Snake River rescue: 2,000 fish stranded below Jackson Lake Dam, down from 7,000

The fall drawdown below Jackson Lake Dam stranded fish again, and the count is smaller than last year’s. KHOL reported Oct. 16, 2026, that Wyoming Game and Fish biologist Diana Miller’s crew, working with Trout Unlimited and the Snake River Fund, electrofished isolated side-channel pools and carried fish back to the main stem. In the pools they checked, Miller counted 2,000 stranded fish, against 7,000 in the same pools last year.

The Bureau of Reclamation sets the ramp-down. KHOL says the plan had been a slow drop from roughly 5,000 cubic feet per second through much of the summer toward fall flows of 280 cubic feet per second. Game and Fish and Trout Unlimited had asked for a gradual ramp so fish could get back to the main channel. The bureau changed that plan the week it met with senior water-rights holders. This year’s drawdown was still longer than last year’s, but it started from higher summer releases, so more fish had been using the side channels. In mid-October the reservoir was about 8 percent full. Bureau chief engineer Brian Stevens told KHOL in August that a normal draft, with enough runoff, would leave the lake about 76 percent full going into winter, and that this year the range would be 1 to 10 percent full by the end of fall.

Miller told the station the rescue covers a few pools and that hundreds of pools exist along the river. Most of the fish in the early-October Moose-to-Wilson outing were small, including young-of-the-year suckers, with an occasional young cutthroat. The Snake hit 70 degrees for weeks this summer, which KHOL ties to the state’s first voluntary fishing closure on the local stretch. Researchers from Idaho State University, the Teton Conservation District, and the National Park Service have been collecting data with Miller; their studies, KHOL reports, show side-channel connectivity is already lost on the first day of a rapid drawdown.

This is a The Gillnet news desk summary, not a reprint.

Source: KHOL — Downstream of Jackson Lake Dam, fish are floundering (Jenna McMurtry, Oct. 16, 2026).