Quoting Mia Monroe, "Best Wishes Little Fishes". Perhaps she'll keep us updated on Redwood Creek in Muir Woods and its fishes.
By Anna Bauman, Staff Writer Updated Nov 21, 2025 3:32 p.m. - San Francisco Chronicle
Leaping over small man-made jumps and swimming determinedly upstream in Alameda Creek, a small group of bright red chinook salmon are back from the Pacific Ocean and ready to spawn.
Twenty miles upstream in the Sunol Valley, at least one salmon had made it farther than the rest by Wednesday — and farther than any known salmon since the 1950s, said Jeff Miller, director of the nonprofit advocacy group Alameda Creek Alliance.
“I’d say it’s epic — this is what we’ve been working for the last three decades,” Miller said. “It’s going to be a really interesting change and enhancement for a lot of wildlife, but also for the public, seeing these fish back in the stream after so long.”
‘Epic’: Salmon seen far upstream in Bay Area creek for first time in 70 years
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Quick and Dirty
Leaping over small man-made jumps and swimming determinedly upstream in Alameda Creek, a small group of bright red chinook salmon are back from the Pacific Ocean and ready to spawn.
Twenty miles upstream in the Sunol Valley, at least one salmon had made it farther than the rest by Wednesday — and farther than any known salmon since the 1950s, said Jeff Miller, director of the nonprofit advocacy group Alameda Creek Alliance.
“I’d say it’s epic — this is what we’ve been working for the last three decades,” Miller said. “It’s going to be a really interesting change and enhancement for a lot of wildlife, but also for the public, seeing these fish back in the stream after so long.”
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Alameda Creek, a 45-mile stream, twists through Fremont and empties into the San Francisco Bay just south of the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge.
Once native to the stream, chinook salmon have been unable to reach the upper portion of Alameda Creek for decades due to concrete barriers and other water supply infrastructure blocking their path, Miller said.
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But over the past three decades, the Alameda County water and flood control districts and other agencies — urged on by environmental groups — have completed restoration projects meant to encourage fish migration.
Officials have removed a few small dams and built fish ladders for others; these help steelhead trout and salmon swim up and over barriers.
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A ladder in lower Alameda Creek, completed in recent years, “creates hydraulic conditions where it’s easy for them to move,” Miller said. “There’s places for them to hold, and then they just move up a step, and hold, move up a step.”
Water flows through a cement fish ladder maintained by Alameda County Water District that’s along Alameda Creek in the Fremont area, as seen in 2024. The fish ladders help salmon and trout surmount man-made obstacles such as dams as the swim upstream.
Jessica Christian/S.F. Chronicle
Fish passage improvements on lower Alameda Creek cost $80 million, with seven projects spanning more than two decades, according to the Alameda County Water District.
This week, volunteers with the Alameda Creek Alliance snapped photos of roughly a dozen chinook salmon using the newest fish ladder to navigate upstream into lower Niles Canyon, located about 12 miles from the bay.
Meanwhile, the salmon farther upstream in Sunol was seen “exactly where a former fish passage barrier got taken out this summer and fall,” Miller said.
“We probably are seeing a fraction of them, so there could be a decent run of fish,” Miller said. “They know what they’re doing — they’ll find each other, they’ll find a good spawning habitat.”
Alameda Creek as seen from the Niles Staging Area in Fremont on Friday. This week, volunteers with the Alameda Creek Alliance saw chinook salmon using the newest fish ladder to navigate upstream into lower Niles Canyon.
Jessica Christian/S.F. Chronicle
The restoration efforts were focused on bringing back steelhead trout, a threatened species in Northern California, but chinook salmon are also reaping the benefits as they migrate up Alameda Creek in late November and December.
“We’re proud to see our environmental stewardship efforts making a real difference for local wildlife and our watershed,” the Alameda County Water District wrote Thursday on Facebook, in a post sharing photos of the migrating chinook salmon.
Similar efforts have occurred in other parts of California. After a $500 million dam-removal project on the Klamath River, considered the largest in U.S. history, salmon reached the river’s headwaters in October for the first time in more than a century.
Salmon are anadromous fish, meaning they are born in freshwater streams, migrate out to the ocean for their adult lives and, guided by smell and magnetic cues, eventually return to the stream where they were born to spawn and die.
With the native salmon population in decline, however, many of the chinook salmon in California are artificially propagated in hatcheries, then dumped in the San Pablo Bay or Carquinez Straight.
The area of Alameda Creek where Chinook salmon were recently spotted, as seen on Friday.
Jessica Christian/S.F. Chronicle
With no imprint on a native stream, Miller said hatchery fish return from the ocean and “opportunistically” swim up available streams, such as Alameda Creek.
Miller said his group had not yet seen evidence of spawning, but volunteers and fisheries biologists with the East Bay Regional Parks District and San Francisco Public Utilities Commission are monitoring the stream.
The returning salmon benefit the wider ecosystem, attracting “all kinds of predators and scavengers,” Miller said. A bald eagle pair in Fremont regularly eat chinook carcasses, he said, while a family of river otters treats the fish ladder “like their snack machine.”
Miller said he hopes the chinook salmon — and eventually, more steelhead, which have been returning more slowly — reach the Sunol Regional Wilderness, where remote conditions are ideal and park visitors could see them spawn.
“I think of salmon as kind of the soul of our rivers,” he said. “My hope is that these fish will get people to really care about the stream and the watershed.”
An egret fishes in Alameda Creek where Chinook salmon were recently spotted.
Jessica Christian/S.F. Chronicle
Dan Sarka, a volunteer with the Alameda Creek Alliance who has been watching the salmon and steelhead for decades, said it was heartbreaking to watch them try to jump over concrete barriers, only to slide backward. Now, with the fish ladder in place, “they can make their way upstream to their home.”
“It’s just marvelous, it really is,” said Sarka, a photographer.
With the stream now cleared of many obstacles, Miller said he hopes to see more fish migrating up and down Alameda Creek each year.
“Given enough generations,” he said, “this will be the native salmon run on the creek.”