Salmon Rebound After Tribes Fight for Culvert Upgrades

At the dead end of Kitty Hawk Drive Northwest in Bremerton, Washington, an open gate in a chain-link fence leads to a panoramic view of one of the many natural spaces taking shape after unblocking some of the state’s most historic salmon streams.

Following a mulched path and past an embankment of native saplings and plants, visitors can watch the newly restored streambed of Chico Creek wend its way beneath the highway to Chico Bay and Dyes Inlet to the northeast. 

On a cloudy morning in October, a few fishermen stop to offer assessments of the creek’s radical transformation. On this waterway, where twin eight-foot-wide culverts long constrained one of the region’s most productive chum salmon runs, this creek now flows free. Passed the revegetated slopes and carefully positioned woodpiles, it now offers abundant wildlife habitat beneath a new two-hundred-foot-wide bridge spanning the highway. 

The chum salmon have returned. 

In September, the Suquamish Tribe celebrated this completion of a three-year-long construction project with speeches from tribal, county, and state Department of Transportation (DOT) officials, song and dance performances, and a meal of nettle soup and smoked salmon.

Nearly a quarter century has passed since a group of twenty-one tribes, including the Suquamish, sued the state of Washington to force the removal of culverts both poorly designed and maintained under state-owned roads. Often little more than corrugated metal pipes or concrete chutes, they had become nearly impassable for migrating salmon and steelhead trout. 

In 2013, a federal injunction in favor of the tribes’ treaty rights, subsequently upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, required the state to identify and unblock enough culverts to reopen 90 percent of the potential upstream fish habitat. Two years after the start of what was then the largest dam removal project in U.S. history—the Olympic Peninsula’s Elwha River—the court ruling launched a habitat-reconnection effort that dwarfed the scale of the dam removal: the state was required to correct 430-plus culverts on tributaries not only to the Elwha, but also to dozens of other salmon-bearing rivers by 2030.    

By June 2025, Washington’s DOT had addressed 176 of the barriers, but conceded that it would miss the deadline, and that meeting its full obligation would require another $4 billion to $5 billion, in addition to the $3.5 billion already allocated. 

Amid ongoing controversy over construction delays, ballooning costs, and questionable plans at some sites, both sides agreed to a mediation process aimed at charting a realistic new path that would still maximize the recovered salmon habitat. The tribes proceeded cautiously, and representatives of the Lower Elwha Klallam, Quileute, and Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission representing the twenty-one treaty tribes all declined to comment on the ongoing effort.

Each Culvert Is a Unique Story

At an October screening of Unconquering the Last Frontier,  a 2000 documentary about the damming of the Elwha and the struggle to undo the damage, a panel of tribal elders emphasized the connectivity of the river with the surrounding network of streams and tributaries. 

J. J. Wilbur, a member of the Swinomish Tribal Senate, acknowledged that tribal leaders and state officials were still trying to come to a common resolution on improving not just the Elwha, but also the “veins” of the ecosystem. “Everything works in harmony, including the timber and the streams up in the mountains, so we have to continue working together,” he told the audience.  

Despite uncertainty, some of these unclogged streams already suggest how restoring salmon habitat can yield a profusion of added benefits to larger watersheds. Each culvert is a unique story, and recovery won’t happen immediately; one project doesn’t really provide a ready template for others, as one Suquamish tribal representative emphasized.

“Everything works in harmony, including the timber and the streams up in the mountains, so we have to continue working together.”

But connectivity is growing with every removed grate, pipe, and chute. As creeks and streams feeding the Elwha and other rivers run freer and wilder, they reopen to more spawning fish from the Pacific Ocean, while, in turn, reconnecting tribal communities to their historic fishing grounds. 

“As a keystone species, salmon are at the heart of not only the Pacific Northwest’s environmental health, but our economy as well,” Ed Johnstone, chairman of the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, wrote in a 2024 column about the fish passage restoration.

Spillover Benefits

Salmon are rebounding in some tributaries, sure, but the culvert upgrades are redirecting terrestrial wildlife away from traffic, too, and toward more natural migration corridors. The culverts also move contaminated stormwater through bioswales and vegetated filter strips, and rechannel storm surges through more accommodating streambeds. In short, retrofitting something as seemingly mundane as a culvert can have vast ecological and cultural ramifications.  

Kim Rydholm, Washington DOT’s fish passage delivery manager, estimates that about half of the sites, like Chico Creek, have new highway bridges to fulfill the barrier removal requirements. A main goal, she says, is “mimicking the natural stream processes so that when fish go through, they can’t tell there’s a difference from upstream to downstream.” 

As part of the streambed restoration and passageway construction, workers are placing giant logjams or rock piles to create deeper pools for salmon to rest and lay eggs. “What benefits salmon benefits terrestrial wildlife,” says Glen Kalisz, the DOT’s habitat connectivity biologist. “A big log and a rock pile . . . provide attractive cover for species like black bear and cougars and bobcats that want cover within a crossing structure.” Cougars have recently been seen passing through several of the widened culverts, he says, including a family of four recorded on one of the state’s wildlife cameras near the Columbia River. 

Custom Culverts

In June 2025, the DOT released a Washington Habitat Connectivity Action Plan that details how Kalisz and colleagues prioritize each mile of the state highway system based on ecological value and wildlife safety scores. For high-priority sites, the team makes recommendations on how to redesign crossings to maximize benefit. Those recommendations range from modest culverts with a restored streambed and three-foot-high vertical clearance, to fifteen-foot-high passageways that can fit roaming elk.

