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Did you know that a dozen species of salmon and steelhead native to the rivers of Puget Sound are listed under the Endangered Species Act?

The barriers to their survival are many from water quality to the loss of habitat to actual physical barriers that keep fish from completing their complex life cycles.

But barriers are slowly being broken.

And on the Hood Canal, the barrier to the area's salmon and steelhead runs isn't being broken, but modified.

As Northwest Now, Steve Higgins tells us, a group called Long Live the Kings is one of the stakeholders in an experiment to see if a large structure called a fill, It can help Steelhead and salmon survive their journey past the Hood On a rainy and muggy July morning along Hood Canal.

It seems Mother Nature forgot to pack the summer sun.

A little rain never slowed down logging industry.

Nor can a little drizzle delay.

Conservationists working to save salmon runs along the third canal rivers.

It's really our responsibility to help restore balance as best we can.

Biologist Joy Walter Meyer works for Long of the Kings at the little up field station tucked away from Highway 1 to 1 along Lulworth Creek sits along with the Kings Conservation Fish Hatchery.

This is where 28 giant tanks raised naturally fertilized seven eggs taken from Wood Canal, local river and the duck bush and the dodo rivers.

The populations were so depleted that close to 60 to 80% of the juveniles that we caught the year after were either progeny from one or two of the adults that we released after spending 2 to 4 years at the hatchery.

Long live the Kings releases hundreds of steelhead back into their native spawning rivers where they begin their journey out of Puget Sound.

The salmon runs, returning from the ocean continues to decline year after year.

Around the state, the seals they have very little pressure.

So these predators don't have the predators predation of the whales that we used to see the orca whales.

And so the numbers are so out of whack and our food chain is completely suffering.

And unfortunately, steelhead are migrating out at a time when there's very other salmon.

And so they're small numbers.

They're just getting hit so hard.

NOAA's mission to protect and recover listed species steelhead are listed, and it's been my job for 17 years to try to figure out why they're not Those populations aren't doing well.

NOAA research fisheries biologist Megan Moore says Steelhead were listed as threatened back in 2007.

The fish have been tracked by scientists ever since 2006 and every year after researchers recorded steelhead mortality rates that were steadily on the rise.

So scientists decided to take their research even deeper.

Skin deep, we use acoustic transmitters and we implant these tiny acoustic tags in the body cavity of the fish, anesthetize them, do the little surgery.

We put the we do the incision, put the tag in the fish, and then use sutures to close up the wound.

And then they recover in like a minute.

And then we let them kind of acclimate overnight, and then we release them back into the river by surgically inserting acoustic telemetry tags into the steelhead.

Researchers could track their movements as they swim north through Hood Canal.

And I can show you actually have one of the receivers.

This is what the receivers look like.

They're these little units and they're deployed on the bottom of the ocean around the Canal Bridge and we use those to triangulate the position of individual fish.

And while the transmitters were good at tracking steelhead movement, there were also good tracking where their movement suddenly halted more often at the Hood Canal with a floating bridge connecting markets up.

And Jefferson Counties really didn't know what would be causing that.

At the time.

We didn't know if it was going to be, you know, light coming off the bridge, if it was sound generated by the bridge, if it was the structure itself.

If it was something about the the hydraulics, the way the bridge affects water movement and water quality, if we're losing up to half the fish that encounter the bridge when they're young steelhead migrating out, then all of that effort to try to increase the populations of steelhead in the Hook Canal is it's not for naught.

But we're definitely, you know, limiting our success by allowing them to then perish in the Canal Bridge in 2020.

Long live the Kings prepare to report gathering data in government, tribal and nonprofit organizations that detailed the bridge's potential impact on the environment in salmon runs.

Washington estimates an average of 2000 vehicles crossed off the bridge every day.

The pontoons that keep the bridge afloat sink about 15 feet into the surface.

But Juneau steelhead typically only travel in the top meter of water, making those pontoons act like a barrier.

Radio transmitters attached to the fish tell researchers nearly 50% of the steelhead heading towards the ocean don't survive past the floating bridge.

The study suggests seals are likely taking advantage of stranded, migrating still have those pontoons also jut outward from the bridge for stretches aboard.

And researchers believe the infrastructure confuses steelhead, sending them into a holding pattern back and forth along the span where they make for easy prey when they get delayed.

That messes with their anti-predator behavior, so they're really not able to evade predators like they normally would be.

And so they're spending all this time at the bridge vulnerable to predation.

That's why long of the kings and partners ponied up more than $1.5 million to design, construct and transport this giant yellow device and then attach it to the side of the Hood Canal Bridge.

It's called La Follette.

It aims to cut the corners and hopefully push more steelhead towards safe passage out of the canal.

But if we can get them around the bridge and we can try these different techniques to help them get around the bridge, that this is a solution that can work.

