The Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe wants to know what struggles spring chinook salmon face during the journey to their spawning grounds in the Dungeness River watershed, especially during ever increasing drought and low flow conditions.
“Where are the fish in the river during the run? When do they move upstream to spawning grounds? And how might that be different between fish that enter the river early in the summer and fish that arrive in August?” said Chandra Johnson, the tribe’s GIS analyst.
The tribe is mapping fish migration patterns using factors such as size, sex, streamflow, water temperature and where they end up spawning.
The tribe tagged 50 adult chinook salmon in the river between July and August to collect data. Chinook return to the river from the end of June to mid-August, spawning from mid-July to October.
The tagged fish were caught 1 mile upstream from the mouth of the river. When a fish swims by one of 24 receivers throughout the river, the tags record data such as tag ID number, time of day and water temperature.
When rivers have lower than normal flow, especially in summer months when fish are returning to spawn, water temperatures rise.
“And when the water is warm, the fish are just more sluggish, don’t feel well, are more prone to infections,” Johnson said. “Salmon experience heat stress just like we do.”
The Dungeness River, once supplied by glacial and snow melt, has become a rain-driven system because of climate change and reduced snowpack in the Olympic Mountains, contributing to degraded water quality. In the 1980s, many salmon habitat projects removed wood from rivers, which is critical for salmon habitat and proper river hydrology. The addition of levees and dikes, water withdrawals for irrigation, and straightening river channels created poor salmon spawning habitat, further contributing to salmon decline.
“This is a better snow year than a lot of recent years, but we’re only at 85% of normal snowpack,” Johnson said. “The snowpack in the last four years has been really low, which means we’re becoming accustomed to seeing very low stream-flows. The amount of water in the Dungeness this year feels abundant, even though it’s still less than a ‘normal’ year.”
Low flows in the Dungeness have been a problem for fish in recent years, especially during the 2015 summer drought. After noticing fish struggling to get past shallow riffles in the river, the tribe started working on fish passage projects.
“Yet we still see fish struggling to get upstream,” said Chris Burns, a Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe natural resources technician. “They pool up in the lower river and wait for water. They just kind of hang there until the first rains come in the fall. We suspect run timing has been altered over several generations causing chinook to show up later in the summer when flows are very low.”
The quality of the salmon habitat within the 28-mile-long Dungeness River varies, with poor habitat in the lower few miles of the river and some of the best spawning habitat in river miles 3-6 because of the tribe’s extensive habitat restoration in those areas. As a result, the tribe has seen high density spawning distribution for all species of salmonids in that area, when salmon are able to access it.
“The further up they go towards the national forest, the better the spawning grounds, and the colder the water, and the more reliable the water flow is throughout the summer,” Johnson said. “So the further up the river we can get the fish, the better.”
Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe staff collect a sampling of adult chinook from the Dungeness River in August 2025. Story and photos: Tiffany Royal
