Lake Quinault is the principal home of the Quinault blueback, a distinct run of sockeye salmon found essentially only in this watershed. The fish ascends the Quinault River from the Pacific to spawn, and has been a cornerstone of Quinault Indian Nation culture and fishery management for generations, making it one of the most geographically restricted salmon runs in the world.
Look out at the lake and think about a fish that lives almost nowhere else on Earth. Lake Quinault has its own kind of sockeye salmon, called the blueback, that runs up the Quinault River from the sea and into this water to spawn, and this is essentially the only place it does it. The Quinault people have fished the blueback here for countless generations, and it's so much theirs that they manage the run and control the harvest to this day. A salmon found in one lake, on one river, in all the world. You're looking at its entire home.
Photo: gailhampshire from Cradley, Malvern, U.K · CC BY 2.0
