Tears for Fears was right: Everybody wants to rule the world, even the organizers of Salmon Days.
Salmon Days enters its 45th festival — taking place Saturday and Sunday — on a high, having won its second consecutive Grand Pinnacle Award for the 2013 festival. Continuing its upward trajectory of growth for Salmon Days 2014, festival leadership has added a 12-ride carnival. The carnival will be held in the Front Street Staples parking lot, and rides will require admission.
The carnival and Salmon Days itself will have different hours. Salmon Days will run from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. The carnival, however, opens Friday and will run for differing hours over its three days. The carnival will run 2-9 p.m. Friday, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday.
Today, Salmon Days is a huge draw for the city of Issaquah, bringing in nearly 200,000 tourists a year. But it began more humbly.
In 1970, the Chamber of Commerce was desperately seeking a replacement for the Labor Day Festival. The Labor Day Festival, begun in 1936, had once been a tourism boon for the Issaquah, but attendance petered out in the 1960s and the event was shuttered in 1968.
Earl Robertson, then the president of the Chamber, wondered: What about salmon?
Robertson knew the city received visiting nature enthusiasts in the fall, when coho and chinook salmon returned to Issaquah Creek to spawn. He believed a festival organized around the return of the salmon could recapture the hey-day of the Labor Day Festival and draw attention to the Issaquah State Salmon Hatchery.
The Salmon Festival (it wouldn’t be renamed Salmon Days for another year) took place on Oct. 3, 1970. It was small, mostly emphasizing the hatchery, bolstered by a small street art show, Kiwanis BBQ and children’s parade. Salmon Days remained small for the first decade of operation, primarily attractive for its parade.
But association with Seafair beginning in the 1980s rapidly grew Salmon Days into a regional attraction. It added an adult Grande Parade replete with Seafair floats. Meanwhile, the diminutive art show became a marketplace and exploded to include hundreds of vendors.
But how are salmon faring?
It’s complicated: according to the history maintained by the Friends of the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery, populations were devastated by logging and mining activities in the early 20th Century. The Hatchery was constructed as a federal New Deal project of the Works Progress Administration in 1936.
Every year, the hatchery raises and releases 2.5 million coho and chinook salmon, both listed as threatened species in Washington state under the Endangered Species Act (Chinook are endangered in the Upper Columbia River Spring run area). Only a fraction of that number complete the upstream return trip to their birthplace to spawn a new generation.
In 2013, 2,554 chinook spawned within the hatchery, along with 10,568 coho. Keeping in mind the numbers can fluctuate wildly year-to-year, the chinook returns were the third-lowest since 1997, while the coho returns were on a significant upswing from a record low of 474 in 2010.
On Monday, the King County Flood Control District approved more than $4 million in grant funding for clean water, habitat restoration and salmon recovery, including $1.5 million for the Lake Washington/Cedar/Sammamish Watershed.
Jacques White, executive director of Long Live The Kings, told a gathering of state and municipal lawmakers at a Sept. 19 hatchery presentation that efforts needed more state attention and financing, illustrating that funds for the state Department of Fish and Wildlife had shrunk as a proportion of the general fund in recent years.
“This is what I call a teachable legislative moment,” he said.
