Return of a Chinook Salmon to Rapid River

We've been doing semi-regular updates on Chinook Salmon counts as they migrate up the Columbia River, but we've been loosely predicting the time they take to travel. This posts goes a little more in depth on a few example fish, identified by their unique PIT tag ids.

First, here's the history for fish 3DD.00779B53AF (Chinook Salmon):

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Next, here's the history for fish 3DD.00778FFE4D (Chinook Salmon):

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In the sites above, RAPH is the Rapid River Hatchery, BO(#) is Bonneville Dam, TD(#) is The Dalles Dam, JO(#) is John Day Dam, MC(#) is McNary Dam, ICH is Ice Harbor Dam, GOA is Little Goose Dam, and GRA is Lower Granite Dam. The miles traveled and locations are as listed in our original post.

We can observe these two fish traveling at about 30-50 miles per day. Although this is a very small sample size, we're currently splitting the difference and deciding the fish are traveling at about 40 miles per day.

From GRA, the fish have about another 120 river miles to go. Based our our earliest observations of fish showing up at GRA from 5/9 - 5/21 bound for their home at RAPH, we're estimating 4-5 day travel times for them. They should be showing up from 5/13, and continue to show up.

Colby Blair