UPDATE!

The Trump administration is abandoning its plan to dismantle a $368 million ocean-monitoring system critical to understanding climate change and marine ecosystems, bowing to bipartisan backlash on Capitol Hill.

On or about June 16, somewhere off the coast of Oregon and Washington, a network of moorings and sail drones that had been listening to the ocean for nearly a decade went silent. The Coastal Endurance Array, part of the National Science Foundation’s Ocean Observatories Initiative, is being pulled out of the water. It is one of four of five arrays the administration has decided to dismantle, stripping monitoring infrastructure from the East Coast, the Pacific Northwest, and Alaska in a single stroke.

For those of us who fight for wild steelhead, this is not an abstract budget line. It is a light going out over the exact water our fish depend on to survive.

Here is what gets lost in the language of “descoping” and “difficult transitions.” Steelhead aren’t only a river fish. They spend years at sea, and what happens to them out there, in the cold, nutrient-rich water that wells up along our coast, determines whether they ever come home. Ocean survival is the great black box of steelhead recovery. We pour millions into habitat, dam passage, and hatchery reform on the freshwater side, and then our smolts swim out past the surf line into conditions we are increasingly blind to. The Endurance Array was one of the few instruments that gave us a front-line view of that world.

And it sat in precisely the wrong place to lose. The waters of the Pacific Northwest are naturally more acidic than most marine regions, and climate change is making it worse. The array was located within a coastal upwelling zone. The same process that supports our extraordinary marine food web also pushes low-oxygen, corrosive water onto the continental shelf, across the fishing grounds, and the rearing waters that juvenile salmonids move through. When oxygen crashes, animals that cannot flee suffocate. The array’s long-term records of pH, dissolved oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrate were, in the words of the scientists who ran them, “particularly uncommon.” You do not rebuild a decade of baseline data. Once the record is broken, it is broken.

We have already lived through what happens when the ocean turns hostile, and we are caught flat-footed. “The Blob,” the marine heatwave that affected the North Pacific from 2013 to 2016, was tracked in part with this very monitoring network. It scrambled the food web, contributed to fishery collapses, and killed seabirds and marine mammals on a scale that still haunts the region. Steelhead returns in those years were dismal, and ocean conditions were a prime suspect. The instruments now being hauled off the seafloor are how we saw that disaster coming. With El Niño conditions developing again, the administration has chosen this moment to blind us.

The cruelest part is who absorbs the risk. As the fisher-led Alaska Marine Community Coalition put it, when the data flows go dark, “decision-making happens with wider uncertainty,” and that uncertainty “falls hardest on the people with the smallest margin for error.” For us, that means wild steelhead, a fish already pushed to the edge across much of its range, and the rural communities, tribal nations, guides, and small businesses whose lives are braided into the runs. Fisheries managers set catch limits and forecast returns using exactly the kind of long-term data this array provided. Strip out the data, and you do not eliminate the risk. You simply manage in the dark and hope.

Defenders of the decision point to a 2025 National Academies report and insist the science community will be fine. But the people closest to the instruments tell a different story. Satellites, the common fallback, “generally see only the very top of the ocean,” as the array’s own manager noted, and the changes that matter most for our fish happen far under the surface, in the deep water that governs what reaches the coast. There is no satellite that measures the dissolved oxygen on the bottom of a steelhead’s migratory corridor. There is no app that replaces a mooring that has been taking the ocean’s pulse since 2016.

This is what makes the dismantling so reckless. It is not a study being paused or a grant being trimmed. It is permanent sensory deprivation imposed on a region that is the beating heart of wild steelhead country, at the precise moment the ocean is becoming less predictable, not more. We are choosing ignorance over knowledge as a matter of policy, and calling it savings.

The Wild Steelhead Coalition’s position is simple. You cannot recover a fish you refuse to watch. The Coastal Endurance Array and Station Papa are not luxuries. They are the early-warning system for the marine half of the steelhead’s life, the half we understand least and can least afford to lose sight of. We call on Congress and the administration to halt the removal of these arrays and restore the funding that keeps them operational. The instruments still on the seafloor should stay there. The records should keep running.

The ocean is still talking. We are the ones choosing to stop listening, and our wild steelhead will not get to vote on that decision.

