Searching for Steelhead Alley in Northeast Ohio

Sometimes I wonder what it must be like to take a little bite of something and get yanked into another stratosphere. Then I remember I already know.

Two years ago, I got hooked on fishing. On a snowy day in April, my buddy, Andy, brought me to one of his favorite spots on a tributary of the Grand River. Out of respect for my fishing mentor, you couldn’t get me to publish the location if you poked me in the eye with a fly. He let me borrow his waders and an old rod, tied on my flies, and pointed where to cast. I clumsily threw a pink felt egg into a deep, slow-moving pool. Miraculously, and kind of accidentally, I tugged on my line and found a shiny chrome steelhead on the end. Andy scooped it up with a net. I gave it a kiss and sent it on its way. Our hooting and hollering echoed through the woods.

That spring, in a column meditating on that moment, I wrote, “How fleeting and few these moments of awe become as we grow older.”

Buddy, I had no idea. 

I chased that high for the rest of spring. I bought the gear and the clothes. I practiced tying knots in front of the TV and casting in the backyard. I watched hours of instructional YouTube videos. I religiously read the Cleveland Metroparks fishing report. I drove my friends and family crazy talking about fishing.

And I caught absolutely nothing.

Fruitful trout trips to Colorado and Pennsylvania, and a successful summer of bass fishing, kept me hopeful. Surely, I was now seasoned enough to land a steelhead on my own.

Each year, at the first touch of cold air, it’s game time. Steelhead are a non-native strain of migratory rainbow trout stocked by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources’ Division of Wildlife. They enter our streams in the fall, as temperatures cool off. The peak of the run tends to be early spring, but fish can be caught throughout the winter.

From October to March, I hit the water at least once a week. My wife, with a newborn in arm and a toddler pulling on her leg, would roll her eyes as I pulled on my waders yet again. When I returned home with numb fingers and toes, she’d ask, “Did you catch anything?” Handing off the baby, she’d fight back a snicker as I said, “No.”

I haven’t been alone in my frustration. Andy pulled out a few here and there but eventually said, “I’m not freezing my ass off for this. We used to catch six or seven a day. You’d see them just piled up.” Commenters on the local steelheader Facebook groups were frustrated, too. Nobody agreed on the reasons. They argued about dam removals, new strains, shifting seasons and “the good old days,” whenever they were. But everyone agreed that the good old days were gone. And everyone was asking the same question.

What happened to Steelhead Alley?

Morgan Bitikofer grew up chasing steelhead with her family. Weekends and school vacations were spent making the five-hour trip from southern Pennsylvania to Northeast Ohio. When the 23-year-old was a teenager, her family moved to Conneaut to start a guiding service. Now, with her dad, she runs Silver Fly Guide Service, which focuses on steelhead guiding but also offers walleye and smallmouth fishing trips. Her mission is to get young girls and women of all ages into the sport. 

Pennsylvania is known for amazing brook, brown and rainbow trout fishing. So why move to Ohio? 

“It’s a big, giant fish that you’re catching,” she says. “The fact that you don’t have to fly to the other side of the world or the other side of the country to catch them is pretty incredible.”

Fishing and location are intrinsically tied. Largemouth bass in Lake Guntersville, Alabama. Tarpon in the Florida Keys. Trout in Colorado, Montana and Pennsylvania. When it comes to steelhead, it’s the Pacific Northwest and Steelhead Alley: the collection of Lake Erie tributary rivers that stretches from the Vermilion River, eastward through Pennsylvania and to the Cattaraugus Creek in New York.

Naturally, the fisheries in Alaska, British Columbia, Northern California, Oregon and Washington are the darlings. Steelhead are native to the Pacific Northwest, though they are supplemented by stocking, too. Here, they are transplants, using Lake Erie as a surrogate ocean during the summer. The ocean-run trout tend to be bigger thanks to the nutrient-rich Pacific. The landscapes out West tend to be more photogenic, in vast, mountainous settings. Meanwhile, I have fished under the lights of a storage unit next to a freeway.

