For generations, the return of sockeye to Seattle's Lake Washington was a summer event — hundreds of thousands of red fish climbing the ladder at the Ballard Locks while crowds watched through the glass.
In 2025 the run hit its lowest count ever recorded. And the reason is a warning for every salmon river in a warming world: these fish aren't being lost to overfishing or a dam. They're being cooked — killed by the water they have to swim through to get home.
The fishery has been closed for years — the run is a small fraction of the roughly 350,000 fish it takes to open one.
The 2025 return was the lowest ever counted — below even the previous record low of about 16,825 fish set in 2019.
The share of returning adults that die before they can spawn climbed from under 10% (1995–2010) to an average of about 43% (2014–2018).
That surge in death tracks a river warming from below 8 degrees Celsius to above 13 — hot enough, with the pathogens that thrive in warm water, to threaten the run's survival.
Here is what makes Lake Washington such a clean warning: the problem isn't the spawning gravel. The Cedar River, where these sockeye spawn, is in reasonable shape. The killing happens in the journey — the Ship Canal and the warm, still lakes the fish must cross in late summer to reach it. In a hot year that water becomes lethal, and a large share of the run simply dies in transit, red and ready to spawn, before it ever reaches the river.
You cannot fix that by closing a fishery and waiting. There is no habitat project on the spawning grounds that reaches back down and cools a ship canal. When the migration corridor itself becomes the thing that kills the fish, the hands-off toolkit is empty.
One thing is working, and it isn't patience. Biologists now capture sockeye at the Ballard Locks and truck them straight to a hatchery on the Cedar River — lifting the fish out of the deadly water and driving them around it. In 2021, nearly all of the transported fish survived to spawn, while the ones left to swim the hot canal died in droves.
That is active recovery in its most literal form: when the river becomes lethal, you carry the fish through by hand. It's a stopgap, not a cure — the real fix is cooling and re-engineering the corridor — but it's the difference between a run that persists and one that blinks out while we file reports. See the rest of the record, or get involved.
Lake Washington sockeye are an engineered, largely introduced run — built up in the 20th century around the Cedar River and the man-made Ship Canal — so this was never a pristine wild population. Warm ocean years, non-native predators in the lakes, and disease all add to the pressure; the ship canal isn't the only factor. And "trap-and-haul" is a bandage on a much larger climate problem, not a solution to it.
But the warning holds regardless of the run's origins: when warming turns a migration corridor into a kill zone, protection and patience have no answer — and active intervention is the only thing standing between the fish and zero.
The figures on this page are drawn from public, authoritative records:
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