Pioneering conservationist and advocate Bill Bakke is the first recipient of the Deschutes River Alliance River Champion Award. This award honors someone whose work and accomplishments have been instrumental in the protection and improvement of the lower Deschutes River. The award was announced at the DRA 2023 Gathering and Auction on Saturday, Feb. 25.
Bill has spent his life advocating for wild fish. A Northwest native, he grew up fishing rivers and streams throughout Oregon and Washington. As Bill began seeing the effects of poor harvest and hatchery management, he was among the first conservation-oriented anglers to search the scientific literature and understand those early observations. Using science, Bill would go on to advocate for change to anyone who would listen.
Bill’s pushing and prodding helped the fishing clubs, and others, understand what was happening to the fisheries. He even educated the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife on the value of maintaining and managing wild trout fisheries whenever possible.
In his decades of work as a fish and river conservationist, Bill with a small handful of others has been responsible for continually raising awareness of the value of wild fish runs and habitats. He has been a lightning rod over the years for coalescing together others, who care about fish and conservation, to get stuff done that makes a difference. One of his, and Oregon Trout’s most lasting impacts in Oregon, was leading the charge to eliminate hatchery trout in the Deschutes River and establish a catch-and-release fishery for wild trout.
Bill’s contributions and accomplishments include securing the Oregon Wild Fish Management Policy in 1978, the first in the nation to protect native fish species; founding Oregon Trout in 1983 (now The Freshwater Trust) to provide a conservation voice for native fish; and pioneering the use of the Endangered Species Act to protect wild salmon and steelhead. Bill has written more than 100 articles on fish conservation for sporting, scientific, and news journals, and has been featured in numerous books about salmon conservation.
“Bill is a walking legacy in the world of wild fish conversation. His fingerprints are on nearly all significant efforts to enhance wild steelhead and salmon since the 1980s. Without his leadership, hardly a river in Oregon, including the Deschutes would still have viable wild trout populations and catch and release regulations. There are few, if any, people in Oregon that have done more to preserve wild fish,” says DRA supporter Paul Franklin.
“It was through angling that I concluded wild salmon, steelhead, and trout and their home rivers are constantly changing environments and these wonderful, beautiful animals have adapted to over their 5 million years of evolution,” says Bill.
“These fish have continued to survive, even though the indigenous people have relied on them for food and celebrated their return annually for over 10,000 years and, following Lewis and Clark in 1805, this landscape has been changed by our culture, to make rivers and land serve our economic purpose. It is the persistence of these fish, and the landscapes they have adapted to, that must be defended by each of us and organizations like the Deschutes River Alliance. The Deschutes River Alliance is our collective voice to save the beautiful Deschutes River for the future of wild salmon, steelhead, and trout,” says Bill.
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