A video clip that shows an Alaskan creek jam-packed with Pacific salmon has blown up on social media. The footage was shared by the Winters, a family of commercial fishermen — first in August 2024 on TikTok, where it’s been viewed more than 13 million times, and again on Instagram last week.
In the short video, a giant mass of salmon — an uncountable number of fish — are stacked up like cordwood in the narrow stream. It’s an amazing sight to behold, and it’s easy to see how millions of people have been enthralled by it. The footage gives us a small glimpse of what the old timers still talk about.
“Sacramento, McCloud, Pit, American, and Feather Rivers all looked like that once in [California],” one commenter pointed out, adding the old refrain that you still occasionally hear from old timers: “…in the 50’s you could walk across their backs there was so many.”
The same could be said of most major rivers on the West Coast, nearly all of which have seen their native salmon and steelhead runs trend downward over the last 50 to 100 years. In some places, wild runs are still hanging on or are supplemented by hatcheries, while in others, the bottom has dropped out entirely. Take the Sacramento, which historically would get 1 million or more fall Chinook in a good year, but now sees runs in the tens of thousands. Or rivers like the Skykomish that flow into the Puget Sound, which used to be salmon superhighways but are now closed to sportfishing some years due to abysmal returns.
Alaska, though, is the outlier in the U.S. Its salmon runs are declining in some places, and its fisheries aren’t immune to problems or closures, but in terms of sheer salmon abundance, nowhere else in this country comes close. We would be wise to take the lessons learned further south — where we’ve dammed and developed our rivers to death — and apply them up north. But I digress.
In the Winters’ video, the salmon are so thick that their fins are rubbing and their backs are breaking the water’s surface. The clip was recorded in August, so the fish are wearing their spawning colors. It’s hard to tell if there are multiple species in the mix, but it looks like mostly chum salmon, which stand out with the purplish vertical bars on their sides.
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The Winter family did not immediately respond to a request for comment, so it’s unclear where exactly the salmon video was recorded. But according to a comment that @kyra.winter made on TikTok, this was just downstream of the hatchery in Metlakatla, a small coastal community on an island in Southeast Alaska and the only federally recognized Indian Reserve there. The traditional Tsimshian community is also home to Tlingit, Aleut, Yupik and other Native Peoples, according to the state.
The fish hatchery is operated by the Metlakatla Indian Community and located on Tamgas Creek. It opened in 1978 and helps supplement runs of mostly chum salmon, along with Chinook, sockeye, and coho salmon. This would explain why so many fish are jammed in the creek in the Winters’ video. These fish are genetically wired to return to spawn in their natal waterway — in this case, a hatchery pond — after spending years in the Pacific Ocean.
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