By Brian Bennett

Recently, five men shared a stage at the Mission Theater in Portland, and between them, they carried close to two and a half centuries of life spent on Pacific Northwest rivers. Steve Pettit. Bill Bakke. John Hazel. Randle Stetzer. Bill McMillan. The event, called Reeling In the Years, deserved a full house.

But listen carefully, because the most useful thing these men can tell us is not how they fished with floating lines and fiberglass rods for fish that ran thick enough to make your hands shake. It’s what they did when the fishing started to disappear.

We have built an entire culture around the wrong half of that story. Open any fly fishing magazine, scroll any feed, and you’ll find the genre fully formed: the elegy, the reverence for the old runs, the old lines, the old hands. We’ve turned steelheading into a memory palace, and we roam its rooms, touching the relics. It is beautiful. It is also, increasingly, a way of not looking at the current state of steelhead.

Here is what gets lost by the candlelight. Bill Bakke did not start Oregon Trout and the Native Fish Society to be remembered. He founded them because the fish were in trouble and somebody had to do the unglamorous, infuriating work of fighting agencies, reading hatchery data, and standing in hearing rooms. Steve Pettit didn’t spend more than thirty years as a fish passage specialist for Idaho Fish and Game because passage specialists get statues. He did it because the dams were killing smolts and the math demanded a witness who wouldn’t blink. Bill McMillan didn't spend decades snorkeling the Washougal and the Skagit, recording wild steelhead counts by hand, then turn that data into testimony, because anyone was paying him to. He did it because somebody had to keep the record, and the record was the only thing that would hold up when the agencies looked away. These men became conservationists out of alarm, not nostalgia. The pioneering was never the point. The stewardship was the point.

So, the question this event and others pose is, what does the future hold for the sport? The answer is baked into the lives of the five people answering it. The future holds exactly as much steelhead fishing as we are willing to fight for. Not mourn. Fight for.

And the fight has moved. It is no longer on the swing run. Consider what is happening on the rivers while some of us celebrate the past.

In the Interior Fraser, the collapse has nearly finished. During the summer 2025 migration window, the DFO test fishery at Albion did not detect a single Interior Fraser steelhead. From that catch, the province now forecasts a 2026 Thompson spawning population of fewer than 19 fish, and a Chilcotin forecast of fewer than 9. There is a 97 percent probability that the Thompson population will be classified as an Extreme Conservation Concern, and a 99 percent probability for the Chilcotin. As one biologist put it, a single slide or a single storm could wipe out a spawning population forever. These are runs that were still in the hundreds a few years ago. We are now counting them on our fingers.

And the killing detail, the one that should make every angler in that theater sit up, is that this was preventable. Back in 2019, when the Thompson returns were still in the hundreds, the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada assessed both populations as endangered and recommended listing them under Canada’s Species at Risk Act, which would have triggered real protections and recovery. It never happened, in part because officials at Fisheries and Oceans Canada corrupted the process. The fish didn’t fail. The institutions did. They failed in the exact arenas, listings, recovery plans, monitoring budgets, where Bakke and Pettit spent their careers throwing their bodies against the gears.

It’s the same pattern closer to home. The Skagit was closed this season not because the fish failed but because nobody funded the people who count them; monitoring is the load-bearing wall, and when the appropriation disappears, the season disappears with it. DFO budget cuts are gutting monitoring on the Skeena, the single most important steelhead watershed left on the continent, the one place where the runs are still real. And under the Pacific Salmon Treaty, up for renegotiation before 2028, wild steelhead remain nearly invisible in interception accounting, as fish taken in mixed-stock fisheries go uncounted against any wild steelhead ledger.

Look at that list. The threats are no longer the romantic ones. They are appropriations line items, treaty annexes, escapement models, emergency listings that get quietly buried, and the slow administrative erasure of the very data we’d need to prove anything. This is not a fight that rewards reverence. It rewards the unsexy persistence that Bakke and Pettit modeled for fifty years, the willingness to be the person in the room who reads the document.

I worry that our nostalgia has become a kind of permission slip. If we are gathered in a theater remembering how good it was, we don’t have to sit with how bad it is, or how much of the badness is ours to fix. Veneration is comfortable. It asks nothing of you but attendance and a lump in the throat. The masters never had that luxury. When they saw the runs decline, they didn’t convene a panel to remember them. They went to work.