Here’s an example: At a major streambed restoration near the university city of Bellingham, Padden Creek long flowed through a small, four-foot-wide box culvert that ran 420 feet—longer than a football field—under Interstate 5. Unsurprisingly, the chute presented a choke point for migrating Chinook, coho, and chum salmon, as well as steelhead and cutthroat trout. In its place, a forty-four-foot-wide channel littered with logs was built and now allows the creek to meander under two bridges.

Kalisz recommends expanded passageways as well as building inexpensive but highly effective features known as “wildlife benches,” five-foot-wide raised grades along stream edges, “basically a hiking trail for wildlife.” Because wildlife tend to follow riparian corridors, these constructed trails draw animals in and encourage them to cross via culverts instead of on highways above, thereby preventing them from becoming roadkill. 

This simple addition on Padden Creek has brought a profound impact. In the year before construction, not one single deer crossed through the old culvert. (The area has one of the highest deer-vehicle collision rates in western Washington.) Kalisz and his team are still compiling the data from post-construction monitoring, “but in the first six months alone, we already documented three hundred or four hundred deer crossings,” he says. Deer-vehicle collisions within a mile of the structure also fell by roughly 50 percent. 

At other sites, like a 172-foot-wide, forty-foot-high bridge on Highway 101 above the restored Indian Creek streambed near Port Angeles, the new wildlife crossing can accommodate elk. A gasoline and diesel spill in July threatened to undo much of the progress in the major Elwha tributary. But a multiagency cleanup effort led by the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe averted the worst and observers documented an encouraging fall run of pink and Chinook salmon.

Filling In the Gaps

Documented use of the new culverts by salmon and steelhead now come mainly from tribal and anecdotal reports. The data gap is partly due to the nature of the federal injunction: the state DOT is required to monitor all new culverts for ten years, to ensure that the new structure remains fish-passable. But because many of the streams have multiple indirect barriers—of which counties, cities, or private landowners hold responsibility—the fish still aren’t always able to make their way to the restored streambeds. 

Detractors have called these “stranded investments” a waste of money. The twenty-one treaty tribes and the DOT, however, maintain that culverts under state roads are often the biggest “linchpins” obstructing salmon streams. Removing them can be the catalyst for clearing nearby barriers. Other blockages are already being addressed through a constellation of projects managed by county, city, nonprofit, and tribal officials. For example, the city of Bellingham has “daylighted” part of the once buried section of Padden Creek and has drawn up plans to remove several downstream culverts. 

Near the northwest corner of the Olympic Peninsula, a separate multiagency project led by the Wild Salmon Center, replaced two aging culverts over salmon-rich Anton and Cedar Creeks in 2024. The fern- and conifer-lined streams, roughly two hundred feet apart, pass under Clallam County’s rural Bear Creek Road before connecting and draining into Bear Creek, a tributary of the Sol Duc River. 

In Anton Creek, corrugated steel shotgun culverts—each five feet wide and often filled with debris—proved largely impassable for migrating salmon. The stream now flows through a seventy-two-foot-long, twenty-four-foot-wide aluminum arch under the roadway. 

The existing Cedar Creek culvert was even more rudimentary: “two pieces of pretty deteriorated log with a concrete slab on top,” according to Betsy Krier, Wild Salmon Center’s habitat project manager for Washington. The new archway over the restored streambed is not only a more functional, but also far more durable piece of county infrastructure, she says. These retrofits are being built for the long view. 

Photo Courtesy: (left) Betsy Krier/Wild Salmon Center; (right) Bryn Nelson.

“We are trying to fill some of the gaps that the state is not obligated to cover and look for the highest priorities outside of the state jurisdiction,” Krier says. The twin projects, aided by the Quileute Tribe, opened up nearly five miles of upstream habitat for coho salmon as well as Chinook, steelhead, cutthroat, and rainbow trout.

These retrofits are being built for the long view.

As construction crews were finishing work at the Anton Creek site in September 2024, Krier recalls experiencing “one of those moments in my career that I will never forget.” Workers had just redirected the diverted stream back to its normal course when they pointed to movement in the water. “There was a small juvenile lamprey that literally came up to my feet and stopped just at the exit of the culvert and latched onto a little rock,” she says. “So that was our first customer. Open for business! That lamprey moved right on up there. It was really, really awesome.”

Within the first few months, the team documented juvenile coho, cutthroat trout, steelhead, sculpin, and more lamprey. They also saw adult coho migrating through both culverts. After years of planning, paperwork, and coordination, Krier says, “it’s nice to finally see it come together in real life, on the ground.”

Leading by Example

Little precedent exists for trying to correct “a century’s worth of environmental damage in such a short period of time,” says Senator Marko Liias, chair of Washington Senate’s Transportation Committee. 

At its heart, he says, the expanding effort is about stewardship, values, and partnerships—with the tribes and with nature. “Mother Nature can do really amazing things if we get out of her way and make sure that those natural systems have an opportunity to operate closer to how they operated before we put our roads and our infrastructure in.”

The state is ramping up the process with a bundling approach that addresses smaller nearby barriers simultaneously, to maximize efficiency. The work is far from over, but Rydholm says the refined designs, acquired expertise, and lessons learned could smooth the way for even more jurisdictions to follow suit. 

Perhaps one of the biggest reasons for cautious optimism has been the strengthening of partnerships to share information, pair projects, and make joint decisions that maximize the benefits. After all, as Krier puts it, “The fish don’t see land boundaries or geographical jurisdictions,” just new connections.