'Sometimes you only get one shot.' Restoring salmon habitat and rejuvenating a South Seattle beach

Logs are being adjusted and plans are in place for floating gardens to be deployed into the cove of Be’er Sheva Park in South Seattle. The goal is to bolster fish habitat as part of a larger project to rejuvenate a Lake Washington beach that serves historically Black and diverse neighborhoods.

Ashley Townes is leading the roughly $300,000 project, working alongside others on the Rainier Beach Link2Lake committee, a neighborhood group working to renovate the park. The effort began in 2016.

This project is an example of what a diverse community can do when it has the resources to invest in its environment, Townes said.

“The power restoration in a predominantly BIPOC neighborhood is really neat,” she said. “You really see that a lot in North Seattle, where it's predominantly white, is very homogenous there… However… salmon do not discriminate. They go everywhere.”

Townes, who lives near the beach, is a fish ecologist in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington. Her work focuses on creating healthy water ecosystems. She said the stakes can be high.

“You can mess up in restoration… your design could be flawed in many ways because you never thought like a fish,” she said. She’s also on a deadline, aiming to have the restoration completed before a new batch of juvenile salmon make their way upriver in January.

The endangered Chinook juveniles, which are about the size of a finger, spawn in a river to the south called the Cedar River. They make a stop here on their way to Puget Sound and then the Pacific Ocean. It’s an adaptation of the fish after the geo-engineering that took place, part of which included the creation of the Lake Washington Ship Canal, artificially linking the lake to the sea.

It’s that same canal that a barge loaded up with logs passed through to bring to the cove, at the small delta of Mapes Creek, a few meters away from the beach.

The creek used to be buried in a culvert, but in an effort partly to conserve salmon habitat, ecologists dug out the creek in 2015, in a process called daylighting.

“That's wild to me,” Townes said.

Learning about the daylighting project inspired her to keep investigating efforts to restore fish habitat in South Seattle.

“I went on and on down this beautiful rabbit hole, and I discovered, wow, Chinook salmon come here, but… they naturally shouldn't be coming here, but they do now,” she said.

It’s with that realization that this project began to form.

A 2020 US Fish and Wildlife report suggested that the delta of the creek, near the site where the logs will be placed, didn't have enough food or shelter for the juvenile Chinook to thrive. The report concluded that the area did not have the preferred conditions for small invertebrates from Lake Washington to live in and around.

That report also found that since the fish habitat was partially restored in 2015, the number of juvenile salmon more than quadrupled, but then dropped off in a later count.

“It is unclear if this variability was due to differences in the annual abundance of juvenile Chinook salmon in Lake Washington, differences in our sampling protocol, or changes in habitat conditions,” the report said.

What was clear according to the 2020 report was that vegetation growth was pretty successful around the creek. But it also said that success could have also been the downfall for the fish population, because it made it easier for what would have been fish food to hide.

"This ecosystem is so fragile, so we got to be careful," Townes said. "Sometimes you only get one shot."