By Pat Ford
June 16, 2026
The Middle Fork Salmon River has strong claim to be the heart of Idaho. To the extent Idaho’s shape allows, the Middle Fork Salmon is its geographic heart.
It is a working river for Idahoans: for a ring of mountain towns – Salmon, Challis, Stanley, Cascade, McCall, Riggins (not to forget Clayton, North Fork, Yellowpine, Lucile, Whitebird …); for Indigenous people renewing traditional use and presence on its lands and waters; and through long family and livelihood ties south to the Snake Plain and north to Clearwater country.
The Middle Fork is the largest wild watershed in the Northwest. And thus a magnet for we who live near – and for visitors from everywhere: 2,812 square miles, 1.8 million acres, an abiding joy to visit, and then again.
Over, under and around our human use, the Middle Fork Salmon River is its own place – rather places, hundreds of them, connected by water. It is mountain steep and rugged, with meadows and lakes interspersed. Alive with water in all forms, including saltwater in salmon form.
There are next to no roads, and nearly all is public land. Forty-five years ago, by the efforts of many Idahoans, the U.S. Congress designated 95% of the watershed as Wilderness, where woman and man are visitors who do not remain.
The Middle Fork hosts heavy human use and certainly human impact. It also breathes without us, wielding natural freedoms that few large areas in earth’s temperate zones still can.
Idahoans can be proud this swath of Creation is the heart of our state. Recognizing it so is also a humble act, and healthy.
The human footprint in this watershed is old, and influential. But the Middle Fork is inarguably its own, authority independent of us, very old and ever new.
The Middle Fork Salmon River within the Columbia River Basin. The dots are federal dams on the Columbia (black) and lower Snake (red) rivers. (Map courtesy of Russ Thurow and the Nez Perce Tribe’s Salmon Orca Project)
(The Middle Fork Salmon River is the official name, but regular visitors often use shorthand: the Middle Fork Salmon, or just the Middle Fork. I will use all three, as will those I quote.)
The Middle Fork Salmon is a mountain river, 7,000 feet at its headwaters in Bear Valley and Marsh creeks. The river they form then descends nearly 4,000 feet in 105 miles to the Main Salmon River. This descent hosts the Middle Fork’s heaviest human use – boating adventures and night camps, guided and private, in the wild river canyon.
Fishers, hunters, hikers and horse packers; tribal members and staff; pilots, some scientists and managers, and staff and guests at a few private lodges comprise its other human visitors.
In this domain of wild animals, the signature creatures are Chinook salmon, which name the river, and steelhead trout. Both bring the Pacific Ocean to Idaho’s heart. They have done so for many thousand years, nourishment borne ceaselessly up from the sea, bringing life by the ton into high, stony lands of long winter.
In the 48 states, the Middle Fork Salmon’s watershed stands alone. It holds more high, wild, cold, healthy, vast, connected and protected salmon habitat than anywhere in our country outside Alaska.
Its salmon and steelhead, with those in the neighboring Sawtooth Valley, are the highest climbing and farthest inland group of their sea-going kind on earth. Middle Fork salmon and steelhead are wild; no hatcheries here. The Middle Fork is by far the largest wild watershed with all-wild salmon in the 48 states.
Geographer Kyle Dittmer calls Idaho’s high habitat “Noah’s Ark for Salmon.” Biologist Russ Thurow, who may know Middle Fork salmon better than anyone, calls the fish and their Middle Fork habitats “the best of the best” – because the fish are wild, locally adapted, with diverse genetics and life histories shaped by eons of natural selection, and because the Middle Fork is the largest salmon watershed in the United States outside Alaska, laced with hundreds of miles of exceptional, high-functioning spawning and rearing habitats.
The Middle Fork and its salmon cannot be separated. They have formed each other in exchanges through seasons and centuries. Salmon born and reared in the river go to sea small, grow big, and bring that marine nutrition home.
In later installments of this story, people who know the Middle Fork and its salmon, and people who want these fish alive in their Idaho-to-come, will speak.
