Fish Traps Have Been Banned on the Columbia River for Nearly a Century. Could Bringing Them Back Help Save Salmon?

A new experiment is testing the commercial success of fish traps in Washington and Oregon. Even as some conservationists embrace the technique, its return has reopened old wounds among local fishers

Zach Theiler

March 27, 2026 7:30 a.m.

In the late summer of 1805, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s Corps of Discovery expedition came upon a camp of Shoshone Indians, who gifted the haggard explorers a meal that raised their spirits.

“This was the first salmon I had seen and perfectly convinced me that we were on the waters of the Pacific Ocean,” Lewis journaled.

He knew that Atlantic salmon moved between ocean and river, inhabiting both saltwater and freshwater environments. The presence of salmon, he thought, surely indicated that he and his group were near their destination on the Pacific coast.

What Lewis did not know was that those fish, caught in the Lemhi River in Idaho, had endured the longest migration of any salmon species on Earth. Certain sockeye salmon climb more than 6,500 feet as they swim from the Pacific upstream through the Columbia River and its tributaries, scaling waterfalls as tall as 20 feet to reach spawning grounds tucked in the snowcapped peaks of central Idaho. Unfortunately for the expedition, the mouth of the Columbia was still more than 600 miles away.

As the explorers followed the river to the west, they encountered an astonishing population of salmon. Historians estimate that at the time, up to 20 million salmon migrated inland in the Pacific Northwest annually.

A combination of factors—including hydropower development, habitat loss, pollution, warming waters, overfishing and the introduction of hatchery fish—drove a dramatic decline in salmon population over time. By the late 1970s, those legendary runs had declined by nearly 97 percent. Today, approximately one million salmon and steelhead, an endangered species of trout often grouped with salmon, remain in the region. Seventeen salmon populations are listed as threatened or endangered on the West Coast.

Amid the wide-ranging threats to salmon, conservationists are considering whether a tool known as the fish trap could help protect endangered populations. The traps corral fish into a fenced-off area of the river, where they can then be harvested or released safely. The practice gained popularity among early settlers racing to catch salmon—but in the mid-20th century, following bitter disputes among fishers over the technology, Oregon and Washington banned it.

In 2025, those states authorized three fish traps to operate on the Columbia River—making them the first to harvest commercially in the region in nearly 100 years. The effort was the initial phase of an experiment to test whether the traps could be an economically viable alternative to gillnets, the leading method for catching salmon.

Other experiments, too, have trialed the traps for their economic and conservation potential throughout the past decade. But even as some people see promise in the tool, the work has reopened old wounds in the local fishing community—dredging up long-buried controversies and resurfacing the fish trap’s fraught history.

The rise and fall of the fish trap

For millennia, Native American tribes throughout the Columbia River basin used a fish-trapping technique known as a weir to harvest only the fish they needed.

But fishers could exploit the trapping technique if they chose. As European settlers expanded west in the 19th century, they drove pilings into the riverbed and set up their own industrial versions of fish traps, explains Donella Miller, a member of the Yakama Nation and the fishery science manager for the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission.

With little regulation or regard for the environment, a strategically positioned trap could catch roughly 73 tons of salmon in a season. The number of commercial fish traps along the river proliferated, and by 1889, approximately 400 were in operation. The volume of salmon caught by these traps sometimes overwhelmed canneries to the point of waste.

“They were only processing what they could in a day, and the rest was just thrown out,” Miller says.

Installing a trap was expensive, so deep-pocketed businessmen were often the ones who profited from the technique. But the relatively cheap costs for running them once built, paired with the abundant salmon supply, allowed trappers to drive down the market price of salmon and out-compete fishers who used gillnets, long curtains of mesh that entangle fish by their gills.

“That’s why there was so much resentment of the traps on the river,” says Irene Martin, a historian who has published three books about fishing communities on the Columbia. “It was used as leverage against commercial fishermen, particularly gillnetters, in terms of prices.”

Animosity toward the fish trap operators grew. Disgruntled gillnetters were known to steal fish from trappers, earning notoriety as “fish trap pirates.” But gillnetters also organized formally, and in one incident, members of a prominent gillnetter union that had gone on strike because of low salmon prices destroyed fish traps on the Columbia. In May 1896, they shot at a boat carrying two nonunion fishermen—likely gillnetters not participating in the strike or fish trap workers—murdering one and injuring the other.

But not all fishermen resented the trap owners—some dreamed of becoming them. One was the Swedish immigrant John C. Peterson, who spent years laboring in a commercial fishery along the river at the turn of the century.

“He didn’t own the boat; the company owned the boat. He didn’t own the net; the company owned the net. And he didn’t make any money,” explains Peterson’s grandson, Blair. “But he saw the fish traps operate, and he saw the money that was being made.”

