Record-breaking salmon run at Carkeek Park’s Piper’s Creek

**A record number of salmon made their way up Carkeek Park’s Piper’s Creek this fall.

Volunteers with the Carkeek Watershed Community Action Project (CWCAP) counted over 1,500 live chum salmon in a single day in November—that’s more than the total recorded during an entire spawning season since annual counts began in 1987.

Piper’s Creek, which drains into the Puget Sound, was historically one of the primary tributaries that supported runs of steelhead, sea-run cutthroat, and coho and chum salmon. In 1893 the Great Northern Railroad was built over the creek, and in 1906 the railroad built a rock seawall and placed the creek in a culvert under the tracks. Over-fishing, urbanization, and the additional of storm-water drainage ditches let to the demise of the historical salmon runs in the 1920s.

In 1929, a large portion of the Piper’s Creek watershed became Carkeek Park. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) said the Carkeek Watershed Community Action Project (CWCAP) started rehabilitating the watershed in 1979 along with Seattle Public Utilities and Seattle Parks and Recreation.

The coalition educated the public, improved water quality and fish passage, lobbied to halt fishing at the mouth of Piper’s Creek during spawning season, and added an imprint pond, which is a retained area of the creek where the new hatchery fish spend time to acclimatize to the creek. Now, there’s an off-channel imprint pond along Venema Creek. Those efforts, along with adding weirs (small dams to change the water flow) and planting plants and shrubs along the creek have created a more natural salmon habitat.

The salmon enhancement project at Piper’s Creek is a stock supplementation program, which means that the Suquamish Tribe’s Grover’s Creek Hatchery provides egg and fry for release into Piper’s Creek. The WDFW says the chum fingerlings are first introduced into the Les Malmgren imprinting pond, usually as part of Earth Day activities at Carkeek Park.

According to David Koon with the CWCAP, the young fry are held in the pond and fed between for 10 to 30 days to imprint them to the “smell’ of the creek system and help them to return as adults to spawn.

Salmon spend about two to three years at sea, and return to Piper’s Creek as 7 to 15 pound adult fish. The returning chum salmon are a mix of fish from the releases of hatchery fry and from the natural spawning that happens in Piper’s Creek. Koon says a normal return of salmon is about 300.

The salmon return to Piper’s Creek starting in late October, and the salmon run peaks between November 15 and 20. It typically concludes by the first week of December.

The salmon run has concluded for the season.

Photo: Carkeek Park Salmon Stewards

**This story has been updated with corrections.