Fishing has resumed in most of the state following Gov. Jay Inslee’s adjustment to his Stay Home – Stay Healthy orders. Fishing has not opened up all the way on the Colville Indian Reservation, however, as the Colville Tribes is keeping it closed to non-members until May 29.
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The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife has produced another excellent, short video on fishing Lake Roosevelt, this on one shore fishing in the winter.
Filmed in January, the video includes several tips and how-to advice on fishing the lake, which is stocked with 750,000 rainbow trout a year.
Rather fish from your boat? Check out the latest boat ramp and lake level information.
If you’d like to glimpse the inside story of one aspect of the mission of Grand Coulee Dam, this is a good video.
The dam was originally conceived to provide irrigation to more than a million acres of potential farmland in the Columbia basin, but these days most people think of it as a huge electricity producer.
It is that, but this video, produced by the Bureau of Reclamation as a tool to help potential recruits, also provides a good overview of the basics with some spectacular footage. Watching it will help you appreciate what you see when you visit in person.
Grand Coulee Dam is the largest electrical production facility of any kind, in terms of capacity, in North America. But it doesn’t just happen magically. These folks make it happen. Watch:
Between a renewed push for re-introducing salmon to the Columbia River above Grand Coulee Dam and a newly developing technology, a consortium of tribes is hopeful that somehow, there will be a way to bring salmon back.
The icon of the Pacific Northwest has been gone from the upper reaches of the Columbia since the building of Grand Coulee Dam. Now they’re actually stopped at Chief Joseph Dam, more than 50 miles downriver.
But a treaty may open for negotiations between the United States and Canada that dictates exchanges of water and electricity and infrastructure provided. And the Upper Columbia United Tribes is hopeful, along with the Colville Confederated Tribes, that a way for cheap transport may have been discovered by company touting its “salmon canon.” Picture a kinder, gentler form of the same kind of suction tube that takes your deposit at a drive-up bank.
Whooshh Innovations, of Bellevue, Washington, has more information about adapting their fruit moving technology, to help solve the problem of letting fish move upstream. Below is a video that demonstrates the innovation. The company has lots more on its website, which was even recently featured in a segment on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
Although a way may be found to move salmon upstream over huge dams, that may actually be the easier part of the problem to solve. After hatching, the young salmon have to get back to the ocean. They only swim upstream, so they have to be pushed by a considerable current, which is not present in Lake Roosevelt above Grand Coulee Dam.
But the salmon canon idea is still fun to watch:
Image of a chinook salmon by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service used under Creative Commons license.
Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) staff will be working to capture bighorn sheep from the Lincoln Cliffs herd in northern Lincoln County on Tuesday, Feb. 10, weather permitting, with a helicopter contractor.
One of the less well-known features of the area is that these big game animals live near Lake Roosevelt in the cliffs of the Lincoln area, north of Creston.
Up to 20 bighorn sheep will be ear-tagged and nine equipped with GPS tracking collars, then released so biologists can better monitor their movements, productivity, and survival, wildlife biologist Carrie Lowe said.
The sheep will be captured with nets shot from the helicopter, then moved to a staging area for handling by a ground crew. Information about each captured animal, including sex, age, and condition, plus blood samples for tracking disease, will be taken before release.
Lowe notes that the department is in the process of securing permission to access private land in the Lincoln and Whitestone Rock areas near the Lake Roosevelt shoreline for the work.
Top image: Bighorn on the shores of Lake Roosevelt. Photo by Beth Goetz
