The festival booths on Front Street are gone. The fish ladder behind the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery at 125 W Sunset Way is still busy, and the fish in it now are mostly a different species from the ones the crowds came to see in early October.
The salmon that define Salmon Days are Chinook. The Friends of the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery say Chinook arrive first and spawn through mid-October. Coho arrive from late September through November. So by the end of October, the Chinook run is mostly done and the coho run is still going. While the coho are still coming in, a third fish starts spawning a few miles north in the creeks that feed Lake Sammamish, and that one lasts into January.
The hatchery's own numbers show it's early in the coho run
The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife publishes a weekly escapement report that tracks fish arriving at each state hatchery. In the preliminary report dated October 15, 2026, the Issaquah Hatchery's fall Chinook total was already 7,045 hatchery-origin adults, with the latest entry dated October 14. That's a full run.
The coho line in the same report looks like a run just getting started. As of October 14, the hatchery had taken in 2,000 hatchery-origin adult coho plus 305 jacks. 1,662 of those adults were still on hand, and the egg-take column for Issaquah coho was still empty.
The comparison point is last year. FISH's homepage still shows its final hatchery statistics, dated November 18, 2025. They list 4,955 Chinook arrivals and more than 5,200 coho arrivals for the 2025 season. If this year's coho run lands anywhere near that, the mid-October count is well under half of it, and most of the coho run happens after the festival.
FISH describes the yearly cycle in simple terms:
| Window | What's happening at the hatchery |
|---|---|
| Late August | Adult salmon start arriving for fall spawning |
| Through mid-October | Chinook arrive and spawn |
| Late September through November | Coho arrive |
| Tuesdays, starting late September | Volunteers help hatchery staff harvest eggs |
| Winter | Eggs are sorted in incubation trays, then fry move to the outdoor raceways |
The winter detail tells you where to look later on. Once the fry go outside, the Chinook are raised in the ponds in front of the hatchery building, and the coho are raised in the ponds across the creek. The state hatchery raises roughly 3,500,000 Chinook and 1,000,000 coho a year.
What you can see on a November visit
The hatchery is free and open every day from dawn to dusk. The viewing windows, the bridge over Issaquah Creek, the fish ladder and the raceways are open that whole time. The visitor page lists the restrooms, the aquarium room and the small theater with its 8-minute film as open daily from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., though the same page gives 4:30 p.m. for the theater elsewhere. In late afternoon, the indoor rooms may already be closed while the fish ladder is still open.
The spawning work is what most people come back for. FISH's 2026 viewing page says Tuesdays and Wednesday mornings in October featured spawning, but it doesn't post a schedule for the rest of the season, so there's no promise of seeing it on a given day. FISH's description of the hatchery's seasons says volunteers help harvest eggs on Tuesdays starting in late September and that coho keep arriving through November. That makes a Tuesday in November the most likely time to catch it, though it isn't guaranteed.
A few details help with planning:
- Docent tours cost $10, run about 50 minutes and need to be booked at least a week ahead, according to FISH's visitor page. There are no regular walk-up tour times.
- The FISH gift shop is open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays in November, and by appointment in December.
- Trout feeding runs March through November, so November is the last month for it until spring.
You can also watch salmon outside the hatchery grounds. FISH's 2026 page notes that Chinook and coho migrate through Lake Sammamish and Issaquah Creek, and it links to a map of other creek viewing spots. This year's run has been going for a while. Visit Issaquah reported the first 2026 salmon sighting in Issaquah Creek on August 27 and describes the season as running from late August through November.
The creek the coho swim up has changed
For anyone who has watched Issaquah Creek for years, the coho swimming up the lower creek this fall are moving through a channel that looks different than it used to. The Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust says it finished an in-stream restoration of lower Issaquah Creek in fall 2025. The project reconnected the floodplain and side channels and added more than 500 pieces of large wood. The Trust's 2026 page says those structures held up well in the December 2025 flood. King County's 2026 Salmon SEEson coverage also lists the Issaquah Creek restoration as an added salmon-viewing opportunity.