There’s a generational sleight of hand in all this; by keeping the lights trained on the pioneers, we excuse ourselves from becoming the next ones. We tell ourselves the giants already walked the earth, that ours is a diminished age, that all we can do is tend the flame. That’s a lie, and a cowardly one. The thirty-year-olds wading the Hoh this winter are not curators of someone else’s legend. They are the Bakkes and Pettits of a fight that is, by every measure, more urgent than the one their predecessors inherited. The treaty reopens. The appropriations get voted on. The monitoring money exists somewhere if someone makes the case for it. The Thompson can still be listed late, against the odds.

So here is what I’d offer, along with the standing ovation these four men earned: let it be one of the last ovations that points only backward. Let that night be the start of us stopping building shrines and starting to read their lives as instruction manuals. Pettit fought for the smolts. Bakke built the institutions. McMillan kept the record. Hazel and Stetzer turned a lifetime on the water into advocacy for the water. None of that is behind us. All of it is the assignment.

The masters were never trying to give us something to remember. They were trying to leave us something to do.

So don’t just remember, get involved. Volunteer, support organizations, and advocate for stronger protection. The future of steelhead depends on what you do next.

The fish are down to single digits in the Chilcotin.

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Brian Bennett writes about wild steelhead and fisheries policy. He is Communications Manager at the American Fly Fishing Trade Association, the Wild Steelhead Coalition, and Tomorrow’s Fish. The opinions expressed are the author’s own.

Wild steelhead deserve more than sympathy. They deserve action. But action starts with understanding, and understanding starts with conversation.

That’s why we built The Adipose Podcast.

The premise is simple: in the 21st century, a steelheader can’t just be an angler. You have to be a conservationist. An advocate. Someone willing to sit with hard questions and harder answers. The Adipose Podcast is where those conversations happen, authentic, informed, and unsparing. We’re here to educate and inspire anglers, members of the public, and the fishing industry to show up for wild steelhead and the rivers they call home.

Because these fish need us to be more than fans.

Our latest episode, A Letter from a Wild Steelhead, is unlike anything we’ve done before.

What does it mean to love something wild? What does it cost, for the fish, for the rivers, for the future, when that love expresses itself as pursuit?

These aren’t comfortable questions. But they’re the ones that matter most when we talk about wild steelhead: a fish so rare that encountering one has become the stuff of legend. The fish of a thousand casts. A living artifact. An angler’s holy grail.

This episode asks the harder question: what if the very act of seeking them, of loving them the way we’ve been taught to love them, is part of what’s pushing them toward the edge?

We let a wild steelhead answer for itself.

It’s not an easy listen. But it’s an honest one.

You’ll find The Adipose on your favorite podcast platform. If this episode inspires you, and we think it will, please subscribe and leave a review. It sounds like a small thing. It isn’t. Every review puts these conversations in front of someone who hasn’t heard them yet.

You can also give it a listen here.

Recent news coverage has brought renewed attention to the North Pacific’s changing ocean conditions and their implications for steelhead and salmon. NOAA scientists have been tracking how environmental shifts in the North Pacific are affecting survival rates for these iconic fish, and the picture isn’t encouraging.

For juvenile steelhead, winter and early spring ocean conditions can make or break an entire year class. As these young fish enter the ocean for the first time, they encounter a gauntlet of environmental factors, all tied to a single, increasingly dominant feature:

The North Pacific is warming at an alarming rate. Ocean heat content continues to climb, sea surface temperatures have hit record highs, and marine heat waves, those prolonged periods of dangerously elevated ocean temperatures, are becoming more frequent and severe. While the region has been warming rapidly for two decades, 2025 stands out as markedly hotter than even recent years.

The North Pacific Gyre Oscillation (NPGO), an established oceanographic index, helps explain these temperature increases and tracks their ripple effects through the marine ecosystem. The NPGO correlates with shifts in salinity, nutrient availability, and chlorophyll-a concentrations, all driven by changes in upwelling patterns and water circulation. Together, these factors shape productivity and food web dynamics, directly determining whether steelhead thrive or struggle.

The pattern is stark: cooler, nutrient-rich oceanic conditions (shown in blue in the chart below) drive higher productivity and better steelhead survival. Warmer, less productive environments (shown in orange) correspond with reduced success for steelhead and many salmon species.

The correlation between steelhead productivity and the NPGO is clear and concerning. Ocean conditions have been consistently unfavorable since late 2013, aligning precisely with the recent collapse in steelhead returns across the Pacific Northwest.