But if you look at accessibility and production, Steelhead Alley blows the Pacific Northwest out of the water. The catch rate in the Pacific Northwest hovers around 0.1 per hour. That means, on average, it takes 10 hours or more of fishing to hook a single steelhead. Many anglers say catching one Pacific Northwest steelhead in a full-week trip is a success. However, across the region, Steelhead Alley’s average catch rate hovers around 0.35, with some areas peaking at 0.5 or higher. It offers at least 15 fishable rivers within a four-hour drive.

“We have people from Washington and Oregon, who fish for steelhead regularly, coming to Steelhead Alley because they just want to come where they’re likely going to have multiple hookups a day,” says Curtis Wagner, an ODNR fisheries biologist. “It’s a world-class fishery. I don’t think a lot of people appreciate that.”

It’s not all sunfish and rainbow trout in Steelhead Alley, though. Regionally, anglers are frustrated by recent years’ low returns. Both ODNR and the Cleveland Metroparks admit that anglers’ memories aren’t fairy tales. The Lake Erie Committee of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission’s benchmark for a satisfactory fishery is 0.25 per hour, or a fish every four hours on the water. An ODNR study recorded mean catch rates of 0.387 in 2008-2009 and 0.354 in 2009-2010 on Ohio’s tributaries. Its most recent study saw that number dip to 0.23. 

“It’s enough that the hardcore folks might notice the difference, but it wasn’t like we sunk to one fish every 10 hours or something,” Wagner says. “It’s a little down, but it’s not tragic.”

Yet, potentially the biggest problem starts before the fish even enter the river. 

Castalia State Fish Hatchery superintendent Andy Jarrett stands on a dock and looks over the edge into the depths of a blue hole. The water is so clear you can see vegetation floating still near the limestone bottom, about 30 feet down. 

It’s not the Blue Hole, the defunct tourist destination nearby that once drew 165,000 visitors per year at its peak. Rumor had it that the Blue Hole was bottomless. It’s not, but beneath the natural sinkhole is an underground river of artesian springwater that flows into Cold Creek, five rare Ohio miles of water cold enough to sustain trout year-round. In 1890, the Castalia Trout Club organized around the stream. In 1990, the club — now one of the most prestigious and exclusive trout clubs in the country — closed the Blue Hole to the public. 

Luckily, it’s not the only one. Over his 26 years working at the Castalia State Fish Hatchery, Jarrett has hosted dozens of tours and kids’ field trips, all starting at the hatchery’s blue hole (this one accidentally man-made, by a drilling accident in the late 1800s). But this blue hole is more than just a tourist site, and Jarrett is much more than a tour guide. 

The hatchery’s blue hole is the lifeblood of Ohio’s entire steelhead stocking program. The 90-acre property is one of six state-owned fish hatcheries, with others raising trout, walleye, catfish and more. Launched in 1997, a $7 million upgrade in 2012 expanded its capabilities. Each year, it raises all of the state’s approximately 460,000 steelhead. That  number has been agreed-upon by the Great Lakes Fishery Commission’s Lake Erie Committee. While the state retains sovereignty, the body is just one example of coordination among Canada and the states surrounding Lake Erie to protect the delicate ecosystem of the shared lake. Castalia Hatchery also raises 75,000 rainbow trout annually for recreation in state ponds and reservoirs.

Jarrett guides me into a canopy with a 900-foot-long raceway that looks like  tiered bocce courts. Water from the blue hole aquifer flows through them. The cerulean H2O is high in nitrogen and lacks oxygen. An aerator with tens of thousands of, what Jarrett calls, “glitch rings” chops up the water to add oxygen and remove nitrogen before pumping into the raceway at 2,500 gallons per minute.

I peek over the edge and thousands of juvenile steelhead scurry from my shadow. A series of barriers helps contain the baby fish, which sit in 30-inch-deep water.

“When they get a little bigger, they like to start jumping, so that helps to keep half of them from ending up on the sidewalks,” says Jarrett. “The kids on field trips will lean over, and the water will start splashing on them, and you’ll hear them start screaming.” 

These steelhead are incubated as eggs and reared in troughs in a nearby building. In the raceway, they’ll grow to about 7 inches. Around that size, they enter the smoltification phase, a physical transformation that allows them to imprint on their home waters and handle the biological demands of entering saltwater or, in this case, Lake Erie. Once they near this benchmark in early spring, a revolving belt carries them into a tank on the back of a truck, which then dispenses them into their new river homes.