Long live, The king says.

So far, anecdotally, the fallout looks to be promising, but more rigorous study over new data must be complete to determine its true effectiveness.

The team is also looking over new visual acoustic data seen here, showing how seals have used the bridge's pontoons to corral and attack steelhead.

And you can see how the seal use it.

Is the bridge, the structure to kind of herd this school of fish into the corner, and then it'll come up through the middle of the school of fish and feed on it.

Other obstacles posed by the bridge identified in the study also impact migrating steelhead.

But it's the fleet the Kings believe could allow the largest number of steelhead to pass successfully beyond predation and onto adulthood.

Full analysis of the fillets impact might not be fully understood until the summer of 2024, but for those working on this project, it's a sense of hope that Steelhead now have a fighting chance.

I grew up going to Girl Scouts camp and learning how to sail on Hook Canal, and it's a really special place and near to dear to people's heart.

And so we all want to see the salmon and the steelhead survive in this kind of habitat, and we want to see Hood Canal thriving.

And she be able to see orcas coming in and, you know, be able to have the kind of ecosystem that that we all remember.

A love.

So considering all that's at stake, from the steelhead themselves to the orca that rely on the nutrition and the salmon's cultural significance to our region and beyond.

Long live the Kings believe saving salmon is how we save ourselves.

We can make it better.

It's not doomsday.

We have technologies.

We have really smart people and passionate public.

And I mean, we're Washingtonians.

This salmon and steelhead are synonymous with our existence, and it truly is our responsibility to not give up on the Hood Canal.

Steve Higgins for us now.

Kings is also looking into a plan to modify the operation of the locks and the Lake Washington ship Canal.

Barriers with long histories of keeping native fish from thriving in King County.

Meanwhile, you drive over road culverts every day without realizing they've prevented millions of fish from migrating.

A recent court decision ordered a $4 billion repair program.

And as John Lambertini tells us, while it's a massive statewide project, each small piece that gets completed adds another river or small creek to the list of waterways that can support salmon just like Jason Goldman has been fishing the waters around Tulalip Bay for most of his life.

I started fishing with my grandfather when I was about ten years old.

I bought my first boat when I was 13, you know, fishing by myself.

But Goman has never known a time when the salmon population wasn't in crisis.

We don't see salmon recovering.

That's that's a hard thing to to deal with.

You know, I always go back to, you know, our tribe.

We stopped fishing on wild Chinook in the Snohomish River back in the early 1980s.

Now 45, he said of natural and cultural resources for the Tulalip Tribe.

That time, our fishermen and elders thought, well, if we just stop fishing on them for a cycle for years, then we'll, you know, the population will come back and we'll be able to start fishing again.

But the Pacific salmon population continues to struggle.

The Chinook Coho chum, pink and sockeye.

So we got a rise of six feet and the span for more than a decade, there's been an intense focus on blocked fish passages.

Culverts can be a barrier to salmon and steelhead returning to spawn.

On this day, Dean Campbell and his crew of volunteers from Trout Unlimited are working in the South Fork of the Stillaguamish River.

The Fish and Wildlife Department of State of Washington has a protocol for evaluating these culverts to determine whether they are a barrier or not.

They can be partial barriers that simply inhibit Fish's ability to get upstream to spawn 11.0 yards.

For decades, these culverts were an afterthought as the state tried to head off damage caused by heavy rains and disabling washouts there estimated anywhere from 40 to 45000 culverts in this state.

And nobody knows where they are.

It's a tedious job finding which culverts are most valuable and which species of salmon benefit most.

There's certain amount of bushwhacking to get to the point where he can understand on what kind of a culvert or passage is there.

Steve Miller organizes volunteer groups while also serving as the state conservation chair for Trout Unlimited.

I would say Chinook, Coho and Sockeye is simply because they tend to spawn further up in the watershed.

They have a longer passage.

Different areas they have to traverse to get there.

The pinks and the chums spawn lower in the watersheds so they don't have to go past as many possible obstacles.

As far back as 1991.

Washington has been working to identify and correct fish barriers.

But in 2013, a federal court ordered the state to work faster.

Today, roughly 1000 fish barrier projects are the subject of this work in western Washington.

In Pierce County, two major road construction projects include rebuilding bridges, clearing and rerouting fish passages along Purdy Creek.

Justin Young is Wash Dot's project engineer.

So it'll include realigning the stream to a new location and creating a new riparian zone and removing the barrier in order to allow species to pass through better.

But in the decades since that federal court ruling, Washington has completed just 114 fish passage projects and a 2030 deadline is fast approaching.

We have 100 barriers that are under contract right now and we have 300 more in the pipeline that we'll have under contract in the next 18 months.

It's time consuming work, taking years in some cases.