The City of Issaquah's habitat update from September 30, 2026 dates a lower Issaquah Creek restoration to 2022, so the city and the Trust may be describing different phases of work on the same stretch. That same city update says more work is in design. That includes restoring Laughing Jacobs Creek and replacing two culverts there, plus restoring Squak Valley Park South. Completion is projected for the late 2020s at the earliest.
Some of the work is already visible. The city scheduled closures at Squak Valley Park on October 14, 15 and 21 so King County could deliver and install its new Crystal Creek bridge, and warned of temporary traffic impacts on Issaquah-Hobart Road. If you walk the park in November, check whether the new crossing is finished.
The kokanee start before the coho finish
The kokanee season overlaps the last weeks of the hatchery coho run, and this is the fish that keeps the salmon calendar going into winter.
Lake Sammamish kokanee are small relatives of sockeye that spend their whole lives in fresh water and never go to the ocean. King County's Salmon SEEson listing calls them one of only six known native kokanee populations in Washington, and says the handful of streams that feed Lake Sammamish are the only place to see them within 90 miles of Seattle. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife says they leave the lake for tributaries to spawn starting in late October and early November.
The main viewing spot is Ebright Creek, just over the line in Sammamish on the east side of the lake. Details from the Salmon SEEson listing on ParentMap:
- Where: 127 E Lake Sammamish Pkwy SE. A small unmarked parking area sits on the west side of the parkway, between the road and the East Lake Sammamish Trail.
- How to find the creek: Walk about 50 feet south on the trail to where the creek passes under it.
- When: Sightings are possible from early November through late January.
- Before you go: Call 206-477-4746 to check whether kokanee are visible.
- Best light: Early morning or late afternoon, to cut down on glare. Bring polarized glasses.
- Courtesy: The site is in a residential area, and the listing asks visitors to be considerate of the neighbors.
Seeing kokanee at all is a recent change. In a May 2025 release, King County reported more than 8,300 adult kokanee in the 2024–25 spawning run. That was the second-highest return since monitoring began in 1996. The low point was 19 fish in 2017–18. On the young-fish side, Three Rivers Trout Unlimited counted nearly 40,000 kokanee fry in spring 2025 across Laughing Jacobs, Lewis and Ebright creeks. The group says that number is a sample, not the full count.
The recovery effort continued this year. In July 2026, the Lake Sammamish Kokanee Work Group held a summer gathering and salmon bake at the Snoqualmie Indian Tribe's new Harvest Kitchen, opened by Tribal Chair Robert de los Angeles and King County Executive Girmay Zahilay, according to King County Field Notes. The same report credits new box culverts under the East Lake Sammamish Trail and Lake Sammamish Parkway with opening up upstream habitat. It also says a fish-passage project on George Davis Creek is scheduled for completion later in 2026. The Ebright Creek viewing spot is where Ebright Creek passes under the East Lake Sammamish Trail.
A salmon season that runs into January
Taken together, the hatchery data and the habitat reports point to a season that keeps going for months after the festival:
- Late October through November: Coho at the Issaquah Hatchery, with egg harvest most likely on Tuesdays. The fish ladder and viewing windows are open dawn to dusk, and the indoor rooms close in the afternoon.
- Early November through late January: Kokanee in Ebright Creek and the other small streams feeding Lake Sammamish. Call ahead and go in low light.
- Winter: Hatchery eggs sorted in incubation trays, then fry moved to the raceways, with coho in the ponds across the creek.
Two other Issaquah dates fall in the same weeks. Squak Mt Nursery opens its holiday shop on November 2 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., with nine themed trees. At Village Theatre, Come From Away opens November 10 while Ragtime finishes its run on November 15. Coho keep arriving at the hatchery through the end of November.
Angie and the team at Angie Holmstrom love hearing what our Eastside neighbors are watching for each season, whether that's coho at the Sunset Way fish ladder or kokanee under the East Lake Sammamish Trail. If you've been planning around Issaquah Creek or the Lake Sammamish shoreline and want a local perspective on the area, let's connect.