The Middle Fork Salmon populations are in pink and within a bolded black line. (Map courtesy of Evan Brown/Idaho Fish and Game Department)
Here I begin with some grim facts and ask you to look them in the face. The death of birth, extinction, is near for the eight salmon and two steelhead populations of the Middle Fork Salmon River. In 15 to 20 years, within our lifetimes, before your children reach your age now, the Middle Fork Salmon could be salmon-less.
The genius in salmon to persist and thrive through change means this heart attack is still treatable. Middle Fork salmon can still restore themselves, if we choose to again share with them their migratory rivers. Or we can choose not to. We cannot hand the choice off to times or people to come.
The history of salmon returning from the Pacific Ocean to the Middle Fork Salmon River
No net of facts or numbers can capture salmon. But I will use a few numbers and charts, past and present, to frame their condition in the Middle Fork. Pardon if I stuff too much in, as I tinker with how to present disturbing information.
I rely on Russ Thurow’s research, and on data gathered and developed by Jay Hesse and Ryan Kinzer, scientists in the Nez Perce Tribe’s Fisheries Division. Their names will recur, and links to their work are below.
In 2025, just 1,368 wild Chinook salmon are estimated to have returned from the Pacific Ocean to the Middle Fork Salmon River. For the last three years, 2023-25, an average 811 Chinook returned. They came 700 to 900 miles in, and 4,000 to 6,800 feet up, from the sea.
Salmon ancestry in the Salmon River goes back two million years, sometimes broken by glacial disruptions. These most recent fish continue post-glacial salmon lineages that have made home in the lower Middle Fork for 16,000 continuous years, and 10,000 years in the upper river.
Assuming an even sex ratio, to reproduce in 2025 one Middle Fork female Chinook had to encounter one of 684 males, in 570 total miles of salmon spawning habitat. That is one female salmon per every .85 miles of habitat. For the last three years, 2023-25, the average is worse: one female per 1.4 miles of Chinook spawning habitat.
An estimated 325 wild steelhead trout returned to the Middle Fork in 2025. One steelhead female had to encounter one of 163 males in 929 miles of habitat. One female steelhead per every six miles of habitat needs little explanation as an extinction indicator.
One female salmon per every 1.4 miles of reproductive habitat may seem less alarming. But for a species whose health, and contributions to the Middle Fork’s health, derive from abundance, it is, says Russ Thurow, “frightening.”
I describe the Middle Fork’s salmon and steelhead populations more fully below, but some population data here can take us a step deeper into frightening. I focus on females because they carry and deposit the eggs. I assume an equal sex ratio for returning fish, and average the last three years of returns, 2023-25.
Spawning and rearing habitat mileage is known for each Middle Fork salmon and steelhead population. The best ratio of female salmon returns to habitat miles for those recent three years is in the Marsh Creek population: 2.3 salmon returned per mile of identified spawning habitat. The other seven populations have female-per-habitat-mile ratios, in descending order, of 1.2, 1.1, 0.6, 0.5, 0.25, 0.2, and 0.
With some variation, Chinook are now close to invisible across their Middle Fork habitats. Invisible to our eyes and senses, invisible as marine providers.
“What does salmon extinction look like?” Russ Thurow asks in his excellent status-and-causes presentation on Middle Fork Chinook salmon (see link below). “In the Middle Fork, it looks like mile after mile after mile of exceptional salmon or steelhead habitat, without any salmon or steelhead.”
The 1950s and early 1960s, one lifetime ago, offer a contrast.
Scientists Russ Thurow, Tim Copeland and Bryce Oldemeyer have used the partial redd (spawning nest) counts available from those years, 35 recent years of complete redd counts for the entire watershed, and rigorous mathematics to estimate the Middle Fork’s salmon presence 70 years ago.
They estimate 24,000 redds, or at least 48,000 adult salmon, annually filled the river and its tributaries in the 1950s and early ’60s. If those fish averaged 20 pounds, salmon brought close to one million pounds of concentrated Pacific Ocean up to the Middle Fork each year, which then spread out to every creek and most every creature.
About 48,000 salmon feels in the ballpark to Bill Platts, a pioneering river scientist who is now 98. As a boy in the 1930s, Platts bucked himself along Bear Valley Creek’s overhung banks, kicking sheltering salmon out where the grown-ups could catch them.