Greenhouse gas emissions are the underlying driver. As atmospheric carbon traps more heat, the ocean’s surface layer warms, reducing vertical mixing with colder deep water. This creates a thinner mixed layer where heat becomes concentrated, accelerating surface warming in a self-reinforcing cycle.

But the North Pacific isn’t just warming, it’s warming faster than any other ocean basin on Earth since 2013.

The region has experienced two major marine heat waves in just five years, with devastating consequences for marine mammals, seabirds, fisheries, and the coastal communities that depend on them. These events aren’t anomalies; they’re warnings.

What the future holds for wild steelhead and the broader North Pacific ecosystem remains uncertain. But recent data from “the Blob,” a massive patch of anomalously warm water that formed in the northeastern Pacific, offers troubling insights into what might become the new normal.

The consequences of recent warming have been far-reaching and severe. As global ocean temperatures continue to rise, these changes may signal fundamental ecological shifts already underway, shifts that wild steelhead, already pushed to the edge by a century of habitat loss and overharvest, may not survive.

There’s a moment described in a recent NOAA Fisheries feature that cuts through the abstraction of policy debates.

On Idaho’s Yankee Fork of the Salmon River, Chinook salmon began building redds in spawning gravel that had been placed just three weeks earlier as part of a habitat restoration project led by the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes and Trout Unlimited. The fish didn’t wait for a ribbon-cutting. They found cold, clean, accessible water and used it.

Rapid recolonization of restored habitats like this is well documented in fisheries science and frequently cited by NOAA and state agencies as evidence that, when physical conditions improve, salmon and steelhead respond quickly.

That moment, and thousands like it across the Columbia River Basin, depend on federal habitat restoration funding that is now under renewed budget pressure.

Snake River Chinook and steelhead undertake one of the longest freshwater migrations in the continental United States, roughly 900 miles from the Pacific Ocean to spawning grounds in central Idaho. Along the way, they pass eight mainstem dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers, navigate warming reservoirs, and face predation and shifting ocean conditions.

Wild runs that once numbered in the millions have declined dramatically over the past half-century. While estimates vary by run and baseline, declines of 80–90 percent are widely cited in federal and academic assessments. Today, Snake River spring/summer Chinook and steelhead are listed as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act.

At the same time, the basin remains central to any recovery strategy. Federal agencies and conservation groups often note that the Columbia-Snake system contains a substantial share, frequently described as roughly half, of the remaining high-quality cold-water habitat for salmon in the lower 48 states.

The habitat still exists. The question is whether fish can reach it.

Large infrastructure, particularly the four lower Snake River dams, dominates public debate. But on the ground, many of the most immediate barriers are smaller and less visible.

Culverts.

Across the Pacific Northwest, thousands of aging road culverts were installed decades ago without fish passage in mind. Many are undersized, perched above stream grade, or create water velocities too fast for juvenile fish to navigate. The result: access to cold-water refuges is cut off precisely when fish need it most.

With approximately $4.2 million in federal funding administered through NOAA and the Idaho Office of Species Conservation, several culvert replacement projects are underway in tributaries to the Salmon and Clearwater rivers, including Poison Creek, Kinnikinic Creek, George Creek, and Big Cedar Creek. According to project summaries from Idaho state agencies, these efforts are expected to reopen access to roughly 25 miles of upstream habitat.

Temperature data underscores the stakes. Tributaries like Poison Creek and Kinnikinic Creek can run 10–14°F cooler than the mainstem Salmon River during peak summer conditions. That difference is decisive. At water temperatures approaching 68°F (20°C), salmon and steelhead experience measurable physiological stress, and prolonged exposure can be lethal.

“When you look at the mouth of these creeks, you often see fish stacked in the cold water,” Idaho Office of Species Conservation Administrator Mike Edmondson said in project communications. “Opening access upstream expands that refuge significantly.”

In practical terms, one culvert replacement can reconnect miles of viable habitat.

Farther upstream, the Yankee Fork offers a case study in both ecological damage and recovery.

Mid-20th-century gold dredge mining reshaped the river on an industrial scale, removing riparian vegetation, straightening channels, and stripping away the complexity salmon rely on for spawning and rearing. The legacy is still visible today in tailings piles and simplified stream channels.

