SALMON ARE INVOLVED in everything people love about living in Seattle, whether you eat them or not. They are a symbol, a mascot, an icon and a keystone species in the uniquely beautiful Pacific Northwest environment. Salmon swim up and down the rivers and streams that run like veins through the region, so it makes an odd kind of sense to find a working salmon hatchery in the middle of downtown Issaquah. 

Issaquah Creek begins in the mountains that are sometimes referred to as the Issaquah Alps (including Cougar Mountain, Squak Mountain and Rattlesnake Ridge) and flows north into Lake Sammamish through  the charming Olde Town area of the city.

Thusly placed, the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery is both a scientific facility and an attraction. It is one of the oldest hatcheries in the state, founded in 1936 and built as a Works Progress Administration project. It offers free daily tours during the fall, when the fish are jumping in the stream and the fish ladder is full, though the public is welcome to behold the machinery and peruse the native plant gardens every day of the year.

The facility is an engineering marvel. Long tanks with running water from the creek — called “raceways” — simulate the rivers in which the fish thrive. A  fish ladder uses a series of gradually rising pools to allow fish to move past human-made barriers or, in the case of the hatchery, into the holding ponds. And in the nursery, millions of eggs are stored in flat metal drawers. 

Coho salmon and Chinook (aka King) salmon are born and raised here, then released into the wild when they’re big enough to fend for themselves — a process important to maintaining healthy populations in an environment where their natural courses have been interrupted by the machinations of humans. (The hatchery also raises trout born elsewhere, which are in the same family — salmonidae — as salmon.)

The life cycles of many of the region’s salmon begin at hatcheries, where they are born from eggs that have been harvested from salmon swimming upstream to breed in autumn. When they are big enough to survive in the wild, the fish are released back into the rivers to swim out to sea, where they live for 2-7 years, eating and trying not to be eaten. Once they reach sexual maturity (which differs year to year and species to species, and involves changes in their body characteristics, like color), they find their way back up the same rivers to breed and, having fulfilled their biological purpose, die. 

In the final stage of their lives, salmon are what Friends of Issaquah Salmon Hatchery (aka FISH, a flawless acronym) Executive Director Mark Clemens refers to as “zombie salmon” because they have ceased to feed and are interested only in breeding. These single-minded fish are often sickly, parasite-ridden and skinny — not particularly good for eating unless you’re a bird or a raccoon. 

Every fall, Issaquah Creek, like all salmon streams, is the site of a large-scale annual die-off, a natural part of the salmon life cycle that returns nutrients back into the environment as the fish decompose. The smell is notably ripe, but that doesn’t stop thousands of visitors, students on school field trips and fish fanciers from leaning out over the stream to watch them run, the water turning black with their bodies as they struggle for genetic immortality. 

Some of the returning salmon are ushered into hatchery tanks to be milked for their roe by hatchery biologists and volunteers — 4.5 million eggs’ worth in 2025. The eggs at this stage must be sorted — clear ones are viable, milky ones dead, and green or black ones rotten. Unviable eggs must be removed because they will spoil the rest, so the hatchery becomes a hive of detail-oriented (one might say obsessive) individuals hand-sorting thousands of fish eggs with droppers. Then the eggs are fertilized and raised in tanks before finding their way out into the wild world. Only the luckiest among them will survive the sea’s orcas, seals, eagles and fishing crews to return to their ancestral home and leave their fishprints on a new generation.