A series of alarms and sensors assist Jarrett’s staff of five in around-the-clock monitoring and feeding. If the power goes out, a backup generator kicks on and an automated message lights up Jarrett’s phone. One staffer even lives on-site for a quicker response. If the system goes down for any extended period of time, the loss can be devastating. Earlier this year, a storm caused a power outage at the hatchery at the Little Manistee River Weir in Michigan resulting in the loss of more than 1,500 adult steelhead. The weir has historically supplied many of Ohio’s eggs.

“Of course, most of the time it’s at 2:30 in the morning,” says Jarrett. 

Despite the technological advances, the facility benefits from hard work and decades of experience. Each staff member takes a weekend a month to feed the fish — they eat roughly 60,000 to 80,000 pounds of feed a year — and to clean their tanks, because they poop a lot.

The team also relies on its know-how to develop makeshift solutions. For example, rather than dumping the food into the water with scoops and buckets, the team invented its own device: a recycled bucket on top of a rolling cart, rigged up with a leaf blower and a spout. The blower pushes feed from inside the bucket into the raceway at a sustained speed and ensures the food falls to the bottom, where the fish like to eat. 

You can’t find that at Walmart. 

Long before the fish feel the cool water of the blue hole, they start their journeys as eggs. This is where, just a few years ago, things took a turn for the worse. 

The eggs used for stocking programs like Ohio’s typically come from another state. For a few weeks during the steelhead run each year, biologists insert a weir, or a barrier that directs migratory fish. The adult fish are scooped up to collect their eggs and sperm to create offspring. Even though the resulting fish are raised in hatcheries, these are considered “wild-strain,” as opposed to “domestic-raised,” which are completely bred in a controlled environment. 

“As agencies started stocking (wild) offspring, they saw even better returns,” says Jarrett. “You’re, sort of, eliminating the duds from the parental template, taking parentals that were coming back into a river.”

For more than 100 years, states across the region carried steelhead from the West in train cars and “Johnny Appleseed-ed them throughout the Great Lakes” in an attempt to repopulate the waters with some kind of table fare, says Wagner.

From 1913 to 1918, federal fish managers tried to establish steelhead in the Cuyahoga River, after years of ecological abuse, but small numbers of stocked fish and poor water conditions doomed the effort. Later in the 1900s, Ohio began stocking salmon with much more success.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t all good. At the time, snagging was legal in both Ohio and Michigan. As a preteen, local guide Jeff Liskay, 65, remembers seeing guys “short sticking,” a dirty method of tying a treble hook to a broomstick and running it through the river. Snagging was later outlawed.

“The salmon era brought out the worst of people,” says Liskay. “It was a zoo.”

In the 1980s, ODNR was impressed by steelhead returns and shifted its focus there. For years, it stocked a domestic strain from London State Fish Hatchery in Ohio. But experimentation with the Manistee strain from the weir at Little Manistee River showed stronger catch rates. In operation since 1968, Little Manistee now produces about 4.5 million steelhead eggs in a typical year. The majority go to Michigan hatcheries. The rest go to Ohio and Indiana. 

For decades, Little Manistee Weir became Ohio’s main source for eggs. That changed in 2020. With the earliest days of COVID-19 restrictions falling right in the middle of the spring run, Michigan Department of Natural Resources canceled its egg-take operation that spring and heavily reduced it for the fall salmon run. Backup sources, such as a hatchery in Wisconsin that ODNR had used in the past, experienced similar challenges. 

“We were faced with: You stock nothing or you stock something,” says Wagner. “We decided to stock something rather than nothing.”

That something was the Shasta strain, which originates at Mount Shasta in California, though Ohio got its eggs closer to home — from a federal hatchery in West Virginia. Shasta is one of the most commonly stocked domestic strains in the country, but some believe their instinct to imprint could be wearing off after years of domestication. This could explain lower returns in recent years. With fish taking about two years to mature in the lake before returning, Shastas would have likely dominated the last few years’ runs. Yet, with steelhead reproducing naturally, the population is likely made up of a mixture of strains.

