The Pinks (Humpys) are Runny Hard

The river was just chock full of Pink Salmon last weekend. We spent much time down on the bank watching the show. We saw a huge and strikingly beautiful King Salmon muscle his way up river through the hoards and hoards of Pinks. We hope he got very far up stream and found a suitable mate.

I did a Wiki search and found this:

Reproduction
Male at spawning time

Pink salmon in their native range have a strict two year life cycle, thus odd and even-year populations do not interbreed. Adult pink salmon enter spawning streams from the ocean, usually returning to the water course, or race, where they originated. Spawning occurs between late June and mid-October. Pink salmon spawn in coastal streams and some longer rivers, and may spawn in the intertidal zone or at the mouth of streams if hyporheic freshwater is available. Using her tail, the female digs a trough-shaped nest, called a redd (Scandinavian word for "nest"), in the gravel of the stream bed, wherein she deposits her eggs. As she expresses the eggs, she is approached by one or more males who fertilize them as they fall into the redd. Subsequently, the female covers the newly-deposited zygotes, again with thrusts of her tail against the gravel at the top of the redd. The female lays from 1000 to 2000 eggs in several clutches within the redd, often fertilized by different males. Females guard their redds until death, which comes within days of spawning. In dense populations, a major source of mortality for embryos is superposition of redds by later-spawning fish. The eggs hatch from December to February, depending on water temperature, and the juveniles emerge from the gravel during March and April and quickly migrate downstream to estuaries at about one-quarter gram. The fish achieve sexual maturity in their second year of life. They return to freshwater in the summer or autumn as two year old adults. Pink and chum salmon sometimes interbreed in nature to form the hybrid known as the miko salmon; the hybrids are reproductively sterile.

 
 
 

We tried to get a few good pictures, but It is difficult as the salmon don't stay still very long + they meld in with the coloring of the background. If you look hard at these pictures, you will see the fish.

Once they are through with their reproductive cycle, the Salmon die. The air was getting rather pungent, and I imagine it is even worse now. Fortunately for us (but not the Salmon) they decay rapidly. It will all be over in a few short weeks.