Kim Riddle was in charge of fish passage delivery at Watchdog.

We have gained a significant amount of experience in this work, so we have been able to figure out ways to be more innovative with our project.

We've been bundling barriers together, which is more efficient, but maybe more importantly, the state legislature is contributing in bigger amounts, billions of dollars more.

And then has this work moving forward in the fast lane.

We have hired the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife to do what's called spotter surveys.

And Washington is already seeing progress where it counts most in the water.

And we found that about half of the sites have salmon spawning upstream.

Soon after the project's complete, tribal communities are watching the progress and even contributing their ideas.

I think there's been some really good strides in the Snohomish on the estuary, but it's this is a long term ask to come back.

For Jason Goldman and the Tulalip Tribe, the slow progress is frustrating, but the bar is low with a fragile salmon population.

My objective, of course, is to have the salmon, the state of the salmon stay the same as it is now and not have any more loss.

Chinook, Coho and sockeye salmon are endangered species in Washington, and the threats are many in King County.

Dave Kyle is diving the depths of Lake Sammamish, a lake full of non-native aquatic weeds, weeds that absorb the heat and warm the water overnight, sometimes leaving behind a toxic soup for salmon.

Our salmon here are at a critical point where I work mainly on Kokanee salmon here.

And if we aren't able to turn their current trajectory, they would be gone in 10 to 15 years.

It's estimated more than half of the coho salmon that return to the Puget Sound each year die before they ever spawn.

The Center for Urban Waters in Tacoma made a connection with six PPD, a toxic chemical used in the production of Every tiger in the world.

We go above and beyond what we need to do from regulations and laws in order to treat stormwater.

Recognizing that link wash dollars.

Taking extra steps to filter runoff as it's building new culverts.

Kim Reed Home Security is definitely a hot topic in our agency, something that we're tracking closely.

You recognize the need to treat our stormwater prior to entering into the streams.

Bio swales have become a staple of that work.

The neatly landscaped planter boxes that filter storm runoff.

There are a number of what we call best management practices vamps that we can build on the side of the road, sometimes for very low cost.

That will really well filter out the contaminants before they get into the streams.

The streams and rivers and ocean waters tell a story.

The salmon and in that time on the water, is central to our culture.

And without that, you know, we start to lose that our cultural identity.

With the salmon population struggling to make a comeback decades ago.

Jason Goldman's family and the two later people took matters into their own hands.

That's the hard thing to see.

You know, if the tribe hadn't taken the initiative back in the early eighties and built our hatchery program that we have here in Tulalip Bay, we wouldn't be fishing today.

They're treaty rights to fish these waters for salmon in perpetuity, even when the future isn't so certain.

barrier as we speak about our dams and lately dam busting has gained momentum.

It happened on the Elwha and White salmon and dams on the Skagit and snake rivers are in the crosshairs.

Two dam removal most certainly comes with a high price, but it also opens up miles of habitat at higher elevations with colder water.

The city of Bellingham's Diversion dam on the exact river came out three years ago.

I traveled to Whatcom County, where the Nook's tribe says the dam's removal is an example of the watershed by watershed restoration that's necessary right now in hopes of bringing back strong salmon and steelhead runs in the future.

Three years ago, the City of Bellingham's Drinking Water Diversion Dam was blown out of the middle fork of the exact river, unblocking 16 miles of pristine salmon habitat.

It was the top priority in the effort to restore the exact watersheds to fading species of Chinook salmon.

Today, the middle fork flows freely, much to the satisfaction of George Swan, who set JR.

He's the exact tribe's cultural resources director who says the headwaters are described by the word hacker.

I guess for lack of translation or lack of better terms, it's like a heaven.

It's like we're where it all comes from.

It's all period.

It comes from up there.

So it gives us, it gives us it opens that up for us again.

That feeling we hear people say, we are old ones, believe this.

This is how it was.

But no, today we still believe that's the way it is.

And if we don't believe, then our kids won't be encouraging the belief in the sacred nature of the headwaters is culturally important, but also essential to sustaining the massive effort underway right now to save salmon and steelhead on the three forks of the nooks app.

Joe Rodriguez is part of the tribe's natural resources team, monitoring the river, always looking for signs of life and hoping to someday see the effects of the dam's removal.

I am optimistic about the future because we still have we still have our children and they are our future.

I still think there's hope for us.

I still think there's a chance that we can educate more of our younger youth about natural resources and the importance of Chinook salmon for future generations.

So when there are barriers, we do our best to, You can only work against it for so long before you have to speak up for the environment.

The natural beings who can't speak up for themselves.

Tribal chair Rosemary Leclaire says the tribe was just part of a large coalition of governments and nonprofits that came together to end two decades of delays, resulting in a free flowing river and a less intrusive drinking water diversion further upstream.

