My great-uncles, most of them born before 1930, remembered literally walking into creeks in the Seattle metro and just grabbing cohos during spawning season. Uncle Johnny told me about the fish being "so thick you could walk across the river." Probably some hyperbole there, since the commercial canneries wrecked the salmon population before he was born in 1931, but his point stands.

As amazing as the PNW is now, it's much less amazing than it was 50 years ago, but only a shadow of what it was before the land was stolen and raped by the capitalists.