The salmon are coming home.

And this year, it’s in record numbers.

A good spawning season for the Glenwood Springs Hatchery is around 700. In recent years, that total has gone down to as low as zero, but this season, the numbers have already reached 1300.

“(In 2005) we began a new program that raised the chinook for a year and then released them, but they weren’t surviving that well, so we switched to releasing them at a much younger age,” said hatchery manager Mike O’Connell. “After three years, we saw the first results of that switch last year.”

OPALCO and Bonneville Power Administration’s planned outage last week caused a slight hiccup for Glenwood Springs.

“We were unaware of the Bonneville  Power Administration’s scheduled outage for maintenance that included all of the San Juan Islands,” O’Connell said. “Our aerator lost power, causing the loss of fish. Fortunately, many survived and there are so many more fish waiting in the hatchery bay to come up the ladder that it poses no problems for us getting our egg take for 2011.”

Last fall O’Connell counted 750 returning salmon, which return to the hatchery from September to October to spawn. This season has been a bumper year for the Chinook.

“It’s safe to say we’ve had 1300 fish come up the ladder,” O’Connell said. “We have several hundred more in the bay … If it’s this good this year, it probably will be next year too, if the ocean conditions stay the same.”

Long Live the Kings’ Glenwood Springs Hatchery is celebrating a milestone: its 25th anniversary.

The hatchery is hosting an open house on Saturday, Sept. 24 from 2 to 5 p.m. at 1649 Olga Road. It will feature tours of the hatchery, holding ponds, and grounds and science displays.

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.

Because no wild Chinook originate in the San Juan Islands, the run serves commercial and sports fishers while posing little threat to endangered fish.

“With the population of salmon so depressed in recent years, this hatchery is providing not only commercial but recreational fisherman the chance to harvest salmon both here and up to British Columbia and Southeast Alaska,” O’Connell said.

Glenwood Springs is a pioneer in natural rearing practices that mimic nature. The results are out-migrating salmon that resemble their wild cousins – in appearance, behavior, and biochemical makeup – more closely than most hatchery fish.

“It’s been a fantastic year so far and a lot of people are enjoying it,” O’Connell said. “We typically have a lot more males than females returning, so we cull really good males and give them to the food bank.”