While win win is a bit of a cliche, longtime Bellingham assistant public Works director Rene Lacroix says that's exactly what it was.

And so I think it's a neat project because it does inspire other smaller jurisdictions that don't usually take down big infrastructure to do something like this so everybody can learn something from it, hopefully, and then take it forward and do what they can do.

It's really nice that the local governments are on board with us.

It's almost as their canoe is right next to our canoe in this journey.

But we still need to educate because even though the local governments are on board, you know, there's still the general population and the general population is certainly affected by all this.

Whatcom County recently approved a recreation ban on the river to reduce the stress on returning fish who get bumped out of their resting spots every time a tuber or a boat passes over.

All but ceremonial fishing is a no go, too.

It's all part of the strategy to try to mitigate the results of climate change that bring wash out floods in the winter and low flows and high temperatures that in the summer of 2021 killed 2400 Priestman Chinook salmon on the South Fork.

367 engineered logjams have been placed in the South Fork to provide fish with places to hide and cool.

And Maggie Taylor is part of the team that monitors factors like water temperature when they're out here monitoring temperature.

It's really helpful to kind of know where the problem areas are.

So, for example, we know that the South Fork is more temperature impaired than the North Fork or the middle fork, where you have these glacial inputs of cold water.

We don't have that here in the South Fork.

And so we know that it's an area we have to pay attention to to target where those fish die offs might occur and where we might install restoration projects like logjams to help create these cool pools that act as temperature refuges for salmon.

While the Nooks Act system as a whole has only achieved 1 to 2% of its salmon recovery goals, both hatchery and in-stream spotters are showing up to use the logjams.

And while in-stream fixes are important, they're limited.

The real challenge is in expanding the 11,000 acres acquired by the Whatcom Land Trust in the Floodplains and Upslope Nooks Act.

Assistant Natural Resources Director Trevor Carr has been working on this for 24 years and says convincing landowners to reconnect the floodplains to the river is essential in the face of climate change to mitigate flood risk in the winter and provide better flows during hotter, drier summers.

But I'm hopeful that we can move towards more sustainable land use practices.

You know, this is a working landscape.

We, you know, thriving economies, vibrant communities is certainly we, you know, the broader community wants to see.

It's going to it's it's going to be a challenge.

There's certainly a challenge with climate change, but there's less water.

There'll be less water available certainly during summer.

So it's going to be a challenge to find those solutions that sort of are probably beneficial.

While lawsuits are rarely seen as beneficial.

An upcoming suit to be filed by the Department of Ecology actually might be.

50 years after the Boldt decision and tribal recognition, it's a plan to finally adjudicate water rights in the exact watershed.

Tribal chair Leclaire says for now, water allocation is a bit of a free for all.

But with that said, she hopes a formal adjudication process will help all the competing interests understand what's at stake and ultimately encourage all parties to keep working together to find more win win solutions.

Water adjudication for the next act means that we'll be able to.

Everybody who has rights to the waterways will have it in black and white.

It's an issue that that involves everyone.

So I think that little by little, people will start understanding once we are all in it together.

Another barrier to restoration is what the tribe says is a slow permitting process, thanks to FEMA.

The agency is concerned with how we in-stream habitat fixes impact properties in the floodplain under the National Flood Insurance Program.

But Trevor Coe says delays like that can be deadly because it is time to go big or go home.

Right now, recovery and we look at 100 years for recovery.

The challenge with that is that this is happening.

We don't have a static climate and so the baseline is shifting.

And that really underscores the urgency of doing what we do.

But faster at a larger scale.

For now, the tribe and its many partners will keep working, working to break the barriers, both physical and administrative, trying to save native steelhead and two native runs of Chinook that are vital to the tribe.

Two sportsmen and the 140 other species, including the Puget Sound Orca, that rely on them.

That's a lot of our hope is our kids are going to be growing up the same way, preserving our culture and our way of life now.

So there are children who can live the same way.

We need to do what we can and we're all in it together.

And as long as we continue to lean on each other and know what the issues are, we can hopefully work together to resolve them for the future, even though we are going against climate change.

So throwing up our hands in despair isn't an option.

Oh, no, no, no, no, no.

When it comes to breaking the barriers from big dams on major rivers to culverts on tiny streams, there are no silver bullets.

It's a massive, decades long effort where the sum of the work is greater than all of the small parts.

That work is underway on just about every watershed in the state, with billions of dollars slated to be spent trying to save the Northwest's most iconic species, which are central to native culture.

The food supply for more than 100 other species and the linchpin of $1,000,000,000 fishing industry that's in deep trouble from California all the way up to Alaska.

As always, I hope this program got you thinking and talking.

I'm Tom Layson.

Thanks for watching.

Northwest now.