Restoration efforts led by the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes in partnership with Trout Unlimited are working to reverse that damage. According to project documentation, current work includes reconnecting dredge ponds to the main channel, installing large wood structures, replacing undersized culverts, and replanting riparian vegetation. More than 1,600 feet of side-channel habitat is being reconnected, creating a critical winter refuge for juvenile fish.

The return of spawning activity in newly placed gravel, within weeks, offers early evidence of ecological response.

Much of this activity is funded or coordinated through NOAA Fisheries’ Office of Habitat Conservation

Other federal agencies, including the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Reclamation, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, also play important roles. But NOAA’s habitat programs are widely viewed by practitioners as a key connective layer between Endangered Species Act protections and on-the-ground restoration.

That work depends heavily on access to private land. In parts of Idaho and the broader Columbia Basin, a large share of spawning and rearing habitat lies on private property, making long-term landowner partnerships essential.

Habitat restoration is often framed as a cost. In practice, it functions as a local economic activity.

Culvert replacements, stream reconstruction, and monitoring projects are typically carried out by regional contractors, engineers, and biologists. Studies of restoration economies in the West have found that these projects can generate significant local employment and secondary spending, though estimates of economic “multiplier effects” vary by methodology and region.

At the same time, salmon and steelhead underpin broader economic sectors, such as recreational fishing, guiding, tourism, and commercial fisheries, that depend on sustainable returns. Declining fish populations constrain those economies; recovery expands them.

The scale and continuity of restoration matter.

Habitat work is not a one-off intervention. Culvert replacement, floodplain reconnection, and riparian recovery are interdependent processes that often unfold over years. Funding interruptions can delay projects, increase costs, and, in some cases, reduce effectiveness if partially completed work cannot be maintained.

Current federal budget proposals have raised concerns among conservation groups, tribes, and state agencies about potential reductions in NOAA’s habitat programs. The precise impacts will depend on final appropriations, but practitioners warn that sustained cuts could significantly slow project pipelines across the basin.

Salmon and steelhead recovery in the Snake River Basin remains one of the most complex conservation challenges in the United States. It involves hydropower, treaty rights, water temperature, hatchery policy, and ocean conditions—none of which can be addressed solely through habitat work.

But habitat is the foundation on which everything else depends.

The Chinook salmon spawning in newly restored gravel on the Yankee Fork didn’t respond to policy language or budget line items. They responded to water conditions, temperature, flow, and access, which determine whether survival is possible.

Those conditions don’t happen by accident.

They are built, piece by piece, through the kind of restoration work that rarely makes headlines and often only becomes visible when it stops.

NOAA Fisheries’ full feature on the Yankee Fork and Snake River Basin restoration projects can be found at fisheries.noaa.gov.

Sources

• NOAA Fisheries habitat restoration program materials and project summaries

• Idaho Office of Species Conservation

• Trout Unlimited restoration reports

• Federal ESA listings under the Endangered Species Act

• Economic analyses of habitat restoration impacts

A recent study published in the North American Journal of Fishery Management documents three decades of demographic change in wild winter steelhead in Washington’s Hoh River. Analyzing growth patterns from more than 5,000 steelhead scales, researchers found that life history diversity, the mix of freshwater and ocean ages represented in spawning runs, has declined markedly from 1994 to 2023.

The researchers identified up to 35 unique life histories among Hoh River steelhead, but their diversity, measured by the Shannon Diversity Index, has been shrinking. The primary drivers: fewer repeat spawners (kelts) and fewer older maiden spawners entering the system. This matters because life history diversity is a population’s hedge against environmental uncertainty. Repeat spawners, in particular, are critical for both productivity and genetic diversity. As that diversity narrows, so does the population’s capacity to absorb and adapt to environmental stress.

This finding lands in a grim context. Across the continental United States, several distinct ecological groups of wild steelhead are already extinct. Most remaining populations are listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act, not just at record-low numbers, but also compressed into diminished age structures and distorted, constricted run timing.

So what should a healthy wild steelhead population actually look like?

Look east, to Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. Kamchatkan steelhead exhibit extraordinarily diverse life histories, ranging from two-year-old half-pounders to 11 and 12-year-old multiple-repeat spawners. The result is a spawning population drawing from many year classes simultaneously, with no single year class contributing more than roughly 20% to any given year’s run. That’s resilience made visible.

