This will be a moderately Easy, 4-mile round trip bike ride, on a paved path.
Bear Creek in Central Point has some good locations to view spawning Chinook salmon in late October. These wild animals can occur at various locations which is why we will use bikes to travel along the Greenway and stop in a few locations to look for salmon. We will ride the Bear Creek Greenway path from the Expo upstream towards Table Rock Road.
Salmon Facts
Fall is a great time to get outside in the region to watch salmon return inland from the Pacific Ocean up rivers to their natal watersheds. Of the six species of Pacific salmon, two occur in the Rogue basin: the Chinook salmon (also known as king), Oncorhynchus tshawytscha, and the coho salmon (also known as silver), Oncorhynchus kisutch. All of the Pacific salmon are anadromous, meaning that these fish are born in fresh water and then make their way to the ocean where they live for a period of time, reaching maturity, before returning to the freshwater streams and rivers where they were born.
There, the fish reproduce by laying their eggs in nests known as redds, and completing their lifecycle, thus rejoining the inland food web and contributing their bodies as nutrients to the surrounding water and land. The Rogue River and its tributaries support some of the largest salmon populations in Oregon. In addition to salmon, other anadromous fish in the Rogue include steelhead trout, Oncorhynchus mykiss, the anadromous form of rainbow trout, and Pacific lamprey, Entosphenus tridentatus.