Michigan started the Great Lakes salmon fishery in 1966 and still supplies the steelhead eggs that stock half of it. Its own agency writes the clearest description anywhere of the thing anglers most often get wrong.
Seasons, limits and licence rules are set by your state agency.
Each bar below spans January to December, with today marked, and draws the quoted sentence underneath it. Where an agency describes a run by season rather than by month, the card carries the sentence without a bar.
The state says fish are present in catchable numbers by mid August. The bracket here is the period the Department of Natural Resources runs its Little Manistee weir, with the egg take in the first two weeks of October.
Chinooks begin their upstream migration in late summer and are usually present in catchable numbers by mid-August.
Later than the Chinook and travelling further up the same rivers. The state notes a late October fishery on the Manistee and fish still moving in the St. Joseph as late as Christmas.
Depending on the tributary, coho spawning runs occur from early September to November.
The single most useful sentence in this whole vertical. Fish are in the river from late autumn, but they do not spawn until spring, and the ones that came in earliest spawn first.
Lake steelhead enter their spawning streams from late October to early May. Although many steelhead enter the rivers in the fall and overwinter there, spawning does not occur until spring.
Michigan is the only Great Lakes state with a real Atlantic salmon run to describe. The St. Marys River fish start moving in midsummer and keep going until November.
Spawning migrations vary by stream of origin, but the St. Mary’s River run typically begins in mid-summer and runs until November when spawning commences.
| River | Water temp | Flow | Measured |
|---|---|---|---|
| Little Manistee Riverat Nine Mile Bridge | Loading | Loading | |
| Manistee Rivernear Wellston | Loading | Loading | |
| Pere Marquette Riverat Scottville | Loading | Loading | |
| Muskegon Rivernear Croton | Loading | Loading | |
| Grand Rivernear Eastmanville | Loading | Loading | |
| St. Joseph Riverat Niles | Loading | Loading | |
| Au Sable Rivernear Au Sable | Loading | Loading |
Source: USGS Water Services (National Water Information System). Instantaneous values service. U.S. Geological Survey data are works of the United States Government and are in the public domain. Gauge list verified 2026-08-24.
The Little Manistee is the river the whole thing rests on. Michigan takes no steelhead there from a hatchery; the run is wild fish and strays, and the eggs collected from it become the Little Manistee strain that Ohio and other states then stock in their own tributaries. The weir goes in around the middle of March for steelhead and around the fifteenth of August for salmon.
No steelhead are stocked by DNR in the Little Manistee River. The run consists mostly of naturally reproduced fish and strays from other rivers.
Fish passage counts are published by the programmes that run the counting stations, linked below with what each one reports.
Run windows on this page are quoted from the agency named beside each one. River conditions come from the U.S. Geological Survey and are readings, not forecasts and not fish counts. Fishing seasons, bag limits, gear rules and licence requirements for Michigan are set by the agency linked here, and a run window is not an open season. For rules, see Michigan Department of Natural Resources. National picture: every state with a salmon or steelhead run →
Hero image: “Pere Marquette River in Fall, Manistee National Forest” by Yetiwriter, CC BY-SA 3.0