According to family legend, during the Klondike Gold Rush, Peterson left for Canada’s Yukon Territory in 1897, with hopes of striking it rich to buy a fish trap. The gamble paid off. After finding gold, he sailed back to Sweden to get married, regaled his bride with promises of financial opportunity, then returned to the Columbia River six years later.

“The first thing he did was buy two fish traps in Chinook, Washington,” says Blair. “And he made money.”

Peterson expanded his operation and purchased seven more traps, earning his place among the elite fishermen garnering blame for monopolizing harvests.

Despite their reputation for catching scores of salmon, between 1927 and 1934, fish traps took only 21 percent of the salmon and steelhead harvest on the Columbia—second to gillnetting, which took 60 percent. But lobbying efforts by gillnetters and other interest groups persuaded Washington and Oregon voters to ban the traps in 1934 and 1948, respectively.

That put Peterson out of business. His son—Blair’s father—had left school to work on the traps, and the ban made him jobless at 20 years old with a sixth-grade education. The loss stung for years.

“My dad never, ever brought up the word ‘trap,’” Blair says.

Salmon populations in peril

Following the ban, salmon runs continued to decline amid habitat loss, overfishing and dam development.

To address the dwindling fish population, government and tribal groups have released farmed salmon into the Columbia for decades. The basin’s first hatchery launched in 1877, and today, more than 200 hatcheries operating along the basin release an estimated 140 million juvenile salmon and steelhead into the river each year.

Although the hatcheries have bolstered salmon runs, scientists now understand that inbreeding between wild and hatchery fish can have detrimental effects on the genetics of wild salmon—making them prone to disease, reducing their size and stamina, and impeding their ability to complete the arduous journey to their spawning grounds.

Wild and hatchery salmon typically swim together, so dragging a gillnet through these runs will inevitably capture some endangered species as bycatch—and when those fish are released, they can die from their injuries. Government regulations permit fisheries only a certain number of endangered species bycatch deaths, called “impacts,” each season. Once a fishery reaches this limit, it must stop harvesting. These regulations have reduced the harm to many threatened stocks.

Still, conservation groups have been looking for approaches that better allow fishers to selectively catch hatchery fish—while sparing as many endangered species and wild fish as possible. As the nonprofit Wild Fish Conservancy searched for such a technique, they heard about someone experimenting with fish traps on the banks of the Columbia. Reviving his grandfather’s embattled method, that man was Blair Peterson.

Resurrecting the fish trap as a conservation tool

One night in 1998, the younger Peterson was sitting at a bar in his hometown on Puget Island, Washington, when a friend mentioned that he had come across Peterson’s grandfather’s name while helping his wife clear out city courthouse records.

“I’ll be damned,” thought Peterson. Looking through the dumpster-bound files, he discovered the original blueprints of his grandfather’s pound nets, a style of fish trap. Peterson felt compelled to save the historical records but left them untouched for the next three years.

Peterson, a former gillnetter, says he was working as part of a Washington State-led fish data collection project in 2001, which he understood to be monitoring the presence and health of various species in the Columbia. That’s when something triggered his memory.

He recalled historical pictures of fish traps and that the fish had swum in the corral before being harvested. “When you saw the old black-and-white photos of the fish in a fish trap, they’re all alive,” Peterson says.

He speculated that pound nets might be a good tool for monitoring fish for the project. The challenge was that nobody had built one on the Columbia River in roughly 70 years. But Peterson had the blueprints.

It took him more than a decade to gain the permit required to pilot the pound net on the Columbia as a research project. In 2013, he finally built a prototype using his grandfather’s notes and tested it out.

That was when the Wild Fish Conservancy, based near Seattle, learned of his experiment. The organization met with Peterson and eventually became intrigued by the traps’ potential for sustainable commercial fishing—informed by their historical use by Native American tribes.

“We know that they can be used sustainably, because they were used sustainably for thousands of years to harvest salmon up and down the coast,” says Emma Helverson, the executive director of the Wild Fish Conservancy.

Between 2013 and 2020, the nonprofit partnered with Peterson and other commercial fishers to run initial experiments, testing the fish trap’s ability to selectively harvest hatchery fish and reduce bycatch mortality of endangered species.

Over years of experimenting, backed by grants from institutions like Patagonia and government agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, they improved John C. Peterson’s blueprints with 21st-century practicalities. Today, fish traps are equipped with underwater cameras and electronically controlled gates that allow for the fish to be selectively harvested with minimal handling and exposure to air.

Research indicates that fish caught in the traps have a more than 91 percent post-release survival rate, depending on the species caught and how the trap is used. Today, the Wild Fish Conservancy embraces fish traps as the sustainable strategy it was looking for.

Still, not all conservationists are on board. Miller, of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, says the technique doesn’t address the biggest threats posed to wild salmon today. She highlights issues like hydropower, habitat loss and invasive species as the highest concerns, rather than fishing. Other environmental groups point to dam removal as a top conservation priority.

“You always have to take a step back and look at the bigger picture,” Miller says. She emphasizes the need for a holistic approach to ecosystem restoration, following long-held conservation traditions, such as managing invasive species, removing dams and protecting spawning grounds.

