Salmon from Sunset Way Bridge in downtown Issaquah in early October. Photo by Dan Hintz.

Click to enlarge. Map courtesy of King County.

Restoration work has occurred along sections of all 13 miles of Issaquah Creek, partnering with local agencies like the City of Issaquah, King County, the Department of Natural Resources, and private landowners to implement projects. However, one location stands out for the scale and visibility of salmon habitat restoration work: Lake Sammamish State Park.

Chinook salmon population numbers have been declining over the past several decades, and the reasons are complex. When talking about Salmon Recovery, you often hear of the four “H’s”: Hatcheries, Hydropower, Harvest, and Habitat. The restoration at Lake Sammamish State Park focuses on the latter “H,” habitat. Salmon need freshwater streams like Issaquah Creek to spawn, and for juvenile salmon to feed, grow, and hide from predators in freshwater before making their journey through the Salish Sea and out to the Pacific Ocean.

 Major indicators for healthy freshwater salmon habitat are stream temperature (salmon need cool water), water quality (pollution and other runoff can endanger salmon), dissolved oxygen levels (salmon need healthy oxygen levels for aquatic life), food sources (presence of macroinvertebrates for example), and instream habitat diversity such as deep water pools, flood refuge, edge habitat, and more generally, places to hide.

Arguably, no other living things connect more directly to these critical elements of freshwater salmon habitat restoration than trees! Trees provide shade for our rivers, filter pollutants from stormwater runoff, attract insects and other food sources for fish, and even after they die, fall into our streams and increase the instream habitat complexity which is so essential for salmon.

This brings us back to Lake Sammamish State Park, where the Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission, the Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust staff and AmeriCorps members, and a total of 64,000 volunteer hours have contributed to planting over 50,000 native trees and shrubs across 60 acres of Issaquah Creek’s riparian buffer since 2002. This project work was primarily funded by the WRIA 8 Cooperative Watershed Management Grant Program.

Walk any of the trails (Sunset Beach is a good place to start) along the mile-plus of Issaquah Creek that passes through the State Park, and you can see young forests developing along with a few old relic cottonwood trees (which the bald eagles and blue herons love) that survived the tree clearing and wetland draining for the dairy farms that occupied this land before it became a State Park.

Although planting a tree into the floodplain soils along Issaquah Creek is, in and of itself, a fairly simple task, ensuring that those seedlings grow into tall, mature trees that enhance salmon habitat is an effort full of seasonal cycles, repetition, and much sweat and blood, often produced by removing the thorny, invasive blackberries that do their absolute best to persist and outcompete our native trees. Most native trees can provide some ecological lift and function for streamside habitats, but it is our native evergreen conifer trees, like Western red cedar, Douglas fir, and Sitka spruce, which are the stalwarts of riparian (streamside) restoration.

For these recently planted conifers, you could be talking about hundreds of years from tree planting to mature trees dying and falling into Issaquah Creek to improve instream habitat. Restoration is not a pursuit for those who lack patience. For every annual tree growth ring created, there are many factors and forces that our native conifers must face to survive. After planting trees during our reliably rainy fall and winter months, young trees with limited root systems must quickly adapt to native soils (often depleted of nutrients due to past agriculture use and lack of organic inputs like leaves and branches), summer heat and droughts, insect pests and deer herbivory, and of course the persistent invasive plant species that are not ready to give up their dominance so easily.

These annual battles are most important during what we call the tree (or stand) establishment phase, which usually takes at least 5–10 years after tree planting. Volunteers and seasonal crews have spent thousands of hours at Lake Sammamish State Park removing invasive weeds to decrease competition, spreading mulch to improve soil conditions, watering trees, installing plant protection to keep deer from girdling trees, and inevitably, replanting trees to replace ones that don’t make it through those early, vulnerable years.

A restoration program calendar for this type of work is so consistent year to year it can seem like déjà vu all over again. However, after the excitement of planting your first trees at a restoration site, it is really the next several annual cycles of maintenance that ensure a successful project and healthy long-term trajectory for our burgeoning forests. Unfortunately, this maintenance is often hard to fund as grants have limited timelines, and there can be fundraising fatigue over raising money for the same project areas year after year. It is critical that we keep an eye on the big picture and realize that a century-plus of habitat degradation and declining salmon populations will not be fixed overnight. It takes consistent dedication, hard work, and repetitive maintenance activities, like pulling the same weeds every spring and adding more mulch to a site you mulched two years ago.

An example of how spur jams form instream complexity.  Photo courtesy of Northwest Hydraulic Consultants.

While there is certainly still an urgency to fund and implement more of this work, there is also a pleasure and satisfaction that comes with the cyclical restoration of nature. Restoration work needs to be appreciated for these incremental, relentless gains that come from putting a tree in the ground, watching it leaf out in the spring, clearing it of invasive weeds in the summer, and remembering that if we do this right, those trees will provide for salmon long after our time passes on this earth. 

The Mountains to Sound Greenway National Heritage Area is a unique geographic corridor made up of connected ecosystems and communities spanning 1.5-million acres from Seattle to Ellensburg. National Heritage Areas are defined as places where historic, cultural, and natural resources combine to form cohesive, nationally important landscapes. The Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust is a coalition-based organization that leads and inspires action to conserve and enhance this special landscape, ensuring a long-term balance between people and nature.

We work to conserve and restore natural lands, open spaces, and historic sites; build and maintain recreational trails; engage with students through our environmental education program; advocate for public lands and recreational access; lead a robust volunteer program; and so much more.

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Thanks so much for your interest and your support.