Hi everyone, this is the Upper Salmon River steelhead fishing report for March 12, 2024. The data included in this report was collected between Monday, March 4 and Sunday, March 10, 2024.

As a reminder to those who may not have heard yet, the spring 2024 steelhead fishery began much earlier than average with the Deadwater ice jam going out on February 7. This has resulted in many steelhead already progressing upriver and catch rates have been good in most areas for over a month now.

Angler effort continued to increase in the upstream areas last week, but the area with the highest amount of observed angler effort continued to be found upstream of the Middle Fork Salmon River in location code 15. Angler effort near the towns of Salmon and Challis also increased considerably over the weekend as people got out to enjoy the nice weather.

We continued to see good to excellent steelhead catch rates in all areas of the Upper Salmon River last week. Anglers interviewed upstream of the Middle Fork Salmon River in location code 15 averaged 11 hours per steelhead caught, and anglers interviewed upstream of North Fork in location code 16 averaged 15 hours per steelhead caught. Anglers interviewed upstream of the Lemhi River in location code 17 averaged 12 hours per steelhead caught, and the best catch rates for the week were observed upstream of the Pahsimeroi River in location code 18 where interviewed anglers averaged 7 hours per steelhead caught. Due to very cold overnight lows, angler effort upstream of the East Fork in location code 19 was limited mostly to the afternoon hours last week, but despite the cold, anglers interviewed in location code 19 were catching steelhead and averaged 13 hours per steelhead caught. Few interviews were obtained from anglers downstream of the Middle Fork Salmon River in location code 14, and anglers interviewed within that area averaged 9 hours per steelhead caught.

River conditions were once again great in most areas throughout the week. As mentioned above, morning ice flows did impact fishing upstream of Challis, but this was less of an issue by the weekend as warmer weather settled in. The river’s visibility remained clear in all areas, and on Sunday afternoon, river temperatures ranged from the mid-30s to the low-40s, depending on the area (see figure below). Currently, the Salmon River is flowing at 1,110 cfs through the town of Salmon, ID which is 101 percent of average for today’s date. With the forecast calling for the warmer weather to continue into next week, it is likely that the downstream areas of the Upper Salmon River will start to see springtime conditions soon with some decreased visibility and increased flow.

As of Monday, March 11, the Pahsimeroi Hatchery has trapped 88 hatchery steelhead. The Sawtooth Hatchery has not started to trap steelhead, but we will include those numbers in future reports once they are available. Anglers can also check for updated trap numbers themselves by following this link to the IDFG steelhead returns webpage.

In last week’s report, we provided instructions for how to use PTAGIS to look up PIT tag detections of adult steelhead at the mainstem Salmon River array located 11 miles upstream of Salmon, ID. We also provided a figure showing the number of detections through March 4. Below is an update to that figure that shows another 12 PIT tags were detected during the past week.