Pull off Lake Sammamish Parkway SE at 127 E Lake Sammamish Pkwy SE and you will not find a sign. There is a small, unmarked gravel patch on the west side of the road, room for maybe four cars, and a fifty-foot walk south along the East Lake Sammamish Trail to the spot where Ebright Creek slips under the pavement. That is the whole production. No boardwalk, no interpretive plaque, just a culvert and, if the timing is right, a scatter of small red fish holding against the current.
This fall, that unmarked pullout is doing more work than usual. Not because the creek changed. Because two of the more formal ways to watch salmon in this neighborhood are, as of this writing, closed.
Lake Sammamish State Park just finished the largest in-stream habitat project in its history, a two-decade effort to give salmon a creek worth swimming up. At the same moment, the bridges that let people walk out and watch them do it are down. One system, built for fish, just got fixed. The other, built for residents, is behind schedule. Here is what actually changed, what is actually closed, and where that leaves anyone who wants to see the run this year.
Twenty Years Of Work, Finished Last Fall
The Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust has been restoring Issaquah Creek since 2005, and the project that wrapped up in fall 2025 was its biggest yet: in-stream restoration along the lower 4,600 feet of the creek as it flows through Lake Sammamish State Park. Crews placed large woody material into the channel, work timed for mid-summer when salmon are not actively migrating through, to help the creek re-establish a slower, more meandering path instead of the scoured-out straight line it had become.
The scale of the deficit is what makes this worth noting. An informal 2015 survey by the Greenway Trust found just 37 pieces of wood larger than a foot in diameter along that stretch of Issaquah Creek, in a channel that should naturally hold somewhere between 1,100 and 1,500. Salmon need that wood. It slows the water, carves out resting pools, and gives young fish somewhere to hide from predators while they grow strong enough to continue downstream. Without it, the creek was fast, shallow, and largely useless as a nursery.
Getting to this point took more than the final construction push. Over roughly two decades, the Trust and its partners removed invasive blackberry and knotweed, planted more than 50,000 native trees and shrubs along the banks, and logged nearly 20,000 volunteers contributing over 70,000 hours of restoration work. The Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust calls it one of the largest restoration projects in the park's history, and the timing means this fall is the first full salmon run to move through the rebuilt channel.
That is the good news, and it is real. It is also only half the picture.
The Bridges Didn't Get The Same Timeline
Winter storms hit the park's infrastructure hard enough that Washington State Parks has both the Issaquah Creek bridge and the Tibbetts Creek bridge listed as closed due to erosion from high creek levels, with no timeframe yet for repairs. The Homestead Trail is closed too, taken out by a washout. Sections of the Sunset Beach playground have also been closed since early August for resurfacing work, a separate maintenance project but one more piece of the park currently unavailable at the same time salmon are returning to it. As of early September, Washington State Parks still lists all of this as active.
None of that is a reason to skip the run. It is a reason to know before you drive over that the boardwalk near where Issaquah Creek meets the lake, the classic viewing spot inside the park, may not connect the way it used to. The creek got its fix. The path to look at it did not, at least not yet.
Where To Actually Stand This Year
With the in-park bridges out of commission, the more reliable viewing this fall sits outside the closures, at sites that were never dependent on them in the first place.
- Issaquah Salmon Hatchery, 125 W. Sunset Way. Salmon return to Issaquah Creek here daily, visible from the bridge or through viewing windows, with guided tours led by trained docents from Friends of the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery running roughly mid-September through mid-November, both mid-day and some weekday evenings.
- Ebright Creek, 127 E Lake Sammamish Pkwy SE. The unmarked pullout described above, reached by walking a short stretch of the East Lake Sammamish Trail to where the creek passes underneath.
- Lewis Creek, at 185th Place SE in Issaquah. A second self-guided kokanee site, less visited than Ebright, feeding the same watershed.
Ebright and Lewis creeks are specifically where the Lake Sammamish kokanee show up, and this population is not something you can see anywhere else nearby. Kokanee are landlocked sockeye that never make the run to the ocean, spending three to four years in the lake before returning to spawn in the exact streams where they hatched. They are native to Lake Sammamish and a handful of its tributaries, and according to King County, this is the only place within 90 miles of Seattle where they can be seen. Because sightings depend on rain and water levels, it is worth calling ahead before making the drive. King County has staffed a line for exactly this at 206-477-4746.
The population's history is worth knowing before you go, because it explains why the creek work matters as much as it does. Since 2007 and 2008, the number of returning kokanee spawners has dropped below 150 fish in eight separate seasons, a level close enough to collapse that the Lake Sammamish Kokanee Work Group formed specifically to pull the run back from it. The most recent season Sammamish has reported on saw a return topping 8,000 fish, the strongest count in nearly a decade, credited in part to culvert replacements on Ebright and Zackuse creeks that reopened upstream spawning habitat those fish had been locked out of for years.
Two Fish, Two Clocks
Anyone planning a fall outing around this should know the run is not one event but two, on different schedules. Chinook and coho move through Issaquah Creek and the state park boardwalk area from late August into October, with the strongest numbers typically showing up in early October. Kokanee are a separate, later window entirely, appearing in Ebright and Lewis creeks from early November through late January. A trip in late September will show you chinook working their way upstream past the hatchery. A trip in December is a different fish, in a different creek, on a different part of the calendar.
That split matters this year specifically because the two viewing systems, the hatchery bridge and the roadside pullouts, are the ones still fully open. The park's own internal boardwalk, the spot most people default to first, is the one currently tangled up in bridge repairs with no announced end date.
Twenty years of quiet, patient work just delivered exactly what it was supposed to: a creek with enough structure in it to actually hold a salmon run. The park's own bridges have not caught up to that success yet, which is an odd but honest state for a neighborhood park to be in this particular September. For now, the fish are back before the crossings are.
If you live near the lake, or you are weighing whether a stretch of this shoreline is where you want to put down roots, this is the kind of texture that only shows up when you are paying attention to a place season after season, not just its listing photos. That is the work Margo Allan does every day along Lake Sammamish and the rest of the Eastside waterfront, and it starts with a conversation about what you actually want from life on the water. Reach out any time.
