King County has removed the last of 13 barriers that blocked fish from reaching spawning grounds around Lake Sammamish, capping an eight-year effort that just reopened George Davis Creek in Sammamish to kokanee salmon and other native fish. New box culverts installed beneath the King County Parks' East Lake Sammamish Trail and the City of Sammamish's East Lake Sammamish Parkway now give fish access to restored habitat for the first time in a century.
According to KOMO News, King County completed all 13 fish-passage projects along the lake over the course of eight years, with the George Davis Creek work marking the final piece. Kokanee salmon, unlike their ocean-run salmon cousins, spend their entire lives in freshwater, and the recovery effort tied to these barrier removals began nearly two decades before the project's completion this fall.
A Run That Nearly Vanished
The urgency behind the work traces back to a dire count: just 19 adult kokanee returned to spawn after the 2017-18 run, prompting King County and its partners to step up both emergency and long-term actions, per the station's report. The crash reflected a broader collapse documented by the Snoqualmie Indian Tribe Environmental & Natural Resources program, whose habitat blueprint found that kokanee numbers had plummeted and their distribution had narrowed across the lake system, with recent data at the time suggesting two native runs were likely already extinct.
The turnaround since then has been dramatic, though the exact season tied to the biggest number is contested. A King County release cited by the same program described more than 8,300 adult kokanee returning during the 2024-25 spawning run, while a separately worded King County snippet attributed that same figure to the 2023-24 season. Either way, biologists believe restoring access to upstream habitat contributed to the larger run, according to the county. The Snoqualmie Tribe's own count found an estimated 8,000 kokanee returned to spawn in Lake Sammamish creeks at the end of 2024, which it called the third-highest return since official counting began in 1996 — a sharp contrast with the roughly 400 fish per year the tribe says has typically returned lake-wide, a level it considers too low to sustain a stable population.
Why George Davis Creek Took So Long
George Davis Creek runs through Sammamish, and the fish-passage and storm improvement project there has a long history. The City of Sammamish says its Public Works Department initiated the project back in 2018 to address an aging drainage system, but the work was paused for approximately three years to resolve legal challenges — the city's materials do not detail what those challenges involved or how they were resolved. The city formally selected Northwest Construction Inc. as the contractor in March 2026, finally clearing the way for construction.
Once built, the project is designed to create 900 feet of potential spawning habitat where none currently exists and provide unimpeded access to another 4,900 feet of pristine habitat upstream, the city says. City of Sammamish news materials describe the lower creek restoration work as running from spring through late fall of 2026, including new 17-foot box culverts at East Lake Sammamish Shore Lane Northeast and the King County trail crossing, plus a short-span bridge replacing the non-fish-passable culvert under East Lake Sammamish Parkway.
Volunteers Plant Trees, Trout Unlimited Plans Eggs
Beyond the concrete and culverts, Snoqualmie Indian Tribe volunteers, City of Sammamish volunteers, and King County volunteers planted native trees and shrubs along the creek, intended to shade the water and help keep it cool for fish. King County officials say incubating eggs directly in George Davis Creek could increase the odds that kokanee return there to spawn, and Trout Unlimited plans to place fertilized kokanee eggs in an incubator in the creek in early 2027, drawing from adult fish collected in other streams that feed the lake.
Kokanee typically spend an average of three years in Lake Sammamish before heading back to their natal streams to spawn, though the Snoqualmie Tribe's broader kokanee blueprint puts that window at three to four years. King County Parks plans to open a reconstructed section of the East Lake Sammamish Trail, including a creek overlook, by the end of 2026, giving visitors a vantage point onto the newly reopened waterway.
The George Davis Creek project is the latest in a string of habitat fixes around the lake. The tribe's own restoration work on Zackuse Creek, which began in 2009 with repairs to the creek outlet, saw three impassable culverts replaced in 2018, opening roughly 1,500 additional linear feet of stream habitat — part of the same broader blueprint that once flagged the East Lake Sammamish Trail culvert as a priority fix.
