The Rivers of the Quillayute Valley: Steelhead and Salmon

The rivers that meet at Forks, the Sol Duc, the Bogachiel, the Calawah, and the Quillayute they form together, are among the finest wild steelhead rivers in the Pacific Northwest. The steelhead is a rainbow trout that spends part of its life in the ocean and returns to the freshwater rivers where it was born to spawn, following the same watercourses its ancestors followed for thousands of years. The rivers of the Quillayute system carry both wild steelhead and wild chinook, coho, and sockeye salmon, among other runs in seasonal runs that have supported the Quileute and Hoh tribes under treaty rights negotiated in the eighteen fifties and reaffirmed by federal courts in the nineteen seventies.

Sport anglers travel from across the country to Forks for steelhead fishing, particularly in winter when the native winter-run fish are moving. The rivers are short and cold and clear, dropping off the Olympic Mountains quickly and carrying water from some of the most pristine watersheds remaining in the lower forty-eight states. The condition of the rivers reflects the condition of the forests above them. Old-growth forests absorb and slowly release rainfall, moderate the extremes of flood and drought, keep the water cold, and provide the fallen logs that create the pools and gravel beds where salmon and steelhead spawn.

The protection of Olympic National Park upstream has preserved headwaters in a condition that supports wild fish runs that have disappeared from most other rivers in the Northwest. Forks sits at the downstream end of that protection, in a river landscape that is, by Pacific Northwest standards, more or less intact.