“Bag-o’-rocks!” Rick hollered, as he braced waist deep in the swift current of the Deschutes River. “Got it!” Brian answered on the walkie-talkie as he operated a surveyor’s transit. Rick set a bag filled with rocks on the bottom of the river to mark the point, waded back to shore and scrambled up the bank through the poison oak and wild rose thorns, keeping an eye out for rattlesnakes.

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Today the Oregon Dept. of Environmental Quality and Warm Springs Tribal Water Control Board, in response to an Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife request, instructed PGE to increase the amount of cool water to be released down the Deschutes River through the remainder of August.

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We may have inadvertently created some confusion about what our lower Deschutes River temperature management program is attempting to achieve. I, like others, have referred to the program as returning the temperature cycle for the river back to what it was before Round Butte Dam’s construction in 1964. Technically, this is a misstatement of the standard we are trying to achieve. In both water quality certificates granted by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality and Tribal Water and Soils, the standard we’re required to meet is to discharge temperatures at or below “Natural Thermal Potential.” Read the rest of this entry.

Last week, in consultation with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality and Warm Spring Tribal Natural Resources, PGE was granted flexibility to adjust the outflow schedule this year, if needed, to keep discharge temperatures below natural thermal potential.

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This spring, I had the great fortune to watch native summer steelhead spawning on a gravel bar in Trout Creek, a tributary of the Deschutes River. The scene was at Trout Creek Ranch, a 3,000-acre property purchased by Portland General Electric in 1999 for fish and wildlife habitat mitigation.

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July 1 marked the beginning of a new era of managing temperatures on the lower Deschutes. Hydro operators adjusted some controls on the new Round Butte Selective Water Withdrawal Tower (SWW) and the lower Deschutes River grew cooler. They had begun mixing the cold, deep water in Lake Billy Chinook with warmer water on the surface.

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In April 2008, I wrote about tagging fish with tiny chips and placing downstream fish traps on rivers and streams feeding Lake Billy Chinook for future fish migration studies. Well, the future is now.

PGE’s Megan Hill and her fisheries studies crew have been extremely busy keeping the six downstream-migrant fish traps operating on the Metolius, Deschutes and Crooked rivers and tributary streams feeding Lake Billy Chinook.

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We have now captured over 100,000 fish at the new downstream fish facility at Round Butte Dam. The numbers of salmon smolts (juvenile salmon migrating to the ocean) entering the new fish facilities increased dramatically during March and April, with several days when more than 7,000 salmon and steelhead were caught. The fish passage crew worked overtime to get them sorted, marked, transported to the lower Deschutes River and released safely to continue their journey to the Pacific.

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It all seems surreal. I’ve been a biologist at the Pelton Round Butte Project since 1971. That was only a few years after we learned that the original downstream fish passage system was unworkable because fish couldn’t find the outlet. The fact that we have completed the new selective water withdrawal intake and downstream fish facility at Round Butte Dam – and are passing salmon smolts downstream – is amazing!

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Work on the underwater tower and fish collection facility was substantially completed Dec. 3, after PGE made the final connections between major tower components, and fish have begun entering the system.

The first major migration of fish is not expected until February, but dozens of juvenile fish have already followed currents created by the tower and have been transported downstream by PGE biologists.The tower is now undergoing testing, which is expected to continue until mid-January. Read the rest of this entry.