Seattle Parks and Recreation is inviting visitors to Carkeek Park this weekend to catch the start of the annual chum salmon run in Piper's Creek, with staff, volunteers and watershed advocates on hand to explain what the fish are doing and why it matters. Volunteer Salmon Stewards will be at the park to answer questions from visitors, and organizers are using the event to teach people about salmon lifecycles and the habitat the fish need to spawn successfully.
The weekend event is a joint effort between Seattle Parks and Recreation's Environmental Education Team, the Carkeek Watershed Community Action Project and Seattle Public Utilities, according to a post from parkways.seattle.gov. The post describes the gathering as a chance to witness the beginning of the chum run and points readers to the city's fall programming schedule for additional details. Seattle Parks and Recreation also posted about the occasion on Facebook.
It's salmon “seeson” at Carkeek Park!
What Volunteers Track Each Season
The Carkeek Watershed Community Action Project conducts spawning surveys at the creek. When volunteers find dead salmon, they record details including length, width, species, sex and whether the fish successfully spawned, according to the organization's survey documentation.
Those surveys are the reason Carkeek's 2024 run became a local milestone. The Seattle Times reported that volunteers counted more than 1,500 live chum salmon in a single day that year, a record count, according to the newspaper. KNKX Public Radio separately reported that by Nov. 20, 2024, organizers said they had already counted nearly 2,000 fish, more than double the previous record of 975 set in 2022 — a figure the Carkeek Watershed Community Action Project's own final report lists differently, citing a highest single-day live count of 1,545 that year. The two figures describe the run using different counting language, and the available reporting doesn't clarify whether they measure the same thing.
A Sharp Drop in 2025 — and What It Might Mean
The boom didn't repeat the following year. The Carkeek Watershed Community Action Project's 2025 survey data found the season's total chum count came in at just 14% of 2024's historic high. That still landed closer to the park's prior 10-year median of 311 fish than to the 10-year average of 666, which the record 2024 season had skewed upward. The group's data also showed 2025's highest single-day live count was 188 fish, far below the 1,545 counted on a single day in 2024.
A director with the watershed group told KNKX that the size and health of the 2024 return, paired with strong runs elsewhere in the region, pointed to favorable ocean conditions that year. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, however, cautioned at the time that it was too early to draw broad conclusions, noting some Puget Sound chum runs had slowed and that the regional peak typically arrives closer to Thanksgiving. The state agency's numbers tell a similarly mixed story across years: it projected the 2024 Puget Sound fall chum run at 818,793 fish, up 26% from the prior year.
Why Carkeek's Numbers Bounce Around
Chum counts at Carkeek have swung wildly for years, which organizers say is itself a lesson about reading salmon data carefully. The park logged just 54 returning chum in 2019 and 190 in 2020, among its lowest runs in recent history, according to KNKX. Smaller year-to-year shifts have long been part of the pattern too — the Carkeek Watershed Community Action Project's own records show the 2017 fall run came in about 41% larger than 2016's, with 338 fish compared with 240.
Chum salmon return to Piper's Creek to spawn and die in the same stream. Organizers ask visitors to stick to designated trails rather than stepping into the creek bed itself.