“It’s not as cut and dry as these statements folks make about strains,” says Wagner. “Manistee strains come from the weir in Michigan, but if you traced back their lineage, they are probably from throughout the Pacific Northwest.” 

When Wagner starts explaining potential reasons for the dip, it comes off like a “litany of excuses,” he says. River fishing is very weather dependent. Steelhead need cold, moving water to get upriver, from the mouth into the tributaries. Climate change is associated with warmer weather and heavier, more sporadic rainfall, says Wagner. Storms also lead to “blow-outs,” fishing jargon for rivers that are temporarily unfishable due to high flows and low visibility. Urbanization and development are making these more common. Roads, buildings and parking lots replace natural, absorbent soil with impervious surfaces that don’t soak up rainwater or snowmelt, leading to more (and more contaminated) runoff and causing erosion. Just as quickly, water levels can drop again, especially after late summer droughts as in 2025. 

Furthermore, some locals wonder if juvenile steelhead are facing more predators from Lake Erie’s booming walleye population. Plus, with information sharing on social media and new smartphone apps for anglers, your honey hole might not be so secret anymore. 

This year is the first since 2020 that ODNR stocked only wild-strain trout. Some fish come from Manistee, while others hail from Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. A few hundred of those fish carry trackers that allow ODNR to monitor returns. While Liskay doesn’t expect the catch rates of yesteryear — “unfortunately, you got into this at the wrong time,” he tells me — he’s hopeful for an uptick.

“We went 20 years of stocking without a hitch in this program,” he says. “Now, we’re getting back on track.”

Liskay has been fishing the Cuyahoga River since the early ’80s, long before stocking it seemed within the realm of possibility.

“It was sort of a getaway from the crowds,” he says.

During the winter months, a secret spot offered fishable waters when other areas did not — even if the reason for that was a little murky. As the rivers iced over elsewhere, he’d plug his nose and wade in to fish the waters near the Akron Treatment Plant and Regional Sewer District.

“The effluent water (aka, treated discharge) kept the river a little bit warmer, and it kept it ice-free,” says Liskay. “That allowed me to fish a river during the wintertime when we traditionally had some harsh winters.”

Years of fishing through sewage and trash have paid off. Liskay is one of the preeminent experts on fly fishing the Cuyahoga River and Northeast Ohio in general. Liskay — that’s Capt. Liskay to you — now runs Great Lakes Fly Fishing, a network of guides and contributors who offer educational opportunities and angling trips. He’s also an ambassador for brands such as Patagonia and a founding member of Ohio Central Basin Steelheaders.

On the October day we chat, he calls from Alaska with his last bit of service before taking a group on a weeklong expedition. He tells me the winters are milder now and the Cuyahoga is cleaner. Dam removals, such as the Brecksville Diversion Dam in 2020, have improved hydrologic connectivity. Access to the river has increased thanks to the establishment of Cuyahoga Valley National Park, the creation of the Greenway Corridor and other acquisitions by the Cleveland Metroparks. He’s not alone on the water anymore. Kayakers paddle by, and other fishermen even wade in beside him. 

“It’s absolutely a game changer,” says Liskay. “You couldn’t fish it all in your lifetime as a weekend angler.”

When the Cuyahoga was designated a Great Lakes Area of Concern in 1987, nine “beneficial use impairments” served as the benchmark for river health. Since 2017, five of those designations have been removed, including restrictions on fish and wildlife consumption, fish tumors or other deformities, eutrophication or undesirable algae, beach closings and degradation of aesthetics. Five still remain: loss of fish habitat; degradation of benthos; bottom-dwelling organisms; restrictions on navigational dredging; and degradation of fish and wildlife populations. 

None of these concerns prevent steelhead stocking, Wagner says. In 2024, ODNR filled the Cuyahoga with 60,000 steelhead for the first time. The river got another batch of the same size in 2025 and 2026. With the fish’s maturation cycle, ODNR expects returns starting this year but truly coming on strong in 2027 and beyond.

Not everyone is thrilled about the expanded program, however. 

