The chinook or king salmon is the largest of all salmon species. Record chinook catches approach six feet. Juveniles are silvery or gold in color, with dark black spots on their backs. Some young chinook spend only a few months in the stream environment, some up to two years. Chinook seem to prefer deep, fast streams with large gravel.
Adults are blue-green on the back and silvery on the sides.
They may spend as many as eight years in the ocean before returning to spawn in the spring or fall. Adult spawners turn bright red on their sides and dark on their backs. Chinook are perhaps the most economically important and valuable of all salmon. They are highly prized by recreational, commercial and subsistence fishers alike. The National Marine Fisheries Service has recently listed four stocks of chinook salmon in the Pacific Northwest as either Threatened or Endangered.