New York is two stories: a modest Lake Erie tributary program in the west, a continent-scale Lake Ontario salmonid program in the east, and one agency — NYDEC — holding both ends together since the 1970s.
New York is two stories. On the Lake Erie shore, the state runs a modest tributary program — Cattaraugus, Chautauqua, Eighteen Mile, Canadaway, and a handful of others — that mirrors in scale and rhythm the Pennsylvania and Ohio fisheries to the west. On the Lake Ontario shore, New York runs the largest salmonid stocking program on the Great Lakes by total volume, anchored at the Salmon River Fish Hatchery in Altmar and built around a Pacific-salmon-and-steelhead system that was scarcely conceivable when Lake Ontario's commercial fishery collapsed at mid-century.
Both shores share a parent program — the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC, or, more recently, simply NYDEC) — but they were built in different decades, against different ecological backdrops, and with different objectives.
Lake Erie's New York shore
The Lake Erie tribs in New York are dominated, in the angler's mind, by the Cattaraugus. The "Catt" is the longest steelhead trib on the south shore, runs through the Seneca Nation reservation, and produces the kind of multi-day fishery that the smaller Ohio and Pennsylvania creeks cannot. New York's Lake Erie program is smaller in fish-count terms than Ohio's or Pennsylvania's, but the per-river stock densities and the Catt's sheer water volume make it disproportionately important to anglers traveling from across the basin.
The strain situation on Lake Erie's New York shore is more complicated than the single-strain Pennsylvania model. The Catt fishery includes Washington-strain steelhead originally derived from the Lake Ontario program, with naturalized resident rainbows in the upper sections. NYDEC has occasionally trialed Skamania-strain stockings — fish that run earlier in summer and pull anglers into the river in July and August — though the bulk of the program remains the standard fall-spawning steelhead that defines the rest of the Alley.
Lake Ontario and the Altmar hatchery
Lake Ontario is the deeper, colder, more biologically structured of the two New York Great Lakes. Its midcentury commercial fishery, like Lake Erie's, was hammered by sea lamprey predation and overfishing. By the late 1960s the lake had a thinned-out fish community and a runaway alewife forage base — a textbook ecological setup for the salmonid-stocking experiments Michigan was then pioneering on Lake Michigan.
NYDEC, in cooperation with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, began Pacific-salmon and steelhead plants on Lake Ontario tributaries in the early 1970s. The Salmon River Fish Hatchery, built in 1980 in Altmar at the head of the Salmon River's tribs, became the engine of the program. Altmar produces chinook salmon, coho salmon, brown trout, and steelhead — the steelhead component drawing on Washington-strain broodstock collected from wild-returning adults at the hatchery itself. Decades of broodstock work have created a Lake Ontario Washington strain that is, like Pennsylvania's PA Lake Erie strain, locally adapted.
The Salmon River became, on the strength of the Altmar program, one of the most heavily fished trout-and-salmon rivers in North America. Pulaski, the small town at its mouth, was reorganized economically around the run. The pattern of a lakeside town discovering a winter and shoulder-season economy from a stocked fishery is one we will return to in the Towns chapters; it played out differently and at different scales on the Catt at Gowanda, on the Erie tribs at North East and Conneautville, and most dramatically on the Salmon at Pulaski.
The 2026–2035 plan
NYDEC's most recent comprehensive Lake Erie Steelhead Management Plan, covering 2026 through 2035, codifies several decisions that had been operationally true for years: Cattaraugus Creek is now formally designated as the program's "buffer system," which means that if hatchery production falls short in a given year, Cattaraugus stocking gets reduced first because the river holds cold and stays fishable later into spring than the smaller tribs. The plan also tightens the strain-selection criteria for the Lake Erie program and aligns sampling protocols across the tribs.
New York is the bookend of the Alley to the east, but it is also the doorway to a different fishery — a deeper, colder lake, a longer river, and a fishery whose history was written in the same decades as the Alley's, by some of the same people, with a wider catalog of fish.
The current operational picture — annual stocking by river on both lakes, the Salmon River Hatchery's full species roster, recent regulation changes — is on the New York Stocking Program page. This chapter is the history. New York's program, more than Ohio's or Pennsylvania's, makes clear that the south-shore steelhead fishery is one chapter of a Great Lakes salmonid story, not a separate book.
