how long does the steelhead run go on the salmon?

[nutman]

I thinking of trying to come home in the spring like march ,if i can afford it then ,i was woundering how long the run lasts ,your killing me with the steelhead stories ,i cant fish till it stops raining for a couple days here ,looks like ill be fishing in feb and march here or toward the end of january .rivers are way blown here ,beyound choclate milk. Im going crazy wanting to fish ,ive tied more flies then ill fish all winter ,hell im getting into summer steelhead flies .
If the run lasts long enough i might want to hit it up there .

[AaronJasper]

Nutman,

Its gets started in ernest around Columbus Day. You will have days and weeks where the fish will never stop coming, kind of like the faucet is turned on. Then you will have times within the period where few fish are entering the river. However, during this time there are loads to catch they will just be holdover steelhead. The fresh fish will enter the river in good numbers through January. Then the fishing transitions to fishing for mostly winter holding fish and a few new ones. March is a weird month. The fish start to spawn and the fishing can be inconsisitant. In april the fishing gets hot again. There will be some newer fish as well as tons of dropbacks. The dropback fishing will last well into the month of May and possibly early June as it did last year.
The peaks are November and December for fresh fish and the last two weeks or April and the first two weeks of May for dropbacks.

[nutman]

maybe i should come back in april again it is a hard descion or wait till october for the browns ,id k like to catch a wall hanger up there ,i just need my picture with a big brown one like a football ,descions descions . Will see how i do when the water drops here . the fish are in it is just super crazy flood water right now .which makes it hard to get places on the river i want to fish canyon walls are lots of fun to scale (not) even in low water . ill be out there soon enough ,im going for pure wild strain steelhead ,and i have the flys ready to go ! im throwing stuff one guy refered to as dead sparrows . The steelhead love the things though .

[Nymphmeister]

Nutman, what Aaron said is very accurate. If you are looking for a monster brown though, I'd prob wait 'till early November, and I'd hit some of the rivers & streams West of the Salmon River, they get much better runs of big browns. Although having said that, we are seeing more browns in the Salmon River in the last 2-3 years, but I'm not sure why. When I went for Steelhead in Nov., I hit a pool that must have had several hundred browns stacked up in it, and needless to say the fishing was silly. No whoppers, but all the 4-7# fish you could want.

If you don't mind all-out combat fishing, 18 Mile Creek at Burt Dam gets an insane run of trophy browns, and a dam just a little ways up from the lake stacks them up in maybe 1/4 mile of river! It is a very fly fishing friendly river, not to big or too deep. And it coughs up fish well over 20# sometimes, we have seen fish over 25# in there. I got a 29" 13# fish there on a Glo-Bug, and the same day I lost a 36" or so fish that probably would have hit the 20# mark or dam close to it.

[VTflyfishing]

The Salmon also has a summer run steelhead.