Issaquah Salmon Hatchery

Adult salmon reach the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery in late August. The Chinook come first and meet a weir stretched across Issaquah Creek, and they jump against it. The weir blocks them and turns them toward gates and a fish ladder. According to the Friends of the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery (FISH), the volunteer group that works the grounds alongside state staff, it carries air bladders so the fish are not hurt. The ladder is glassed in. At its underwater windows and at the adult holding ponds, a visitor stands nose-to-nose with fish that left this creek as smolts and came back years later to spawn.

Inside, each fish is counted. Fish that began life in the hatchery are spawned, and fish born in the creek are released upstream. The two are told apart by the adipose fin, which is clipped on hatchery fish. FISH says all 3.2 million fish the hatchery releases are clipped. In 2026 the ladder was open by September 9. In the first week of spawning, staff spawned 347 Chinook, took 691,000 eggs and passed 31 natural-origin fish upstream. Coho follow from late September through November. On the morning of October 4, 2026, the Sunday of Salmon Days, FISH reported the hatchery “packed with salmon.”

Raceways, murals and a planted drive

The grounds lie between West Sunset Way and Newport Way, two blocks from the old downtown and 18 miles from Seattle. The public library stands across Sunset Way. A viewing bridge crosses the creek, and in fall hundreds of adult Chinook and coho can be seen from it moving upstream. Eighteen raceway ponds hold young coho, Chinook, kokanee and trout. From March to November a $1 donation buys food for the trout, and FISH warns that feeders may get splashed.

The incubation building has a long row of windows and a high-pitched roof. The curved walls of the water tower carry a mural of salmon predators and spawning by the local muralist Larry Kangas. Kangas also painted the mural in the aquarium room, where live salmon grow from fertilized egg to smolt in a setting modeled on a Northwest stream.

Gilda and Finley, two 8-foot coho by the artist Tom Jay, rest among spawning habitat. Opposite the ladder windows is a stained-glass salmon mosaic made in August 2017 by 87 community members aged 4 to 86, who put more than 600 hours into it. The Coast Salish plant garden labels its salmon-friendly natives in English and Lushootseed. In the Steve Bell Theater an eight-minute film, “Salmon, a Miraculous Journey,” runs through the day.

Along the exit drive is a bed about 100 feet long and 2 feet wide. On August 15, 2026, a scout named Ran directed his troop in clearing the weeds and filling the bed with 86 kinnikinnick, 23 western yarrow and 22 nodding onion, all donated by two nurseries.

The creek has other callers. FISH has recorded a beaver climbing under a ladder to get past the weir, a beaver and a heron side by side, a raccoon fishing in the early morning, and a mink.

The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife owns and runs the hatchery. In 2022 two of its employees lived on the grounds with their families. FISH has more than 100 volunteers. They lead tours, keep the FISHop, which stocks more than 350 items including work by local and native artists, and join hatchery staff on Tuesdays from late September to take eggs. Spawning can be watched on Tuesday mornings in October. Docents wear khaki fishing vests and meet tour groups at the flagpole in front of the main hatchery building.

The work turns with the year. Chinook spawn through mid-October. In winter, staff and volunteers sort infertile eggs out of the incubation trays. After hatching, the fry go outdoors to the raceways, Chinook in front of the building and coho across the creek. In spring about 3 million juvenile Chinook and half a million yearling coho, at the smolt stage, are let into Issaquah Creek. They follow the current through lakes and rivers to Puget Sound at the Ballard Locks. In summer the emptied Chinook ponds hold rainbow trout.

Rubber ducks in the raceways

FISH launched Salmon on Sunset, a free one-day welcome for the returning fish, in 2022. The fifth, on September 12, 2026, drew about 8,000 people by FISH’s count. Rubber ducks raced down the salmon raceways every hour from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., with 400 duck racers taking part. About 2,970 people made fish hats at an arts station, and visitors fed the trout 986 times. The Lake Washington Symphony Orchestra played selected pieces, Clown Garage put on street circle shows, and three bands filled six hours. There were food trucks, a beer garden, fly-casting demonstrations and the painting of a salmon shed.

Three weeks later the whole town takes part. Since 1970 the hatchery has been the hub of Issaquah Salmon Days, which the Issaquah Chamber of Commerce presents on the first weekend of October to honor the salmon’s return. The Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust put attendance at 150,000 a year before the pandemic. Brodie Antipa, a former hatchery manager, remembered a festival that hosted up to 200,000. Steve Bell, FISH’s founder, said “the city was a little crazy about salmon,” and recalled the Chamber’s Salmonchanted Evening dance and its information volunteers, called Salmbassadors.

