Friends of Butte Creek are featured the 2026 fall newsletter for the Sierra Club Blue Oak Group!
Read all about Butte Creek Chinook salmon populations over the past few years from our executive director, Allen Harthorn.
Excerpt from the Newsletter:
Butte Creek Salmon
By Allen Harthorn, Friends of Butte Creek, Fall 2026
It has been quite the up and down situation for Butte Creek salmon over the last five years. We had a record run, 21,500 wild chinook salmon in 2021, however we saw 92% of the population die before spawning due to exacerbated water temperatures. There were extremely low runs in both 2023 and 2024 coincidental with lower runs in the Sacramento and Feather River, and a closed ocean and river fishing season. However, we had good runs in 2022 and as the cycle goes, again in 2025, mostly three-year-old fish in the cohort of 6,500 salmon. Surprisingly, in 2026, we had an extraordinary percentage of fouryear-old fish and a run likely exceeding 5,000 fish, return to Butte Creek.
The high number of 4-year old fish is most likely the result of a closed ocean and river fishing season. This will be the second year in a row with over 5000 returning adults. Both last year and this year we have had pretty good summer holding conditions, flow, and temperature wise, and we can only hope that this trend will continue.
The bottom line is that Butte Creek has the tremendous capability of bouncing back from adversity on its own without a hatchery. These are wild fish living in a wild canyon, we need to do everything we can to protect it, make it better, and more accessible. There is lots of cold water habitat upstream. We need to take advantage of it by removing the two deadbeat PG&E dams. Thank you all for your support