“Pend Oreille Lake is widely noted for the excellent sports fishery it now affords. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service states that regulation as proposed by Albeni Falls Dam will improve the sports fishery in both by stabilizing the elevations of the lake and river. The project will have little effect, either beneficial or harmful, on the wildlife resources of the area.”
From “Albeni Falls Project, Discussion of Local Problem,” U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 1950.
Despite the early optimism of the Army Corps, kokanee began to decline soon after Albeni Falls dam was completed. A 1954 study concluded that Albeni Falls dam already had produced adverse effects on kokanee spawning. In the fall, the small fish laid their eggs on lake shores, leaving them vulnerable to drying out when the lake level was drawn down.
The drop was gradual, however. Until the mid-1960s, when the annual catch dropped below one million fish for the first time, Harlan Walker remembered, “The pattern of their migration or movement in the lake began to change. Instead of catching them in February down around Bayview, for instance, then they would be further up the lake, I’d say Maiden Rock to Talache. And then they become fewer and fewer and harder to catch.” In 1973, the U.S. Fish and Game ended commercial fishing on Lake Pend Oreille and lowered sport limits. Starting in 1996, the winter lake level was held several feet higher in an attempt to help the kokanee fishery recover.
Graph of Kokanee decline in Lake Pend Oreille