A WPA hatchery on City Park

The ground was once part of City Park. It had a bandstand and a speaking platform for large holiday celebrations, and in the 1920s it drew local events. Townspeople picnicked beside the creek, once known as Squak Creek.

FISH writes that kokanee, a landlocked sockeye, filled Issaquah Creek for centuries and gave native peoples food and a trading resource. Logging, coal mining and other work in the basin wrecked the runs. The federal Works Progress Administration built the hatchery to restore them. FISH and the Greenway Trust date the work to 1936, and HistoryLink to 1936 and 1937.

FISH describes the goal as restoring the kokanee runs. HistoryLink says the salmon runs were so depleted that the hatchery’s earliest stocks came from the Green River. FISH records coho from the Green River and sockeye from the Baker River. Steelhead were raised for years and dropped in the early 2000s. In recent years the hatchery has spawned Lake Sammamish kokanee to support the Kokanee Working Group’s effort to save that critically endangered native fish.

In 1990, flood water overwhelmed the rearing ponds and washed nearly a million coho fry downstream.

A press release from Olympia

In 1992 the state listed the hatchery for closure to cut its budget. The editor Andrew McKean found the news in a state budget-cut press release. Bell called it “like the evil lightning bolt with the stench of sulfur that came from Olympia.” City and county officials, business leaders, teachers and students wrote letters until the hatchery won a reprieve and a year’s funding.

FISH was incorporated in the summer of 1993. By Suzanne Suther’s account, she and founding member Fred Kempe signed the certificate on August 16. Mayor Rowan Hinds is credited with suggesting the name and its acronym. The city committed up to $500,000 in matching funds, which Bell noted was a lot of money for a town of 10,000.

Bell, a former library board member and city councilman, became FISH’s first executive director. He was given a fertilizer storage room in the hatchery garage, unheated and the size of a walk-in closet, with a desk, a phone and a portable space heater. On the footbridge one day he met Mike Mahovlich, a Muckleshoot Tribe fish biologist who was watching the returning adults, and the two found they shared an interest in saving the hatchery. Hundreds of letters went to the governor. Bell judged the students’ letters and drawings the most convincing.

The state eventually put $6.5 million into three phases of rebuilding. Sen. Dino Rossi shepherded the last phase with a $3 million budget. Antipa arrived in 1995, at 25, to manage the hatchery. “It was kind of dark and dreary,” he said.

The rebuilding changed most of the grounds:

• A longer ladder with underwater windows replaced the underground fish ladder.
• Deeper ponds with automated crowders replaced the shallow holding ponds, where volunteers had waded in with big nets to corral fish for eggs.
• A crane dropped a pedestrian bridge twice as wide into place over the creek.
• The incubation building got a new roof and new equipment and kept its original appearance. “You almost feel a spirit within the building,” Antipa said.

Antipa also worked with the city on a waterline from the Darigold plant a few blocks away. It carries pure well water the plant used to chill butter, which the hatchery mixes with creek water to incubate eggs. In 2002, in the final phase, seven granite boulders were set in a semicircle, etched with Phil Hamilton’s drawings and the text of a Salmon People story. In the story, Raven and Mouse visit the Salmon People and bring salmon back to their village, and the bones of the first fish are returned to the river so the fish will come again.

Upstream stood the intake dam of 1937, “a state-of-the-art design in 1937,” as the Issaquah Reporter wrote. Its ladder was built like a staircase with water running down it, and its steps were 12 inches high. In 2012 Jane Kuechle, then FISH’s director, pointed out the 10-foot buttress where coho that missed the jump lay stranded. Of the $4 million system of rock weirs that would replace the dam, she said, “The idea behind it is to make the stream more of a stream.” The Reporter wrote in 2012 that the Legislature had approved the money that year, and its 2014 story gave 2013.

Weather and groundwater delayed the work. On Monday, March 3, 2014, the valves opened, and creek water ran from the new upper intake into the ponds and incubation trays. The new weirs rise 9 inches at a step, with pools between for resting. “It’s critical — they don’t have much life left in them when they get to this point,” said Darin Combs of the Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The FISHop opened in 2012. In 2013 a new aquarium full of salmon fry debuted, and the volunteer David Waggoner called it the first place in the state to show the whole lifecycle with live fish.

The pandemic closed the grounds in 2020. Robin Kelley, once the Salmon Days director and by then FISH’s executive director, asked Antipa about small masked tours. “This is going to be a hard sell,” he told her. He got state permission, and, he said, “Issaquah was then the only place in the state giving tours, and that was because of FISH.” The hatchery reopened to the public on March 21, 2022.

In 2023 Jake Magill joined the FISH board as a third-generation salmon advocate, drawn by family stories of a rescue that happened before he was born.