In Osprey Park, salmon embrace Sultan River’s newly restored channel

SULTAN — Before the first heavy autumn rainfall in Western Washington, the Snohomish County Public Utility District was rushing to prepare for the influx of salmon in the Sultan River.

Keith Binkley, natural resources manager for PUD, lost sleep waiting for permission to restore a side channel in Osprey Park’s southern loop before this year’s run.

Stretching up to Culmback Dam and the Spada Lake reservoir, the Sultan River’s flow is essential for the city of Everett’s water supply, Snohomish County power generation and — most important to Binkley — several species of salmon. The project in Osprey Park was a part of a decade-long, and ongoing, PUD effort to create salmon habitat within the park’s 85 acres and ensure fish are thriving downstream from the dam.

In 2020, flooding swamped this particular side channel through Osprey Park with gravel, completely blocking flow. A beaver dam occupied another side channel slightly upstream, also inhibiting flow.

But the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had a backlog of permits it needed to address. And Binkley’s request to clear the inundated channel was stacked in the hefty pile.

“We were really nervous this year,” Binkley said. “If we hadn’t gotten this permit, we would have been pinched.”

By early August, after waiting about 18 months, the Army Corps of Engineers granted Binkley the permit. Contractors dredged the channel about three weeks later.

“The banks are still raw,” Binkley said, standing on a logjam at the edge of the project site. “But the channel is already churned and being utilized.”

Earlier this month at Osprey Park, salmon were spotted swimming in the Sultan and its channels, many fish moving progressively slower — if at all. The growing rotten stench and piles of salmon corpses marked the end of a completed life cycle for most of the fish.

In addition to the Army Corps of Engineers, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife also issued a hydraulic project approval permit for PUD to restore the channel. The project was “a complete success,” said Ashley Kees, a habitat biologist with Fish and Wildlife.

Since then, large numbers of pink salmon spawned in the restored channel, Kees said.

Next year, the PUD plans to create more side channels, stemming from Osprey Park’s southern loop, Binkley said.

Since 2012, PUD staff have been engineering logjams and redirecting river flow for salmon.

The agency was licensed in 2011 to create 10,000 feet of side channel habitat through the Henry M. Jackson Hydroelectric Project. The utility has since exceeded that, establishing over 12,000 feet of habitat.

But having already made relationships with landowners near Osprey Park’s project sites, and having done this work for 10 years, Binkley said it made sense to continue, as opportunities arise.

“We’re not pretending to be Mother Nature,” Binkley said, “but we work with the landscape and the water and landowners to try and … make the Sultan be all it can be.”

Ta’Leah Van Sistine: 425-339-3460; taleah.vansistine@heraldnet.com; Twitter: @TaLeahRoseV.