Leavenworth National Fish Hatchery: The Salmon Debt
Near Leavenworth, Washington
A few miles south of Leavenworth on Icicle Creek, the Leavenworth National Fish Hatchery has been raising Chinook salmon since nineteen forty. It was built as part of the federal government's mitigation program for the dams going up on the Columbia River, which were blocking salmon from reaching their traditional spawning grounds far upstream. The hatchery was intended to compensate for the fish that could no longer complete their journey.
At various points it has produced millions of juvenile Chinook annually, releasing them into Icicle Creek and other tributaries to begin the downstream migration toward the Pacific Ocean. The hatchery sits on the same Icicle Creek that the Wenatchi people fished for thousands of years before any dam existed. The salmon runs that sustained those people for millennia were dramatically reduced when the Columbia was dammed in the nineteen thirties, forties, and fifties.
Scientists have argued for decades about whether hatchery fish genuinely substitute for wild populations or whether they compete with and harm the wild fish that still exist. The consensus has shifted toward caution about hatcheries, even as they remain politically difficult to eliminate. The Leavenworth hatchery continues to operate, a reminder that the salmon debt incurred by a century of dam building has not been fully paid, and may not be payable.
