Qualla: Carkeek Park

Carkeek Park: Introduction

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Leslie Seaton from Seattle, WA, USA, CC BY 2.0. In November 2024, volunteers counted 1,779 chum salmon in Pipers Creek -- a record for a waterway that had held just 54 fish five years earlier. The creek runs through Carkeek Park, a 216-acre wedge of forest and beach on Seattle's northern edge, and the salmon's return is one of the most improbable urban wildlife stories in the Pacific Northwest. Fifty years of absence, decades of restoration work, a name in Lushootseed -- kwaateb, meaning "place where people are sent" -- and then the fish came back. Then the beavers showed up and built a dam.

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Image: Leslie Seaton from Seattle, WA, USA | CC BY 2.0

Carkeek Park: A Canyon That Resisted the City

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 3.0. Carkeek Park occupies a steep canyon on Puget Sound in Seattle's Broadview neighborhood, and its rugged terrain is the reason it still exists. While the rest of northern Seattle was clearcut, graded, and built over during the twentieth century, this ravine was too difficult to de...

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Image: Joe Mabel | CC BY-SA 3.0

Carkeek Park: From Clearcut to Comeback

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ben Menesini, CC BY 3.0. The old-growth forest that once covered the canyon was logged off by the early twentieth century. What grows there now is a mature maple-alder forest in a successional stage, with Western red cedar and Douglas fir slowly reclaiming their dominance. Wetlands host cattails and sedg...

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Image: Ben Menesini | CC BY 3.0

Carkeek Park: The Salmon and the Beavers

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Guywelch2000, CC0. The centerpiece of Carkeek Park's ecological story is Pipers Creek, where chum salmon returned in 1987 after a fifty-year absence. The comeback was engineered by the Carkeek Watershed Community Action Project, launched in 1979 with support from the Suquamish Tribe, state agencies...

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Image: Guywelch2000 | CC0

Carkeek Park: The Purple Salmon Slide

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ingrid Taylar from Seattle, WA, USA, CC BY 2.0. Carkeek Park's playground, completed in 1997 after years of planning and $275,000 in funding, was designed to teach children about the Pipers Creek watershed through play. Its centerpiece is a 19-foot purple salmon slide -- the kind of design choice that could only emerge from a ...

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Image: Ingrid Taylar from Seattle, WA, USA | CC BY 2.0