Green River

The Green runs out of the Cascades through Howard Hanson Dam, a Corps of Engineers flood-control dam, then through the Green River Gorge and the farms of the Green Valley to Auburn and north through Kent, where it becomes the Duwamish and reaches Elliott Bay. It is an urban river for most of its fished length, and a hatchery river: the Soos Creek hatchery in Auburn and the Icy Creek ponds upriver raise fall Chinook, coho and steelhead. Because the dam smooths the flows and the river sits half an hour from Seattle and Tacoma, it is one of the easiest salmon rivers in the region to fish on short notice.

The salmon seasons step up the river with the run. The Kent reach below South 212th Street opens August 20, the first water for fall Chinook, and there you must keep the first 2 adult Chinook you catch. From South 212th to the Highway 18 bridge in Auburn, salmon open September 16 for coho and chum, with Chinook released. The short stretch between the Highway 18 and Auburn–Black Diamond Road bridges is closed. Above it, through the Green Valley to the Tacoma watershed boundary, salmon open November 1. Pink salmon pack the river in odd years, and chum peak in November and December. Game fish close December 31, so the hatchery summer steelhead from June through fall are the river's steelhead fishery, with winter steelhead open only in December.

Read the flows at the Auburn gauge. Releases from Howard Hanson keep the river from dropping too low in late summer and cap the peaks in winter. As a rough guide it fishes from about 400 to 1,500 CFS, and past about 3,000 it is high and colored. Chum and coho hold in the slow water of the Kent and Auburn reaches; the Green Valley above Auburn has the most natural riffles and runs.