He fished the Middle Fork from the late 1930s through the 1960s and helped count its salmon redds in the 1950s. The overpowering smell of salmon carcasses lining miles of Marsh Creek after spawning is with him still. “There were very large numbers of salmon in the Middle Fork in the 1950s. And even more in the 1930s and ’40s.”
From 48,000 or so Chinook 65 years ago to 1,368 in 2025, 675 in 2024, and 468 in 2023. Middle Fork salmon, and steelhead, annually return at 2% or less of their abundance one lifetime ago.
Can we recover a tangible feel for the salmon productivity the Middle Fork’s wild habitats had then, and retain today? Imagine 48,000 big salmon coming up the river each summer, spreading through tributaries to spawn, then leaving their bodies to their homes and offspring.
Imagine boating that river. Imagine the surge and sound, the fishing, the feast for fish, beasts, insects, willows, forests, and people. Imagine, as best you can, 10,000 years of it.
My purpose is not nostalgic. The 65-year plunge of Idaho’s salmon to nearly nothing leaves most Idahoans with no first-hand physical or heart relations with the wild creatures for whom the heart of our state is named.
While describing the extinctions underway in the Middle Fork, I also want to stretch our imaginations and ambitions out, toward a gift Idahoans enjoyed one lifetime ago: the riches that come when salmon fill the Salmon River.
The 1950s version of those riches will not return. But a 2040s version of recovery will be gift enough. It will point the long close relations of salmon, the Middle Fork Salmon River, and people in the only right direction: forward.
Looking for patterns among the salmon population
Now back to more recent years, at a finer grain.
The first chart shows you the steady plunge of Middle Fork salmon from the mid-1960s to 2025. This chart is full of stories, including a few that offer hope. Watch Mr. Thurow’s webinar for that. For now, just observe the obvious trend: a 98% decline over that period, correlated with a doubling (four to eight) of downstream dams.
Middle Fork Salmon River Chinook Returns, 1950s to present. (Graph courtesy of Russ Thurow and the Nez Perce Tribe’s Salmon Orca Project)
The second chart shows the last 11 years’ estimates of returning fish, for each of the Middle Fork’s eight populations of Chinook salmon and two populations of steelhead trout.
All of them have been listed under the Endangered Species Act since 1993.
Recent Middle Fork Salmon River salmon and steelhead returns, by population. (Data from Jay Hesse and Ryan Kinzer, Nez Perce Tribe fisheries scientists. Text calculations using the data are Pat Ford’s. courtesy of Nez Perce Tribe Department of Fisheries Resources.)
Look for the patterns. For the last nine years, 2017 to 2025, returns in two digits dominate. Six of the eight populations are terminally low. Three are never over 100 fish in the last nine years, Sulphur Creek is over 100 just once, and Camas and Big Creek only twice.
You don’t need science degrees to know that populations of 99 fish or fewer, repeating nearly every year in many miles of exceptional habitat, are near extinction – or already over the edge. In the last four years, zero salmon have returned to the Lower Mainstem population, whose home was the main Middle Fork below Indian Creek.
The few three digit returns that remain concentrate in Bear Valley and Marsh creeks. More rivers than creeks, they join to form the Middle Fork Salmon itself.
Both possess miles of winding meadow habitats, ideal for salmon and steelhead spawning. Tributaries, braids and sloughs that lace the meadows are ideal rearing habitat – neighborhoods where hatched salmon can spend their first year-plus sheltering, feeding, and growing capable for the big rivers and ocean which await.
I recommend the habit of walking these meadows. Keep at it, and you can begin to imagine 5,000 or 10,000 salmon returning to each of the creeks, digging thousands of redds and filling them with eggs, then spreading their tons of ocean through meadows, uplands, forests and creatures.
You get a feel how un-filling today’s salmon returns to Marsh and Bear Valley Creeks are, scattered dots in the habitats surrounding you. In spawning season, rarely and memorably, you may from time to time see a salmon or two.
