The Salmon Run - Canvas Print

This piece lights me up in nostalgia and joy and so many beautiful memories. 

If you’ve ever stood beside a river in British Columbia in autumn, you know the moment you enter the forest near the spawning ground. The water shifts. The air feels charged. And then they come - bright, determined, impossibly alive - giving it literally everything they have, swimming upstream against everything. Flying up waterfalls and huge gaps that don't even seem possible. Their mission to give life and then to pass, almost complete.

The salmon are not just fish here. They are lifeblood. The air is likely charged with the energy of their predators as well. I have seen many of my best grizzly sightings in salmon spawn time. 

They bring the ocean inland. Scientists have found marine nutrients from salmon in the trees themselves - nitrogen from their bodies feeding the forest after they spawn. The grizzlies depend on them. The eagles depend on them. The wolves drag them into the woods and feed the soil. Even the towering cedar and spruce owe part of their strength to the salmon’s return.

And the orcas? Southern resident orcas rely heavily on Chinook salmon. When salmon numbers fall, the ripple moves outward. The web tightens. The balance shifts. The orca numbers directly correlate with this crucial source of food. 

It’s a delicate balance. A circle that only works when each part is honoured.

This piece is my love letter to that cycle.

I drew this with the energy of their importance - bold and wild, nothing quiet about this piece. Red bodies cutting through teals and blues, moving in one direction in a beautiful pattern. The water curls around them like the river itself is alive and watching.

There’s something deeply witchy about salmon to me. Running on the pure instinct to return. The refusal to give up. The offering of their bodies so that everything else may live. It’s brutal and sacred, sacrificial and loving, all at once.

These lessons are core memories for me, and my children. 

We remember that we are part of this web, not separate from it. That when we protect one thing, we protect many. That the balance is fragile and fierce at the same time.

The Salmon Run is a digital illustration, but it carries real reverence. For the places I lived in BC. For the rivers. For the orcas and the bears and the forests. For the magic of systems working as they should.

If you feel that pull too - that adoration for wild places and the things that sustain them - this piece was made for you.