Hey bud, I was just curious as to how you were coming up with your #'s. I'm in total agreement that we are having a steelhead run for the ages, but I've been watching it pretty close as well, and ur #'s sounded a bit high. I suspect that you are adding together Steelhead and Wild Steelhead. I assume you pull the Fisherman's Update on the Fish Passage Center. . . check out the notes at the bottom of the page.
Here's what I got: since July 1 @ Bonneville (thru 9/7) 509,058 steelhead (this includes clipped and unclipped fish); Sept 4-7 @ Lower Granite 23,848 clipped
and unclipped steelhead.
I was also a little confused how you were comparing with other years, but I will say this: 2001 was the largest steelhead return on record for both Bonneville and Lower Granite. It's too early to say what will happen at LG, but we are already a shoe-in for second largest ever @ Bonneville. To date, we are 17,626 steelhead ahead

of 2001. September was a big month in 2001, so to secure this year as the largest steelhead return ever recorded we will have to average 3,845 steelhead per day for the rest of this month. It looks like it will happen.
Now lets talk rivers. I use PIT tag data to track this. It looks to me like the fish that are returning to the Salmon River this year are PIT tagged at a much higher rate than the ones that returned last year. For example last year only 126 Salmon River PIT tagged steelhead crossed Bonneville all year long. This year there has already been 1,590! For the Clearwater, last year
by this time, there had been 134 PIT tags over Bonneville, this year we have had 133.
So it looks to me like the Salmon River should be gangbusters this year for sure, and it's a little too soon to tell on the Clearwater. The Cw steelies cross Bonne later: sept-mid oct. As a side note, around 25% of all the steelhead crossing Bonne the last week or so have been B-run (by age) or older. This is the highest I have seen so far this year.