Yakima River salmon anglers face triple whammy

SALMON FISHING — The 2011 Yakima River spring chinook season had great potential.

The fish took their sweet time heading upriver, but about two weeks ago, some of the fish that had climbed over McNary Dam arrived in the Yakima and started running over Prosser Dam by the hundreds.

But their arrive coincided with rain on snow that sent the river into a torrent.

The Yakima River is so swollen with runoff that it’s “going to be pretty much blown for the next few weeks,” sighed Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife enforcement officer Alan Baird in a story written by Scott Sandsberry of the Yakima Herald-Republic.

“Now, even when the rain stops we’ll warm up,” Baird said, “and we’re going to have all that snowmelt coming down.”

The third and final body blow: That stretch just downriver from the closed area just below Roza Dam — which has become oh-so-popular with bank anglers in recent years — is now virtually unreachable on foot, at least legally, Sandberry reports.

Read on for the details.

During recent Yakima River spring chinook fisheries, as many as 60 or 70 cars might be parked along State Route 821 near the Bureau of Reclamation’s entrance to Roza Dam, as anglers would walk in from there to fish from the bank.

To do that, though, requires either crossing a railroad trestle or crossing the tracks themselves.

That has always been officially illegal. This year, though, the folks at the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad are enforcing the law.