The first 14 of what is hoped to be a bumper crop of Snake River sockeye salmon had arrived in central Idaho's high country through Thursday. That's already double the return of the previous two years combined.

"We're hoping this is really going to take off in the next 5 to 10 days," said Kurtis Plaster, a senior fisheries technician at the Idaho Department of Fish and Game's Eagle Hatchery near Boise. Through Wednesday 847 sockeye had been counted climbing over the lower Snake River's Lower Granite Dam, which is more than 400 river miles away from their destination in Idaho's Stanley basin.

That's the highest count on a record dating back to 1975. The next highest was a count of 531 in 1976. Between 1984 and 2000 the Lower Granite sockeye count never topped 50.

This year's peak sockeye counts at Lower Granite were during the first two weeks of July. In the past, the trip from the dam up the lower Snake and Salmon rivers has typically taken about three weeks so hatchery officials are hoping returns to Sawtooth Hatchery and a Redfish Lake Creek trap will soon start to spike.

Plaster said that early summer river conditions have been accommodating for spawners, running cooler and higher than is typical.

The fish are the product of the IDFG's Snake River Sockeye Captive Broodstock Program. The returning adults have been trapped either at Sawtooth Fish Hatchery or in Redfish Lake Creek and hauled to Eagle Hatchery where they will be held until they are ready to spawn. They will either be spawned at the hatchery or released in Redfish Lake to spawn on their own.

At least five of the fish trapped so far did not display a clipped fin, which means they were hatched in the wild. They were produced by hatchery-reared or returning adults released to spawn in Redfish Lake, mostly likely in 2004, or from fish that emerged from fertilized eggs from the hatchery that were outplanted in nearby Alturus or Pettit lakes. The fish with fin clips are hatchery-reared fish released as smolts or pre-smolts.

Genetic tests will be conducted to determine the exact origin of the fish.

Last year only 57 sockeye were counted at Lower Granite, and only four of them made it back to the hatchery. Only three reached their destination in 2003.

The captive broodstock hatchery program was initiated in 1991, the same year the Snake River sockeye stock was listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. It was started with 16 naturally produced sockeye salmon – the only to return to the basin between 1991 and 1998. No naturally produced fish have returned since 1998.

Several hundred Redfish Lake wild juvenile out-migrants and several residual sockeye salmon adults were also used to develop captive broodstock at Eagle and at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Service facilities in Washington state.

In 2000, 257 adult sockeye made it back to the Stanley basin's Sawtooth Hatchery or Redfish Lake Creek, by far the biggest return to program. The next highest total is 27. In 2000, 299 sockeye were counted passing Lower Granite.

The Snake River sockeye run is a small part of what has been a gigantic 2008 sockeye return to the Columbia River basin. The sockeye count at Bonneville Dam was 213,533 through Wednesday. That's the third highest count on a record dating back to 1938. Counts in 1953 and 1955 were 235,215 and 237,748, respectively, according to data posted online by the Fish Passage Center.

Bonneville is the first dam the salmon pass on their say upriver. Lower Granite is the eighth and final dam the Snake River fish pass on their 950-mile swim from the ocean to central Idaho.

Most of the sockeye are returning to Wenatchee Lake and the Okanagan River's Osoyoos Lake. The 2008 pre-season forecast was for a total return of 75,600 sockeye to the Columbia basin with 13,700 bound for Wenatchee Lake and 61,200 for Osoyoos Lake. The Wenatchee and Okanagan are rivers branching from the mid-Columbia in central Washington.

That forecast has been surpassed with 191,411 counted at Priest Rapids Dam so far.

The basin's steelhead run is also surging. The Bonneville Count through Wednesday was 133,962, including 53,277 "wild" steelhead.

The 2008 steelhead count at Bonneville through July 24 was 2.09 times greater than the 2007 count of 48,703 and 1.44 times greater than the 10 year average, according to the FPC. In the week since, counts have ranged from 4,527 and 5,894.