An upcoming salmon habitat restoration project will also mean improvements for an important Skagit County road.
By 2024, the Skagit River System Cooperative hopes to begin restoration of about 17 acres of crucial chinook salmon habitat along Similk Bay south of the Swinomish Golf Links.
The work will turn the land that is owned by the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community into what is known as a pocket estuary.
“These are like little bays that lie along the coastal margins, near bays and inlets,” said Colin Wahl, the senior restoration ecologist with the cooperative. “It’s an essential rearing habitat for juvenile chinook salmon”
At a Monday open house, Wahl said pocket estuaries used to be common, but that today 89 percent of them have been drained for agricultural purposes.
“The problem is, over the course of the last 150 years, a lot of the Skagit estuary has been lost,” he said. “It’s been diked, it’s been drained, now a lot of it is farmland.”
Restoration involves removing a section of the dike that keeps water from the bay off the 17 acres, digging trenches for the water to follow, and rebuilding part of Satterlee Road as a bridge.
Wahl said Satterlee Road along Similk Bay floods regularly. The road is about 7 feet above the bay at its lowest point, and high tide can reach as high as 10.5 feet.
“By raising the road and building a bridge, and just working with the natural process that exists here … we’re going to have a more resilient piece of civil infrastructure,” he said.
County Commissioner Lisa Janicki, who was present at the open house, said flooding in the area causes headaches for county Public Works staff. The onsite pump breaks frequently, and is undersized for the task.
She said it’s easy to support a fix for the flooding issue that also helps salmon.
“The buy-in from the county side is so easy,” Janicki said.
The Skagit River System Cooperative is a collaborative effort between the Swinomish tribe and the Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe.
Wahl said his team is planning to study whether nearby septic systems could be impacted, but an initial review indicates there shouldn’t be a problem.
