BAKER RIVER, Skagit County — Scott Schuyler cut the motor on his skiff as the driftnet traced the current. White corks keeping the net afloat began to vigorously tremble through the emerald waters.
“See those?” Doreen Maloney, his mom and general manager of the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe, said from the riverbank, pointing to the corks. “There’s fish in there.”
The river was alive with thousands of sockeye salmon, fresh with energy from the saltwater: leaping, dashing through the riffles and crowding in a pool as the pristine waters called them home.
As other salmon runs edge toward extinction, the Baker was beckoning in a record run this summer. At least an estimated 90,000 sockeye will return from their high-seas journey to feed the land, forest, bears, osprey, human families — and spawn the next generation.
It was an extensive intervention over decades after Puget Sound Energy’s largest hydropower operation nearly drove these fish to extinction. The complex series of concrete ponds, chutes — and even an elevator, a fish taxi and a hatchery — that the salmon need to navigate are far from what the river’s original runs traversed, but it’s working.
In general, sockeye are not doing well toward the southern end of their range, where the effects of climate warming are much more pronounced.
Fraser River runs are declining and becoming more variable from year to year. For over a decade, Columbia River sockeye have been increasing, but elevated water temperature delays migration, at times, causing mortality before they reach their spawning grounds. Lake Washington sockeye continue to struggle amid heat, disease and predators that thrive in the warmer waters.
Yet here, in the glacial-fed Baker, the sockeye are booming.
“Getting people out on our ancestral river and reviving the fishing culture — the fish made this possible,” said Schuyler, policy representative for natural and cultural resources for the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe. “The fish are amazing. They have a will — they just need a little help from us.”
Fish camp
Fish camp was abuzz soon after sunrise.
Upper Skagit community members Leela Mathias and Sherman Williams-Griffin racked a green driftnet in undulating folds in Upper Skagit Vice Chairman Edmond Mathias’ boat as the Swainson’s thrush trilled from the river banks. Fishers Ricky Emmsley and Mike Pfluger, Upper Skagit tribal members, shoveled ice in totes to keep their catch cool.
“It’s our way of life,” said Upper Skagit tribal member Joe Rodriguez, who learned to fish from his dad. “It’s more than just making money, it’s culture. It’s just carrying on our way of life, spending time with family.”
Many generations ago, Upper Skagit people made a village here named S.báliuqʷ to protect the people and resources of the Baker Valley.
Then the dams were constructed. The runs came crashing down. Before the Boldt decision, tribal members exercising their treaty rights to fish in their usual and accustomed areas faced the threat of violence and arrests by the state.
Decades passed without a sockeye fishery.
As a fisheries technician in the mid-1980s, Schuyler would climb in Puget Sound Energy’s adult trap to count and sample adult salmon. There was a fish passage system and hatchery already in place intended to mitigate the impacts of the dams.
“Obviously none of this stuff was helping, because in 1985 the run went nearly extinct,” Schuyler said. Fewer than 100 fish returned that year.
There were ongoing disease problems in the hatchery that led to fish kills. Many young fish weren’t able to migrate out of the lake because of the previous inefficient passage system. When the dams’ relicensing came up, Schuyler met with Puget Sound Energy executives at the negotiating table.
Upper Skagit’s first priority was saving the sockeye from extinction. That meant updating the smolt fish passage system for the Upper and Lower Baker dams to improve outmigrant efficiency and building a new hatchery, in combination with wild spawning.
Schuyler would run some back-of-napkin calculations of what a meaningful fishery might look like to the Upper Skagit people and outlined a goal of 75,000 to 100,000 returning sockeye annually.
“We’re going to hit it, aren’t we?” Maloney asked Upper Skagit field coordinator Mike Bartlett on the river bank in July.
“I think so,” Bartlett confirmed.
Maloney pumped her fist, a grin washing across her face.
And the fish kept on coming.
Help from humans
After growing for about a year in Baker Lake or Lake Shannon, young sockeye likely head out through the straits and up the continental shelf, and scientists think they spend summers in the Gulf of Alaska or the Bering Sea and winters in the Gulf.
On the return from their journey, those that narrowly escape the grasp of hungry seals, sea lions and orcas and fishers’ nets follow the scent of their home waters — heading up the Skagit to its confluence with the Baker River.
Ospreys and eagles lurk in the towering canopy as the sockeye make their final burst, following the flows through human-made ponds.
On a recent summer day, the floor of a water elevator raised the sockeye from river level to a metal chute.
Staff tallied the fish one by one as they came clanging down.
It’s taken a century to fine-tune the machine river to better accommodate fish.
The Baker River hydroelectric project is PSE’s largest, with four turbines that can churn out enough electricity to meet the peak needs of 96,000 homes. The first dam, Lower Baker, was completed in 1925.
Today, alongside electricity, the system provides what many describe as state-of-the art fish passage and hatchery production. The adult fish that enter the trap will be drained into trucks stationed below the raceways and taxied to Baker Lake or the hatchery.
The fish released to the lake will spawn at seeps and springs in the upper Baker River above the lake.
At the hatchery, some sockeye will be cut open, eggs poured out and mixed with milt by human hands. Others will be released into four human-made spawning beaches, where they can naturally select a mate and conditions mimic the wild.
Fry from the hatchery are released into Baker Lake and Lake Shannon where they can rely on an abundance of daphnia, or water fleas, to grow big before heading to the saltwater.
Smolts are gathered from the lakes at collectors for truck transport around the dams.
This year, over 1.5 million smolts headed out for the saltwater.
The lakes offer pristine, ideal conditions for the growth of these young fish, but some worry about the future.
“We have this cold water that supports these fish. All these other things that we’ve talked about, those can be all fixed,” Schuyler said. “But the potential for losing our glaciers? That’s the concern I have.”
Changing climate
As Baker River sockeye find their groove with some human intervention, their slightly southern neighbors from Lake Washington continue to struggle.
Perhaps it’s disease, the deadly 2021 heat dome or Lake Washington’s general warmth, or the walleye, bass and other predators that have grown accustomed to a juvenile sockeye feast.
Baker Lake doesn’t have the urban issues that Lake Washington runs have to face, said Leeroy Courville Jr., chair of the Muckleshoot Fisheries Commission. About 70% of the adult sockeye counted at the Ballard Locks are not making it through the lake to their spawning grounds, Courville said.
Their survival may hinge on a trucking operation by the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe and state Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Some Columbia River sockeye are also being trapped and trucked past hot water blocking access to their spawning habitat, as part of a pilot program led by the Okanagan Nation Alliance Fisheries and Grant and Chelan County Public Utility Districts.
Sockeye aren’t as vulnerable to climate impacts as steelhead, but aren’t as well off as pink and chum. That’s because pink and chum spend so little time in freshwater.
Meanwhile, steelhead are surface-oriented and migrate farther out, making them more susceptible to ocean heat waves.
Sockeye happen to be thriving where their habitat is still intact in the northern end of their range, and where a little bit of warming can actually boost their chances of survival.
Bristol Bay sockeye appear to be benefiting from warmer conditions where they enter a more productive Bering Sea, said Laurie Weitkamp, a research fisheries biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
And, rising lake temperatures in the Bristol Bay watershed have helped juvenile fish grow faster than they did some 30 years ago. Bigger smolts are correlated with higher survival rates in the ocean.
About 56 million Bristol Bay sockeye have returned this year, said Daniel Schindler, professor in School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington.
“As a long-term solution, trap and haul systems, sure they work,” Schindler said, “but I really think it’s important that we emphasize maintaining, protecting, restoring the habitat that fish need over their entire life cycle.”