“Anglers are some of the biggest opponents to stocking the river, because their attitude is, There’s already fish here,” says Wagner. “You don’t have the crowds. They’re afraid that the stocking is going to increase the fish numbers, yes, but it’s also going to increase the number of anglers.” 

They’re not alone. About 26 miles of the river run through Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Officials there have pushed back on the stocking effort. Steelhead do, in fact, make their way up the Cuyahoga already. These strays are fish that return to non-natal streams, where they weren’t stocked. It’s the same phenomenon responsible for the recent uptick in coho and king salmon, which are likely straying from Michigan. There is also evidence, CVNP says, that steelhead reproduce in the Cuyahoga tributaries and that rainbow trout are year-round residents in the tributaries and the main stem. Wagner says none of the Lake Erie agencies feel that natural reproduction in tributaries is significantly contributing to the lake population. Across two years of samples in 14 tributaries, steelhead were only found in one tributary in extremely small numbers, he says.

CVNP isn’t against recreational fishing, but the National Park Service prioritizes reproducing native species rather than recreation-focused, non-native stocking. It’s OK with some cases of stocking. This year, for example, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reintroduced lake sturgeon in the Cuyahoga, with permission and collaboration from the Ohio Division of Wildlife and aid from the Metroparks, CVNP and Summit Metro Parks by cooperating with release sites and staffing. This massive, ancient bottom-dweller that can live for centuries and is native to the region. 

“Cuyahoga Valley National Park’s mission is to protect the native species and support natural processes that create a healthy habitat for them,” the park said in a statement to Cleveland Magazine. It denied multiple interview requests. “Through collaboration and science, we can find paths forward that support both outdoor recreation and ecological stewardship.”

Here on land, aquatic biologist Mike Durkalec, who writes the Metroparks’ weekly fishing report, points to ways the “hook and bullet” communities drive conservation. Some of them are simple. Most anglers know to leave their favorite holes better than they found them, picking up trash along the way. But hundreds of them come together each year for the Metroparks’ river cleanups. National groups such as Trout Unlimited and Ducks Unlimited have contributed millions of dollars to conservation efforts, and Ohio Central Basin Steelheaders have contributed more than $81,000 over the past decade, with support going back to the 1980s.  

Every individual angler is pitching in, too — even if they don’t know it. Gear purchases generate an excise tax collected from outdoor manufacturers and importers to a dedicated fund managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Meanwhile, most of Ohio Division of Wildlife’s funding comes from hunting and fishing licenses. While that money must go toward recreation, ecological studies and capital improvement projects qualify as rising-tide efforts. 

Right now, that funding model is broken. For the past two decades, purchases of fishing licenses and hunting licenses have declined by 1% and 2%, respectively, each year. Some states have moved away from solely relying on consumptive tax and shifted to funding based on state budget or sales tax, or a combination of the two structures. Ohio’s steelhead stocking program alone costs approximately $600,000 per year to operate, but the fishery generates millions in direct economic value to the region. 

“If people still want their state agency to do wildlife-y things, there’s going to have to be some other funding mechanism,” says Wagner. “I just can’t see another 10 or 20 years of decline fueling conservation on the scale we need to when we’re building more and putting more stressors on the environment.”

Starting this year, the Ohio Division of Wildlife is conducting a study, in collaboration with local conservation partners, to hopefully ease concerns. The research is designed to better understand natural reproduction and subsequent survival of steelhead in Cuyahoga River tributaries, and examine this in relation to present fish communities. 

But some impacts can’t be measured.

“I’m an angler, but I’m also a conservationist,” says Durkalec. “If it wasn’t for fishing, I don’t think that connection would nearly be as strong.”

On a sunny day in late September, a slight breeze carries a briskness only detectable in a life lived four seasons at a time. On this gorgeous day, one of the few remaining, I drag my family to the Rocky River Nature Center in North Olmsted under the guise of a hike. “Oh, what do you know,” I say, as we pass a sign reading: 32nd Annual Steelhead Expo, presented by Ohio Central Basin Steelheaders. My wife rolls her eyes. “Seriously?”

