Queets River

Start with the closures. The Queets runs almost entirely inside Olympic National Park, and the Park closed it to sport fishing from late November 2023 after wild steelhead missed their escapement goal in eight of ten years. It stayed closed through the 2024-25 and 2025-26 winters. The Park now opens it each June and sets the winter steelhead rules every November with the state and the tribes, so check the Park's fishing page before you plan a winter trip. Below the Park, the lower river runs through the Quinault Indian Reservation, where you can fish only with a Quinault-licensed tribal guide.

It is still worth knowing. The Queets is the biggest undammed river on the Olympic coast, running about 53 miles from the glaciers on the south side of Mount Olympus through old-growth rainforest to the ocean at Queets. Its wild steelhead are some of the largest on the Peninsula, with fish past 40 inches in winter and spring, and it holds big fall Chinook and coho too. The Clearwater, Salmon and Sams Rivers feed it, and the Quinault hatchery on the Salmon River sends coho through the lower Park water every September.

It is also a hard river to catch in shape. Glacial flour and clay banks color it fast and it is the last coastal river to clear; it can jump from a few thousand CFS to many times that within a day. Read the Clearwater gauge, which sits on the reservation below the Clearwater's mouth and so counts both rivers: it fishes best under about 3,500 CFS. From June through September it is mostly a summer steelhead, cutthroat and early-coho river, walked from pullouts on Queets River Road or floated from Hartzell Creek. Expect to bushwhack, expect braided channels and log jams that move every winter, and expect to have it to yourself.