Snartac, actually read the quote you posted from my response! The population I was referring to was the large bodied springers (from the first sentence you quoted). Certainly, there will be salmon spawning in the Elwha above the locations of the dams after barrier removal as I stated in my previous response. It will just take a while for there to be enough of them to start a fishery even if PS Chinook are delisted. The new population will contain hatchery fish from the hatcheries on the Elwha and stray hatchery and wild fish from other systems. As far as I'm aware, there are not any true wild Chinook or steelhead in the Elwha system. Although there are naturally spawning fish in the tiny amount of available habitat below the lower dam, these will be hatchery fish or wild spawned fish from hatchery parents. However, there will be no large bodied spring run Chinook like there was historicallly because those genetics don't exist anymore and there are no large bodied springers in the proximal systems to "seed" the habitat. Local wild and hatchery fall Chinook salmon will not just automatically convert to large bodied springers just because they stray into historical habitat for large bodied springers after the migration corridor is restored. Those Elwha spring fish were naturally selected over hundreds if not thousands of years for that phenotype. The recovery of a wild Chinook population in the system will likely be hindered by the influx of hatchery fish but I'm sure the population will grow over time even with heavy hatchery introgression because that has been seen in other systems after barrier removal. Even fish with hatchery parents can survive when there is hardly any competition for spawning and rearing habitat. The uppper Cedar River above Landsburg Dam for example, had fish ladder access completed in 2003 after over 100 years of blockage for resident and anadromous fish. Originally, most of the Chinook "colonizers" were hatchery fish but, after enough years for fish to return to natal habitats above the dam, the upstream of dam subpopulation is now dominated by wild fish, some of which were spawned above the dam. Chinook typically return as 3, 4 and 5 year olds in the Cedar, and so, 5 years after passage construction, there were probably 3 year classes returning to their natal habitats above the dam. This is supported by the fact that the percentage of the total Chinook population in the Cedar Basin (based on redds) spawning above the dam almost doubled 4-7 years after fish passage compared to the first three years after access was restored. And yet, 7 years on, there are only tens to low hundreds spawning above the dam and this year, we will be lucky if it is 100 (most of which will be males, just like in previous years). There has not been a Chinook fishery in the Cedar River for decades and there won't be one in decades, because the population won't bounce back that fast and if it does, the Muckleshoots will be fishing again before the rec fisher because the rec fisher gets his half of the fish in the salt. Oh, and lets not forget that Puget Sound wild Chinook are listed as threatened under the ESA. Do you think you are going to fish a wild stock that is listed, c'mon people. You will need the whole Puget Sound ESU to be healthy and delisted before any fishery for "wild" Elwha Chinook happens. Of course, I realize that the scale of the experiment will be much bigger in the Elwha than the Cedar and the habitat is certainly more pristine but where are all the wild genes going to come from, never mind wild spring salmon genes? At least the Cedar had/has some residual wild fish although admittedly they are somewhat introgressed with hatchery strays, mostly from the Issaquah and Portage Bay hatcheries. But the wild produced fish always dominate in the Cedar as a whole and the habitat/disturbance regime is always working on that population via natural selection which likely reduces hatchery genetic influences. Not so for the remaining Elwha fish which are nearly all used as broodstock for the hatchery. We will see what happens and I hope the optomists are right and the new population really takes off and establishes itself robustly. That would be great, but it doesn't mean there will be a fishery and I would not support one on wild fish in my lifetime.
In the case of steelhead, it would be nice if they just relied on the wild rainbows in the upper system to re-establish an anadromous life history to produce wild steelhead in the system. I'm sure the populations of rainbow have been producing smolts over time but those smolts are not able to return to their natal habitats because of the dams and are forced to spawn with hatchery fish in the river or captured for hatchery broodstock. The best thing for steelhead would be a weir to keep the hatchery fish out of the upper river and let a wild stock re-establish itself from the wild genetics in the resident rainbows that still exist. Those fish are locally adapted and have the best chance of producing a sustainable, wild Elwha river steelhead stock.