Walk the gravel path behind the Harbor History Museum on a gray Saturday in mid-November and you will find a small crowd clutching paper Salmon Passports, stopping at booths strung along txʷaalqəł Estuary, working their way toward Donkey Creek Park where a bronze sculpture called "Ringing in the Salmon," installed in 2009 by artists Tom Torrens and Ben Isitt, marks the spot where the creek meets the harbor. Somewhere in that walk, most people expect to see the thing the whole event is named for: a chum salmon, home from the ocean, fighting upstream to spawn.
Most years, they don't.
That gap between what Gig Harbor celebrates and what actually swims up Donkey Creek is not a secret exactly. It's just not the kind of thing that makes it onto the festival flyer, and it's worth understanding if you live here, because it changes what the day is actually for.
The Version Everyone Already Knows
Donkey Creek Park earns its reputation honestly. The city daylighted the creek's mouth years ago, replacing an old roadway and culvert with a bridge that let water move naturally again into the estuary behind it. Harbor WildWatch, the nonprofit that runs a small Marine Life Center in downtown Gig Harbor, leads free guided Salmon Tours each fall, walking visitors from Austin Estuary Park to Donkey Creek Park while staff biologists explain what a chum's life cycle actually looks like, egg to ocean and back.
Then there's the poetry. A Gig Harbor resident named Jennifer Preston Chuschoff created what she calls the Echology Poetry Walk, nine metal plaques staked along the creek bank, each holding a poem about salmon or the Salish Sea written by a local poet. Washington State Poet Laureate Rena Priest contributed one. Another is written partly in Lushootseed, the language of the Suquamish, Duwamish, Puyallup, Nisqually, Squaxin and other Salish Sea peoples, a detail that ties the walk to a much older relationship with this creek than the sculpture or the museum behind it. A tenth plaque, crowdsourced from residents, was meant to join the other nine.
All of that is real, and all of it is worth your Saturday. None of it requires a single fish to show up.
The Number Nobody Puts On The Poster
Here is the part that changes the story. Every year, the city releases roughly one million chum eggs into a small hatchery at Donkey Creek Park. Run that math forward and you'd expect, conservatively, dozens if not hundreds of adult fish returning each November to spawn where they were born. In recent years, observers have counted as few as one or two.
That is not a rounding error. It is close to the entire run.
Andy Philley, a Gig Harbor native and longtime local fisherman, put it plainly to a local reporter:
"For as long as I've lived here and have watched the fish populations, I have never seen more than three fish in that creek at a time."
The reasons trace back to the creek's plumbing. Up until 2012, a culvert choked the lower creek badly enough that the city removed it and built a bridge on Harborview Drive to let the water and the fish move through again. That fix helped. But a second culvert, further upstream near where Donkey Creek begins, still blocks passage entirely. Fish that make it past the harbor mouth can hit that barrier and go no further. Removing it is projected to cost the city roughly $8 million. Lead contamination from a nearby shooting range has also been linked to lower egg survival in the creek, compounding the problem before the fish even reach the second barrier.
Set that $8 million figure against something happening at the same time on the other side of the state. In 2024, nearly 200,000 sockeye returned to the Tumwater Dam on the Wenatchee River, a record year, and the state approved a $4.56 million budget for ongoing salmon work at that site. Gig Harbor is being asked to spend almost twice that just to open one blocked culvert on a creek where the best recent years produced a small handful of fish.
| Donkey Creek | Tumwater Dam, Wenatchee River | |
|---|---|---|
| Hatchery eggs released annually | ~1,000,000 | n/a (wild and hatchery mix) |
| Recent adult returns observed | As few as 1-2 in a season | Nearly 200,000 (2024, a record year) |
| Cost tied to fish passage | ~$8 million needed to remove remaining culvert | $4.56 million approved for ongoing salmon projects |
That table is not an argument against the festival. It's the context that makes the festival make sense.
Why The Town Shows Up Anyway
If the point were counting fish, Gig Harbor would have quietly retired this tradition years ago. Instead, the Donkey Creek Chum Festival, sometimes scaled up with kayak and paddleboard races, chum burgers and a "Big Blue Salmon Tent," other years run as a more modest Chum Walk with the same Salmon Passport format, keeps happening on a Saturday in mid-November. Last fall's version ran from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on November 15, 2025, with participants starting at Austin Park on Harborview Drive, working through booths along the estuary, and turning in completed passports at the Harbor History Museum front desk by 2 p.m. for a chance at a salmon-themed prize. Parking is free at the museum, along Harborview Drive, and on Austin Street, and the walking route itself is under a quarter mile of packed gravel, open to any age or ability.
What people are actually gathering for is the idea of the thing. The creek's name, txʷaalqəł, and the poem written in Lushootseed are reminders that people were marking this same return of salmon here long before there was a hatchery, a culvert problem, or a festival flyer to explain it. The 2012 bridge project, the sculpture, the poetry plaques, and the WildWatch tours are all newer layers on top of something the Squaxin, Suquamish, Puyallup and other Salish Sea peoples treated as essential rather than ceremonial. Gig Harbor's version keeps that attention alive even in years when the creek itself has almost nothing to show for it.
That is worth knowing before you go, not to talk yourself out of attending, but so you're not standing on the bridge in November expecting a spectacle and calling the day a disappointment when you count two fish instead of two hundred. The count was never really the point. The town noticing, year after year, whether the creek gives it much to notice or not, is.
If You're Planning To Go This Fall
Harbor WildWatch runs its Marine Life Center in downtown Gig Harbor year-round and posts its current-year Salmon Tour dates and Chum Festival details there closer to the season, since the exact date and format shift slightly each year. If you want to actually spot a fish rather than just walk the route, ask a WildWatch volunteer where the creek is running highest that week. And if you bring visitors from out of town, the poetry walk is worth the ten extra minutes it takes to read all nine plaques rather than breeze past them on your way to the water.
None of this requires you to be house-hunting or new to town. It just requires living here long enough to want the fuller version of a story most visitors only get the postcard of.
That's the kind of local detail I've spent decades collecting, not because it sells a house, but because it's the texture of the place I've called home since before most of the current waterfront was built. If something in this town ever does turn into a real estate conversation, whether it's a waterfront property, a family home, or a piece of land you've had your eye on, I'd be glad to bring that same attention to it. You can reach Julia Runyan any time. Let's Connect.
