, and Thomas Bergham from Sweden. I authored our new two hand short head exam. We, we have a two hand master exam that looks that you use the long 50, 60 foot headlines. And then we have a entry level casting instructor exam that focuses on scan and Skagit line. And we, Thomas and I authored that exam about three or four years ago. So Dave (1h 5m 9s): There you go. Yeah, that’s great. Awesome. Well, a as we knew at the start, Rick, I knew we, we would, we’d run out of time eventually, but we’ll hopefully follow up with you down the line and we’ll obviously send everybody out Managed Extinction on Amazon. And where was the other place they could pick up that book? Rick (1h 5m 26s): Caxton Caxton Press, C-A-X-T-O-N press out of Caldwell, Idaho. Dave (1h 5m 30s): Oh, Caldwell. Good. So, we’ll, we’ll put those links in the show notes and yeah, I really appreciate all your time, all the hard work. I mean, obviously you’ve had a big impact on fly fishing and, and all the conservation work. So definitely appreciate that and look forward to keeping in touch with you. Rick (1h 5m 43s): Yeah. And if some of your listeners wanna reach out to me with further questions, happy to deal with ’em. Dave (1h 5m 50s): All right. Here is your call to action for today. Go to check out your local group. That could be FFI tu, any local conservation groups. Join that group because that’s the best chance for you to get started. And you could also check in any time with me. I can connect you with Rick if you want to connect with him. He’s a hard guy to find out there on social media, so, so let me know if you have questions, if you haven’t heard, we are posting on YouTube and we have a webinar with Bruce Richards on fly casting. If you wanna see this. This is the man you heard it today, from Rick, the Guy, the Six Steps. This is a huge one, Rick talked about it. Bruce Richards is here full webinar video if you wanna check this out step by step right now. Dave (1h 6m 31s): Quick ones before we get outta here. We mentioned Alaska, we mentioned Togiac, the giveaway that is going on, if you wanna get a trip right now, wet fly swing.com/ Alaska. Sign up there and I’ll follow up with you on details. We’re heading up there to swing for these big Chinook. We’ve been talking a lot about this, but this is your chance right now. If you’ve been waiting for this one, check in with me next week. CJ is here, Chad Johnson, CJ’s real Southern podcast. I can’t wait to share this one to the world and fill you in on it. Lots of good stuff going this year. Hope you’re enjoying it. As always, dave@wetlyswing.com, if you have any questions, any feedback, I always love to hear from you. If I haven’t heard from you for a while, if you’re brand new, never check in with me. That’s the easy way. It’s a direct shot right at me, dave@wew.com. Dave (1h 7m 13s): If you have an episode topic, any feedback for the show, how we can make it better, I would love to hear from you. Appreciate you for stopping in and listen to the very end here today. And I hope you have a great morning. I hope you have a fantastic afternoon, or if it’s evening, might be late in the evening. Even though we all know that getting sleep is going to increase your lifespan is what they say. So you don’t wanna be up too late staying up for that next fishing trip the next day. But if you are, that’s okay. Enjoy it. Fired up. You might be young and looking ahead, they could. Life is long. But trust me, I’m with you, so stay in touch and let’s talk to you soon. Thanks again. 3 (1h 7m 50s): Thanks for listening to the Wet Fly, swing Fly fishing show. For notes and links from this episode, visit wet fly swing.com.