• View from Sourdough Mountain Overlook A view looking down onto Diablo Lake. Photo Credit: NPS/Michael Silverman, 2010.

    North Cascades

    National Park Washington

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  • Interstate 5 Bridge Collapse Detour

    I-5 is closed in both directions in Skagit County south of Burlington. WSDOT has published the following detour map. Also consider State Route 530 through Darrington from the south or State Route 9 from Bellingham and the Lower Mainland to reach the park. More »

Fish

Salmon are the best known icon of the Pacific Northwest. The Skagit River Watershed is the only watershed in the continental US to have runs of all Pacific salmon species: chinook (king), coho, chum, pink and sockeye. Every autumn between August and December, thousands of salmon work their way up the Skagit River, struggling against the current and leaping high out of the cascading whitewater to reach their spawning beds. The spectacle not only draws curious tourists but also hundreds of bald eagles that come to feed on the salmon and their spawned-out corpses.

While thousands of fish return each year, many salmon runs have been in decline for many years as a result of logging, dams, over-harvesting, cross-breeding with genetically inferior hatchery fish and a variety of other factors. Both Puget Sound Chinook salmon and Coastal Puget Sound bull trout (char) were listed as a threatened species in 1999.

The other varieties of trout found in the waters of the North Cascades include steelhead (sea-run rainbow), resident rainbow, sea-run cutthroat and resident cutthroat, all of which are evolutionary relatives of salmon known as salmonids.

 

Additional Resources:
Fish Checklist (PDF 120 kb)

  • Fishing Guide to the North Cascades Fishing Guide to the North Cascades

    Discover where to fish with your family and learn about what you might catch in the North Cascades. Read More

Did You Know?

Grizzly bear track in North Cascades National Park (1989). Photo Credit: NPS/NOCA/Roger Christophersen

Grizzly bear tracks can be a reliable indicator of species? Grizzly bear and black bear forepaw tracks are distinct from one another and often times better than a photo of the bear to confirm an observation. So don't just look up, look down.