Hope for the king salmon is now leaping up a fish ladder at Orcas Island’s Glenwood Springs Hatchery.

“Since 2005 we’ve been experiencing low returns in fish,” said hatchery manager Mike O’Connell, “primarily due to poor ocean survival … overall salmon populations have been depressed.”

As the spawning season begins this year, a lower holding tank above the fish ladder already holds 36 mature king salmon returned from their ocean journeys. O’Connell said he’s seen 100 more milling around in the estuary below. As the Chinook spawning season runs from September to October, there could be many more returnees before the season is through.

These fish hold the promise for future generations of king salmon, each one containing thousands of spawn.

The hatchery was created by Orcas Islander Jim Youngren in 1978, when he decided to find out whether a salmon run could be created in an area that had never before hosted one. His 300-acre property includes three natural artesian springs on the west side of Mount Constitution, which he funneled into a series of man-made rearing ponds that eventually pour down a fish ladder into a little bay. Youngren got his answer in 1982, when several hundred salmon returned to spawn.

In 1986, Youngren founded the Seattle-based nonprofit Long Live the Kings, which now has two hatcheries: Glenwood Springs on Orcas and Lilliwaup Creek Hatchery situated just north of the great bend of Hood Canal, near the mouth of Lilliwaup Creek.

The organization hopes to encourage hatchery reform, creating hatcheries that assist rather than assault the recovery of wild salmon runs. For more information, see http://www.lltk.org/.

Glenwood Springs releases hundreds of thousands of fish into the wild each year. In April 2009, O’Connell and 13 volunteers worked full-time for over a month marking and tagging roughly 562,000 Chinook and 100,000 Coho salmon for release.

In most years leading up to 2004, the hatchery saw several hundred returning Chinook, but in 2005 that number dwindled to 55. The year 2006 saw only 15 fish; 2007, not a single fish; and in 2008, only two fish made it home. In 2009, things started looking up with 39 fish come home, and 2010 is looking positive, with 36 already in the pen. The numbers were similar for Coho.

Glenwood Springs is unlike the concrete ponds lined with predator netting of Washington state-run hatcheries, said O’Connell. Most of its pools are designed to mimic wild habitat. Whereas state hatcheries rear their fish exclusively on commercial feed, the fish here mainly forage for aquatic insects, only supplemented with feed. O’Connell also doesn’t control for predators, allowing the fish to learn a healthy fear of otter and mink.

“We want the fish to live here with more of a wild behavioral pattern than a standard hatchery-raised fish,” O’Connell said.

He makes an exception only for mature adults who have returned to spawn: after an otter killed 14 one evening, eating none of them, he installed an electric fence-like tape around the holding pool.

The recent increase in returning salmon may be due to the state Department of Fish and Wildlife’s 2006 decision to have all hatcheries release only zero-age hatchlings instead of yearling fish, having determined that yearlings have a much lower rate of ocean survival. While they don’t yet know why this occurs, O’Connell said yearlings tend to refrain from joining wild fish on ocean migrations, instead staying in Puget Sound. He said it’s likely the lower survival rate is “partially due to changing conditions in Puget Sound.”

After four years of this policy, it may be now paying off with increased numbers of surviving salmon.

“All indicators are good this year,” O’Connell said.