The study’s conclusion points to one path forward for declining wild steelhead populations: restoring life-history diversity. That means moving beyond our current narrow focus on abundance, escapement numbers, and instead providing sufficient survival across different run types so that natural diversity can re-establish itself: broader age structure, more repeat spawners, and run timing dynamically tuned to individual watersheds.

The researchers also found that annual survival rates for repeat spawners were positively correlated with life-history diversity, further evidence that protecting kelts isn’t a conservation nicety; it’s a demographic necessity.

A management approach capable of recovering wild steelhead must account for all life histories, not just total counts. Fishing regulations, habitat protection, and population assessments should reflect the full life-history composition of each population, not just whether enough fish crossed the line.

That would be true stewardship.

In the cold, tumbling rivers that rush to the sea,

lived the most remarkable fish you ever did see.

Not farmed fish. Not hatchery fish. Not fish raised in tanks.

But WILD ones. REAL ones. Fish worthy of thanks.

They were called Steelhead.

(Though once they were trout.)

They went INTO the ocean

and then they came OUT.

They hatched in the gravel,

in rivers with names

like the Queets and the Hoh

and the Thompson, Skagit, and Sauk

and the Deschutes

and the Dean

and the Skagit

and more —

(There are so many rivers,

My tongue has grown sore.)

They ate little bugs.

They ate nymphs. They ate things.

They grew fins that were spotted

and silvery wings.

Then one day, they noticed

The river ran DOWN.

And something inside them

said:

“GO.

Leave this town.”

So they swam. And they swam.

Past the herons and logs.

Past the bears and the otters

and the people with dogs.

Past the towns and the farms

and the bridges of grey,

till the river turned salty

And they slipped away.

And the OCEAN!

Oh, the ocean was big.

It was cold. It was dark.

It was not a small rig.

There were sharks.

There were nets.

There were ships large as malls.

There were hooks, and there were long lines

and other bad calls.

But the steelhead swam ON

through the cold rolling deep,

gobbling squid and small fishes

and trying to sleep.

For TWO years. For THREE.

(Some fish took FOUR.)

They grew fat in the ocean

then turned toward the shore.

Because something inside them —

a magnet, a map,

a smell-memory-compass-

type-built-in-mishap —

said:

“GO HOME.

Go back.

Find the rock where you hatched.

Find the gravel.

Find the cold.

Find the stream that you matched.”

And so they came BACK.

Up the coast. Up the estuary. Up.

Past the pilings and pull nets

and the occasional pup.

They jumped WATERFALLS!

(Real ones. Big ones. Not small.)

They bashed their noses on boulders

And they didn’t mind at all.

Because of the pull of the river

is a powerful thing,

And wild steelhead don’t stop

in the rain or the spring —

Unless, of course, the river

has a DAM in the way.

Then they stop.

And they mill.

And they cannot proceed

past the wall of concrete

built for someone else’s need.

(That part is not fun.

That part makes us frown.

We should talk about dams.

We should take some of them DOWN.)

But in rivers that run free —

the ones that still try —

The wild fish came home

underneath the grey sky.

The hens dug their redds

in the cold, cobble clean.

The bucks held their lies

in the pool’s cold and green.

And the eggs that they laid

in the dark gravel bed?

Those would hatch into fishes

wild and spotted and fed

on the bugs of the river,

the nymphs and the stone,

and grow up and swim OUT

and then someday come home.

Now, I’ve heard some folks say

that a hatchery fish

is the very same thing,

If you get your wish.

They’ll say: “Fish is a fish.

What’s the big fuss?

Here are millions of fingerlings.

What’s wrong with us?”

But a hatchery fish

is a copy of a copy.

Its instincts are muddy.

Its genetics are sloppy.

It crowds out the wild fish.

It dilutes the old strain.

It’s a Band-Aid on a river

that needs habitat again.

So here is the thing

about wild steelhead, friend:

They are not a product.

They are not a trend.

They are thousands of years old

of selection and rain.

They are glaciers and gravel

and loss and again.

They are gone from the rivers

where once they ran thick.

And the only cure for that

is not a hatchery trick.

It’s clean water.

Cold water.

Free-flowing streams.

It’s pulling out the dams

and letting go of old schemes.

It’s habitat.

Habitat.

HABITAT.

(Times three.)

It’s the kind of world

where a wild fish

can still be

free.