The river has definitely changed. I used to catch trout in pretty good numbers even in the riffle above the pool at the old power plant. No more.

The Fish Commission would stock at various sites between the dam and Warren so the fingerlings were pretty spread out. Not sure if they still do that.
Even though the stocking list indicates both browns and rainbows, I never caught a stocked fingerling brown but caught hundreds of rainbows. And to boot, they were in the 7-8 inch range by July most years. Some years they would add a fall stocking which was usually 9-10 inch rainbows.

Last time I fished in June (and I've mostly stopped making the trip in the summer) we saw no signs of the fingerling trout in any of the usual places we'd catch them. It basically went from seeing hundreds of fish to zero despite the fact that the fish commission website stil lists a fingerling stocking, it was as though the stocking never happened.

Another change that seems to be occurring is the availability of bass upstream from Warren. When the trout were plentiful, bass of any size were super rare from the bridge at the refinery up to the dam. I haven't attempted to examine temp data from the USGS, but I'd guess that in the past few years, summer temps have either achieved a higher value than in the past, or are higher on average. A similar thing happened in the 1980s with some really hot summers and a decline in trout. It also did not help in the 80s that there was a major fish kill during a summer when the only discharge was from from the powerplant at the dam due to repairs to the dam itself.

Another complication is the source of many of the larger browns. I'm convinced they are born in the few tribs of size (brown run and hemlock run). If anything is affecting those streams then so goes the trout as well.

So, the cause of the change is probably complicated. I'd love to talk to the biologists about what they think but I'm pretty sure they are ignoring this area. I once had a biologist flat out tell me that there were no trout in the river after they turned up none during sampling. I sent him a few pictures to sway his beliefs and it really did take awhile for him to actually believe me that the fish came from the river!

I still think the river will continue to be a viable trout option. The ups and now downs of the population are part of the puzzle.