Men wearing dirty waders like they’re the latest fashion sit in clinics on fly casting, fly tying and float fishing. A local content creator, @skunkdoutdoors, talks into his phone, discussing the event and today’s river conditions. Vendors sell gear, promote clubs and explain conservation efforts. Outside, my daughter catches her first fish — a plastic one as part of a kids’ game. “I did it!” she beams, proudly wearing a Metroparks steelhead sticker (next to a freaky, toothy lamprey sticker) as her prize. 

A tank in the entryway displays three steelhead, one floating in the corner and the other swimming in circles. The third stares into the eyes of my toddler, who asks, “What’s it like in there, fishy?” I elect not to tell her that Durkalec caught them just days before by electrofishing. Used by biologists to study fish, this method shoots an electric current through the water to briefly stun the fish, so they can be caught without being too harmed. 

An OCBS board member, Durkalec uses this tradition, however non-scientific it may be for a biologist, as an early indicator of how the season might go. 

“It gives me an idea of how many steelhead are around,” he says. “I would say this year’s numbers are about average. Better than last year.”

Charlie Brown said, “If you expect nothing, you won’t be disappointed.” I feel that. But I admit that I’m hopeful a few weeks later as I drive to Euclid Creek at Wildwood Park. We finally got a little rain in this second week of October, and the nights have dipped into the 40s. Plus, throughout this journey, I’ve gained so much knowledge: Fish as the river drops and clears. Don’t overthink it, but the bite is subtle. Be sneaky. Adjust your indicator to ensure your fly brushes the ground.

The water is a weird, murky blue and stagnant in some spots, but it’s deep and has enough movement to float a fly. I zip my phone into my waders, pull my sunglass strap tight and gently step into the water. I work my way upriver so as not to spook any fish. My egg fly isn’t working, so I switch over to a white zonker. The white two-inch streamer, which imitates a dead emerald shiner, is a well-known Great Lakes steelhead magnet. A fast-moving pool under a tree catches my eye. Looks Fishy. I tiptoe up to it as slowly as possible. Thankfully, my camo Rust Belt River Rats hat gives me super stealth. 

It’s a tough cast into a small pool. I don’t have many chances. I exhale and send my fly flying. It plops at the top of the pool. The weight pulls it under. My indicator floats steadily and then dips. I yank the line and pull up on my rod. Splashing chaos ensues, and a flash of bright chrome shines as the trout flies through the air. 

Just kidding. 

Actually, I miss that spot three or four times before my fly gets caught in the branches above. Frustrated, I stomp over, ruining the spot, to unhook my fly. After trying one more spot, my phone alarm goes off. It’s time to get home for the kids’ bath time and bed. I vow to return in a week or so but to not force it. I’ll fish when I can and avoid checking social media and the river gauge when I can’t.

Maybe I need to rethink my mission on Steelhead Alley. As he taught me to fish, my buddy, Andy, was learning to bow hunt for deer. His frustration mirrored my own. Finally, after two seasons of fruitless effort, he shot a buck, the legal limit for the year in Pennsylvania. All that work for one moment. Was it less fulfilling because he couldn’t get 15? No. Maybe, after all that effort, it meant even more. For now, that’s how I’m going to choose to look at things: a hunt for my great white whale — err, silver steelhead. 

I don’t know if Steelhead Alley will return to the former glory that so many remember. Bitikofer, the young guide who moved from Pennsylvania to Ohio, doesn’t expect the “30-fish days” of her teen years to come back. Getting one or two fish per day feels like “a big win” now, especially when guiding beginners. But that’s part of the fun, she says. 

“What brings people back to it is that you could have a magical moment where everything works out,” she says.

I’m sure that magic still exists here in Steelhead Alley, Ohio. It exists in the birds and the trees and the fish and the streams, even the ones under bridges and next to storage units. It exists in the lineage of outdoorsmen, whose impact is felt in our revitalized rivers. It exists in the smart, passionate folks who are doing the hard work of protecting the natural resources and recreational opportunities that define our region just as much as sports teams, rock ‘n’ roll and Downtown restaurants.

This year, I’ll try to remember that it’s about finding that connection to nature, what little of it we have left. That it’s about the romance in the chase; not the catch.

But God, it’d be a whole lot easier if I could just catch one.

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