But the Wild Fish Conservancy argues that addressing the threats posed to wild salmon runs requires using all available methods. “We should be fishing with whatever tool has the lowest impact to wild fish,” Helverson says.

A divided fishing community

The traps may also face an uphill battle among local fishers. “There’s not one guy I know of that’s a gillnetter here that’s interested,” says Jim Wells, a retired gillnetter who serves as the president of Salmon for All, an association of gillnetters and seafood businesses on the Columbia River. According to Wells, doubt largely stems from whether fish traps can compare economically to gillnetting.

The experiment that began last year might answer that question. The three new, commercially licensed fish traps on the Columbia operated on 43 days between August and October. They will return during the fall season throughout the next four years, harvesting only hatchery fish.

Throughout, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife will monitor the traps to evaluate their business viability while gathering biological data on encountered fish. The traps are being tested alongside a few other types of fishing gear as alternatives to gillnets. “I just think of these alternative gears as like another tool in the toolbox,” says Charlene Hurst, the Columbia River division manager for Washington’s Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Just as in the past, when wealthy entrepreneurs like Peterson could best afford fish traps, the technology has a steep upfront cost—thought to be higher than that of a gillnet. The Wild Fish Conservancy believes the government could subsidize the use of fish traps, because of their conservation potential, which would help gillnetters make the switch.

One fisherman who is interested in the technique is Mike Clark, a former gillnetter who is operating one of the newly licensed traps during the trial.

“It’s a steep learning curve, right?” he says, “You know, it’s all about location.” Last fall, he earned roughly $12,000, but he missed around two weeks of potential harvest due to travel and adjustments he needed to make to his fish trap. He believes the technique has much more potential. Consultants for Salmon for All estimate that fish traps could make around $24,000 in a single fall season.

Some experts suggest that number could increase. Because the trapped fish are not stressed or struggling, their meat is of a finer quality, Clark explains, and that allowed him to sell Chinook salmon at about twice the regular market price last fall. The Wild Fish Conservancy asserts that the price could improve further if the traps are certified as sustainable fisheries.

For comparison, Wells says gillnetters can make between $20,000 and $100,000 a year, inclusive of the fall and spring seasons, depending on their skill and dedication. By contrast, the Wild Fish Conservancy estimates that the average gillnetter working on the Columbia can make as little as $4,000 in a year.

Wells also contends that higher quality, larger fish are caught in deeper and colder sections of the Columbia accessible only with a boat, which means they’re available to gillnetters but not trappers.

While the number of fish swimming into a trap fluctuates, Clark recalls one instance where up to 700 salmon were in his trap. “In all my years gillnetting, I’ve never caught down here six or seven hundred salmon” in a single tide, he says.

But due to the positioning of his trap, he accidentally encountered too many endangered steelhead. Though he released all of them, he was required to stop fishing, in accordance with regulations. Next fall, he plans to move his fish trap into deeper waters to avoid steelhead and, ideally, elongate his season.

Despite the setback, Clark marveled at the gentleness with which the fish trap treated the animals. “What a really nice way to handle the fish,” he says. “You could just open your door and let them pass through.”

“A zero-sum game”

According to the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, tribal governments have little interest in reintroducing fish traps. If the fish traps prove to be too effective, they might allow trap owners to catch the majority of the river’s fish, limiting fishing opportunities for tribal members who are already struggling.

“The amount of fish that we have today, it’s not enough to for anybody to even make a modest living,” Miller says.

Some gillnetters also see the fish traps as a threat to their livelihoods and have directed their ire toward those associated with the trials—including Peterson, who “really has taken a pounding,” Clark says. “People are afraid of change, right?”

Peterson, who is participating in the pilot program as one of the three fish trap operators, maintains that he has sought to explore the fish trap’s potential as a research and monitoring tool. But after the financial strain of his experiments and the resentment he and his family have received, he says he regrets ever getting involved with the fish traps.

Today, he lives next to his grandfather’s former property on the banks of the Columbia River. From his window, he can still see the ruins of the old traps sticking up through the water.

“I would look at those pilings, and I would think to myself: Why weren’t you a shoe cobbler?” he says. Were that the case, “I wouldn’t be in this mess.”

Much of the tension comes from the river’s finite nature. With salmon run sizes varying yearly and many species under threat, the number of fish available each season is uncertain—and that makes gillnetters’ livelihoods precarious.

Added to that are regulations related to protected species, which are a core reason gillnetters largely oppose scaling the fish trap’s use, Wells explains. All commercial fishers get a share of a fixed limit on deaths to endangered fish across the river, and the introduction of fish traps for this pilot program has taken away a small portion previously allocated to gillnetters—shortening the length of their seasons. It’s starting to make the river feel too crowded for some.

“The river is a zero-sum game,” Wells says. “Somebody’s gonna have to give something up.”