Quasi-extinction threshold ‘represents tipping points for population collapse’
As salmon numbers dwindle, the science and law of salmon extinction accelerates. Research underway since 2020 in the Nez Perce Tribe’s Fisheries Division has quickly become influential.
Scientists Jay Hesse and Ryan Kinzer are annually applying a federal measure, called “quasi-extinction threshold,” to Snake River populations, including those in the Middle Fork Salmon. The threshold is 50 or fewer returning salmon in a population for four or more straight years.
NOAA Fisheries, the lead federal agency for salmon recovery, says the threshold “represents tipping points for population collapse, where the actual extinction potential may not be predictable or, in some cases, avoidable …The result can be an extinction vortex.” Think of water when it tips from sink to drain.
Hesse and Kinzer’s research has documented dire conditions for Snake River populations through the lens of this federal measure.
U.S. District Court Judge Michael Simon cited their work in his recent verdict that found salmon are “disappearing from the landscape.” In response the court ordered a longer period of safe salmon spill over federal dams this spring and summer.
If not reversed on appeal, the good result is that most ocean-bound Idaho salmon and steelhead this year will not be forced to migrate the malignant non-habitat they encounter inside the powerhouses of dams.
The extinction threshold is a demanding, sometimes confusing, standard. For example, variations in annual salmon numbers caused by weather and ocean cycles can raise a population above the 50 fish threshold in one year.
Then, by definition, the population can’t be deemed to violate the threshold (below 50 fish four consecutive years) for at least four years, even if actual counts below 50 resume immediately. Extinction risk to the population has in no way been reduced, but a federal measure of it changes.
Such arbitrary outcomes are built in when any single number is posited as a surrogate for or last gasp signal of salmon extinction, as NOAA Fisheries’ science team did.
Nevertheless, Hesse and Kinzer’s quasi-extinction threshold analysis delivers an unambiguous verdict of deep peril for salmon. As Mr. Hesse said in his declaration to the U.S. District Court, “When the discussion becomes one of labeling populations as either “functionally” or “quasi” extinct, there should be no question about the need for urgent actions to hang on to the remaining populations and avoid any further generational declines.”
My first take-home from extinction threshold science is to recognize what it means that it is taking place at all. It signifies that decades of prior effort and expense have failed. And that scientists and managers must now try to temporarily plug up extinction’s active course in nearly every Salmon and Clearwater River population, because the fish are at or near their end.
Whether the population is 49, 99, or 199 fish, this is daunting if not impossible. Managing extinction, rather than managing our way out of extinction, will continue to be a constant temptation.
Second, the Nez Perce’s extinction threshold work connects diagnosis of dire conditions with policy decisions those conditions force. What emergency measures, if any, are possible, sensible or affordable to try staving extinction off for multiple populations for a few more years?
Answers in the Middle Fork, whose salmon are all wild and spread across wilderness, will be uniquely thorny. I will explore this in a later installment.
Third, Hesse and Kinzer’s assembly and production of data about Snake River salmon and steelhead, and their extinction trajectories at the population level, is invaluable in trying to tell home stories of the Middle Fork’s extinctions in progress. I recommend it for that storytelling purpose. I have used it extensively above.
Fourth, their work has earned scientific and legal weight, which makes it one of few immediate levers against aggressively anti-salmon federal policies.
NOAA Fisheries created the extinction threshold standard, but had never applied it in policy. The Nez Perce Tribe and state of Oregon are applying it, in court, with success that will improve salmon survival. Bravo to them. (A link to Hesse and Kinzer’s work is provided below.)
A place-based watershed identity and community populations
I have talked of salmon populations without defining the term. For me, it’s an indicator of homes.
In 1939, pioneering salmon investigator Willis Rich wrote: “By population I mean an effectively isolated, self-perpetuating group of organisms of the same species …” Rich and others found that wild salmon return from sea to spawn in the stream where they were born. He and others thus deduced that salmon species are built of many local populations, each with a place-based watershed identity.
Much research since has confirmed genetic, behavioral, and life history differences between populations. These differences are not static; evolution is always ongoing.
