If you have tried to ride from Inglewood Hill down toward Issaquah since June, you already know the answer to the question half the Plateau has been asking this summer: the trail stops. There is no detour, no signed workaround, and no obvious explanation on the barricade. Six hundred feet of a fully paved eleven-mile trail have been fenced off since June 1, and the gap is enough to cut the whole corridor into two disconnected halves.
The reason is a fish that most residents have never seen, in a creek most residents have never noticed, roughly nine weeks before that fish comes back.
Here is the thesis worth carrying into fall: the closure and the kokanee run are the same story. Sammamish's salmon comeback has been built almost entirely by tearing up the things people use. Culvert by culvert, driveway by driveway, road crossing by road crossing. The gap between Louis Thompson Road NE and NE Inglewood Hill Road is the last piece of that pattern, and it is scheduled to be gone by the end of the year.
What is actually happening at George Davis Creek
The City of Sammamish is not simply swapping pipes. The George Davis Creek Fish Passage and Storm Improvement Project removes a dam and a high-flow bypass, installs 17-foot box culverts at East Lake Sammamish Shore Lane NE and under the county trail, puts a short-span bridge under East Lake Sammamish Parkway, and daylights the creek where it reaches the lake. Right now that lower stretch runs through pipe. When crews finish, it will run in open air, and the trail gets a creek overlook where the fence is today.
The city picked Northwest Construction Inc. in March 2026. The bid came in just under $9 million against a last engineering estimate near $13 million. Sammamish had already paid $4 million for the property needed to rebuild the stream between the lake and Shore Lane, with roughly 65 percent of that purchase price covered by grants, including a $2 million King County Conservation Futures grant. That is a substantial amount of public money spent on about a quarter mile of water.
King County Parks is blunt about the tradeoff on its trail page: the closure runs through the rest of the year, there is no detour, and finishing it opens high-quality salmon habitat while completing the final section of the East Lake Sammamish Trail. Seattle Bike Blog covered the practical fallout in April, noting that for most of 2026 the only ways to bike between Issaquah and Redmond are around the west side of the lake or up over the Plateau streets.
The number that explains why anyone bothered
Lake Sammamish kokanee are landlocked sockeye. They never reach salt water. They leave the creeks as inch-long fry, spend three to four years in the lake, and come back to the stream where they hatched to spawn in late fall and early winter. Their entire known range is this lake and a handful of its tributaries.
In the 2017-18 run, biologists counted 19 adult fish. Not nineteen thousand. Nineteen.
King County reported more than 8,300 adults returning in the most recently published season, the second-highest count since monitoring began in 1996. The City of Sammamish framed the same result against the more useful baseline: returns had averaged fewer than 400 fish across the previous eight years. The county credits barrier removal above almost everything else, specifically the box culverts installed where Ebright Creek and Zackuse Creek cross East Lake Sammamish Parkway and the regional trail.
That is the pattern. Every one of those culvert projects closed a road or a trail segment that someone used daily. Each one preceded a jump in fish.
Two cautions belong here, because the recovery is not finished. Since 2007-08, returns have dipped below 150 fish eight times, and King County still describes extinction risk as high. And most kokanee come back as three-year-olds, which means each run is the sum of three years of lake conditions rather than a verdict on last winter. No count for the 2025-26 season has been published, so what volunteers tally this November is genuinely unknown.
Where the fish actually go
Not every creek on the Plateau gets fish, and the ones that do are not evenly used.
| Creek | Where it matters | What the record shows |
|---|---|---|
| Ebright Creek | Crosses under East Lake Sammamish Parkway and the trail near 127 E Lake Sammamish Pkwy SE | The workhorse stream. Roughly a third of the run spawned here during the big 2024 return |
| Zackuse Creek | North end, mouth at the lake up to 206th Ave SE | Surveyed by Snoqualmie Indian Tribe staff from about October through December for live adults, carcasses and redds |
| Laughing Jacobs, Lewis, Pine Lake creeks | South and east shore tributaries | Named in the Kokanee Work Group blueprint as consistent spawning streams |
| Tibbetts and Vasa creeks | Occasional use | Spawning happens some years, not others |
George Davis Creek is not on that list yet. That is the entire point of the fence.
Going to look, without wasting the trip
The Salmon SEEson viewing site on Ebright Creek sits at 127 E Lake Sammamish Pkwy SE, with a small unmarked pullout on the west side of the parkway between the road and the trail. Walk about 50 feet south onto the trail to where the creek passes underneath. Sightings run roughly from early November into late January.
