Hood River

The Hood is a wild steelhead river first and a trout river a distant second. It drains the cold, wet north face of Mt Hood and runs about 25 miles to the Columbia at the town of Hood River, an hour east of Portland — one of the closest wild steelhead rivers to the metro. The winter run is the whole point: fish trickle in from November through April with the bulk showing in February and March, and it's rain that turns it on. A hard freshet that bumps and colors the mainstem is what pushes fish up out of the Columbia, so the good windows are the days a high, dirty river drops back into green shape. The hatchery steelhead program was suspended in 2021 and the hatchery run has faded to nothing, so this is effectively a wild-only fishery now — plan on catch-and-release and low fish counts, not numbers.

The honest catch with the Hood is glacial melt. The East Fork carries silt, mud, and rounded glacial rock straight off the mountain, and the Middle Fork runs muddy and basically unfishable in season, so from roughly July into September the mainstem runs milky and blown out from snow and glacier melt and most people just don't fish it then. That's the trade-off with a glacier-fed river — the same cold water that grows bull trout and keeps summer temps low also carries the flour that clouds it up. The limiter here is turbidity, not temperature: at Tucker Bridge the mainstem was 234 cfs and 61°F in early July, cold for midsummer, which tells you how much of that flow is meltwater. This is a wade-and-walk fishery, not a float. The productive water is a short list of runs you hike to — the single most-fished spot is 'the mouth,' the water under the footbridge just downstream of I-84, with easy parking and wadeable runs, and the powerhouse run about a half mile above the confluence is the other classic.

Beyond the mainstem, the forks are their own thing. The East Fork parallels Highway 35 with pullouts the whole way and holds small, feisty native cutthroat, mostly above Polallie Creek, on a standard late-May-to-October 31 trout season — the fishable trout option, though it colors up with melt too. The West Fork is where the summer steelhead and spring Chinook go, but public access is a sliver: about 100 yards of water below Punchbowl Falls above the confluence, closed above the falls. Coho move through late September into mid-November near the mouth in modest numbers, and Pacific lamprey have pushed several miles up the East Fork since Powerdale Dam came out in 2010. It's a real wild fishery in recovery, close to Portland, but it rewards timing the water far more than it rewards showing up.