Scientists have designated eight Middle Fork Chinook salmon populations: Bear Valley Creek, Marsh Creek, Sulphur Creek, Camas Creek, Loon Creek, Big Creek, Upper Middle Fork, and Lower Middle Fork. Each is in a large watershed of its own within the encompassing Middle Fork.
The Bear Valley salmon population, for example, is born and rears only in the meadows of Bear Valley Creek and its tributary Elk Creek. The population has been continuously settled there, continuously adapting, for 10,000 years. Bear Valley is their home.
Indigenous people often call salmon the Salmon People. With that perspective, I think we better understand.
Salmon populations are communities. Like Salmon, Challis, Stanley or McCall, I can find them on a map, as do the salmon homing to them. Each population has long history in a longtime home.
Their homes cluster in spawning beds where flow and channel conditions produce riffles whose gravels can hold over-wintering eggs while streaming them oxygen. Around the homes are neighborhoods, in tributaries where the hatched fish feed, shelter and grow for a year or two before going to sea. The chemical stamp of this natal habitat will call those that survive back to it.
The five Chinook Julia Page and I saw last year in Marsh Creek, at the Middle Fork’s headwaters, and a Chinook 70 miles downstream in its Camas Creek tributary, are the same species. But granularly, they are detectably different – genetically, behaviorally, by life history. The internal mapping of salmon populations, which make hemispheric journeys, to the particular gravels, waters, weathers and rhythms of their home stream is wondrous.
In the 1950s, healthy diverse Middle Fork salmon communities armed each other for productivity and buffered each other against harm. Today, all are stuck in decades of downward trend, and the fabric of their whole is unraveling.
People often track Columbia and Snake River salmon by dam counts, the number that reach this or that dam.
These counts have some management value, but they also mislead. They propagate a widget-like, all-the-same view of salmon. They do not tell us of salmon and steelhead in their communities.
A dam count does not reveal that last year, zero salmon made homes in the lower Middle Fork Salmon River.
For Middle Fork Chinook salmon, extinction is very near, but it’s not inevitable
At the moment, two facts co-exist uneasily. Extinction of Middle Fork Chinook salmon is just a few years away.
Russ Thurow’s educated guess, based on current conditions, is around three salmon generations, about 15 years ahead. I’ve heard other scientists estimate 20 years. Others will not offer a specific number. All agree extinction is very near.
Second, extinction of Middle Fork salmon is not yet biologically inevitable. Watch Thurow’s presentation for evidence, and listen to geneticist Dr. Helen Neville of Trout Unlimited for more.
They and others have confirmed that genetic and life history capacities for recovery still exist within these resilient best fish, born of best habitats. Faith in nature, in the wild Middle Fork and its wild salmon, is still warranted.
Extinction is near. Extinction is not inevitable. The choice is ours, and is now.
I have stuffed a lot of bad news into these pages. For the heart of Idaho, it is deeply consequential news.
Middle Fork outfitter Steve Zettel, from Challis, foresees the future we are about to leave his children and ours in the Salmon River: “Welcome to the Salmon-less River!”
Additional thoughts and resources
Postscript: This is part one of a story on the looming extinction of Chinook salmon in the Middle Fork Salmon River. Part two will focus on Middle Fork outfitters and guides, for whom extinction is professional, personal and cultural. Look for it in a month or so.
Here is a link to biologist Russ Thurow’s May 2024 presentation on Middle Fork salmon: their condition, the causes, and the capability of self-recovery these salmon still contain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhaXzrd6wk0
And a link to the Thurow, Copeland and Oldemeyer paper estimating 1950s salmon abundance in the Middle Fork Salmon River: https://doi.org/10.1139/cjfas-2019-0111
For the Nez Perce Tribe Fisheries Division’s quasi-extinction work, see https://ryankinzer.github.io/SRAFS This is a source of data; there is no narrative tying the data together. For that, see this August 2024 presentation by Jay Hesse, in which he describes the research and its tribal context: https://youtu.be/jOienpLHKqc. Its numbers will be partially outdated; the explanation and overview are not.
I am grateful to these three busy men for long conversations, information, and review. While relying extensively on their work, I am responsible for any errors.