Read the map before you go and this becomes obvious: Ebright is well south of the Louis Thompson to Inglewood Hill closure. The southern half of the trail is intact and reachable. The closure blocks the through-trip, not the fish.
- Watch the rain first. Trout Unlimited's Lake Sammamish Kokanee volunteers post in-season notes when fish begin showing up in Zackuse and Ebright, and they consistently observe that continued rain draws more fish into the streams. A dry week in November is a slow week at the creek.
- Go early morning or late afternoon. Midday glare on moving water hides everything.
- Bring polarized glasses. Amber or yellow lenses let more light through than gray, which matters under a Sammamish overcast.
- Then stand still for five minutes. The fish are there before you can see them.
King County's Salmon SEEson map lists which sites are self-guided and which have volunteer naturalists on hand.
A note on manners at the creek, because this run is small enough that individual nests matter. Stay on the trail and the bank. Keep dogs out of the water. Do not wade into spawning gravel, and do not move a fish that looks half-dead, because that is what a spawned kokanee is supposed to look like. Kokanee are closed to fishing in Lake Sammamish. This is a watching activity only.
Who is out there counting
The volunteer work behind this is unusually specific. Snoqualmie Indian Tribe staff walk Zackuse Creek from the mouth at the lake upstream to 206th Ave SE, recording live adults, carcasses and redds, mapping nest locations in GIS. When they find a carcass, they measure it, note the sex, and collect the head so ear bones can be read at the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery to determine whether the fish was naturally spawned or hatchery-marked.
Ryan Lewis, habitat and wildlife manager for the Snoqualmie Tribe, offers the single most useful frame for reading any year's count: most kokanee come back as three-year-olds, so each run is "the sum of conditions in the system over the preceding 3 years."
The Lake Sammamish Kokanee Work Group, formed in 2007, pulls together watershed residents, the Snoqualmie Indian Tribe, the cities of Sammamish, Bellevue, Issaquah and Redmond, WDFW, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Washington State Parks, Trout Unlimited, Mid-Sound Fisheries Enhancement Group, Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust, Save Lake Sammamish, Friends of Pine Lake and Long Live the Kings, among others. Residents do fish counts, tend hatch boxes, help with fry releases and plant streambanks.
Private landowners have gone further. One Ebright Creek property owner, Wally Pereyra, spent $300,000 of his own money replacing a pipe culvert on his land with a box culvert. The creek runs through his property, and a third of the run swims past his house.
The rest of the Plateau's fall
The Sammamish Farmers Market at Sammamish Commons closes out its season with September's Wednesdays, shifting to 3 to 7 p.m. for the last stretch. The 2026 season ran with more than 60 vendors and 24 sponsors under market manager Pam Saito, who also owns Five Hooks Seafood. If you have been meaning to go all summer, you have a handful of Wednesdays left before it wraps for the year.
After that, the calendar moves indoors. Pine Lake Community Center is listed for a Karwa Chauth and Diwali bazaar on October 24 and a Diwali bazaar on November 1, which lands almost exactly when the first fish start pushing into Ebright.
And a creek visit in November wants a warm room afterward. Diyar opened this spring in the Klahanie Shopping Center at 4592 Klahanie Drive SE, where owner Ramin Rafiei built a fully halal, alcohol-free Persian room around the idea that guests should feel like they walked into a home rather than a business. Big Block Brewing runs small evening events. Metropolitan Market and Sammamish Cafe & Spirits on NE 8th are the reliable standbys.
What this says about the Plateau
Buyers relocating here ask about commute times and lot sizes. Long-time residents already know the quieter thing: this city spends real money and real inconvenience on a handful of small creeks and a fish nobody is allowed to catch. A stream restoration bid at just under $9 million, a $4 million land purchase before that, and a closed trail through an entire riding season, for habitat measured in hundreds of feet.
The overlook comes once the culverts are finished. The fish arrive in about nine weeks. Go stand on the bank at least once before the fence comes down, so you can tell the difference afterward.
Thinking about what this kind of neighborhood knowledge means for your own move, whether you are buying on the Plateau or preparing to sell here? WA Homes by Vidya Vadakoot brings the same attention to your transaction that we bring to the creeks. Schedule your free consultation.
