How Issaquah earned the score
Population 40,051 (US Census 2020), a King County city on the Interstate 90 corridor roughly 15 miles east of Seattle, wrapped on three sides by the Issaquah Alps.
Situation One of Washington’s fastest growing suburbs, home to Costco’s world headquarters since 1996, carrying a salmon festival older than most of its subdivisions and a mild case of bedroom community anonymity.
Action When Thomas Dambo’s crew raised a 14 foot recycled troll beside the Rainier Trail in August 2023, the city did not just permit it. It adopted it: an official city page, bus directions, a parking plan, a citywide geotour, and the municipal Arts program on repair duty.
Result Jakob Two Trees joined a visitor base that was already real, 150,000 to 200,000 at Salmon Days each October and more than 300,000 hatchery visitors a year, and gave the suburb its first year round postcard.
Situation: a company town three times over, still asked what it is
The name is the oldest thing in town. Issaquah is an Anglicization of a Southern Lushootseed word usually translated as the sound of birds, and for its first decades of American settlement the valley went by the blunter spelling Squak. Coal was found in the surrounding hills in the early 1860s, the Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern Railway pushed through in the late 1880s, and the railroad’s great promoter, Daniel Hunt Gilman, got the young town named after himself. It incorporated as Gilman in 1892, and per HistoryLink, the state legislature settled the matter on February 2, 1899, renaming the place Issaquah. Three names in forty years is a town still deciding what it is.
The twentieth century ran the usual Northwest sequence, mines, timber, dairy, then the highway. The twenty-first has been faster. Costco moved its global headquarters to Issaquah from Kirkland in June 1996 and never left. Between the 2010 and 2020 censuses the city grew 31.6 percent, from 30,434 to 40,051 people, which Wikipedia records as the second fastest suburban growth in the state. The commute data cuts both ways: city figures reported by 425 Business count about 14,000 residents leaving each day for work and about 21,000 workers arriving. Issaquah is a bedroom community that is also somebody else’s office park, which is exactly the kind of prosperity that comes with no silhouette attached.
What the town had, and had deeply, was fish. The state built a hatchery on Issaquah Creek in 1936 as a Works Progress Administration project, an explicit repair job for salmon runs wrecked by the coal and logging decades, per the hatchery’s own history. The fish still come back every fall, up a creek that runs directly through downtown. In October 1970 the Greater Issaquah Chamber of Commerce, on an idea credited to its president Earl Robinson, threw a festival around the return. About 20,000 people showed up. By 1980 it drew 65,000; by 1988, 150,000; and through the 1990s and 2000s Salmon Days averaged 150,000 to 200,000 visitors across one October weekend, which makes it one of the Northwest’s biggest festivals in any category.
Around the edges stood the Issaquah Alps, Cougar Mountain to the west, Squak in the middle, Tiger to the southeast, older than the Cascades and laced with trailheads that fill every clear weekend. Paragliders run off Poo Poo Point on Tiger Mountain. King County Metro runs a seasonal Trailhead Direct shuttle because the parking lots cannot hold the demand. The hatchery alone hosts more than 300,000 visitors a year, per the Friends of the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery. None of this was a secret. All of it was seasonal, dispersed, or both, and none of it photographed like an icon.
Task: give the pass-through a place to stop
The Eastside suburb problem is prosperity without a picture. Bellevue has the skyline, Seattle has everything else, and the towns along Interstate 90 blur together at seventy miles an hour. Issaquah’s assets peaked in one golden month, October, when the salmon and the festival and the larch-yellow hillsides all arrive at once, then went quiet. The task, in Visitor Impact terms, was to convert a real but seasonal identity into a year round one, with something free, all ages, walkable from downtown, and alive in February. Preferably without building anything the general fund would have to defend forever.
In the summer of 2023 a Danish artist’s crew showed up with a shipping container and a pile of donated pallets, and the answer turned out to weigh about as much as a pickup truck and stand fourteen feet tall.
Action: adopt the troll, then do the paperwork
The Northwest Trolls: Way of the Bird King project put six Thomas Dambo trolls into the region in a single seven week run in summer 2023, per the project’s official site: Bainbridge Island, West Seattle, Ballard, Vashon Island, Portland, and Issaquah. The exhibit was presented by the Scan Design Foundation with the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation as partner, each head, hand, and foot built in Dambo’s Copenhagen studio and shipped over, each body framed on site from local recycled pallets by the crew and more than 200 volunteers. Dambo’s premise, repeated at every stop, is that trash has value; the trolls are folklore-scale proof.
Issaquah’s troll went up quietly over several days in late August 2023, beside the paved Rainier Trail about a quarter mile south of the Issaquah Community Center, per the Issaquah Alps Trails Club, whose own board president put in hours dismantling pallets. He is called Jakob Two Trees for the pair of uprooted trees he cradles, wears a necklace of working birdhouses, and carries a first in Dambo’s worldwide canon: a ponytail, held by a band made by the Snoqualmie Tribe.
The ponytail is the point
The Way of the Bird King series was designed as a handshake between traditions: Norse trolls that draw their magic from nature, sited on Coast Salish land, with tribal artists contributing carved and woven elements across the six installations, per nwtrolls.org. Jakob’s hair band from the Snoqualmie Tribe made him the first troll anywhere to wear one. It is a small detail doing the oldest civic work there is, saying two histories out loud at once.
What happened at city hall is the part other towns should photocopy. Issaquah built the troll an official page on the city website, the same digital shelf as utilities and permits, and stocked it like a transit brochure: take Sound Transit route 554 or Metro routes 208 or 271; expect limited parking at the community center lot, where the EV chargers are; street parking beyond that; restrooms in the community center with posted hours. Touch him, hug him, please do not climb him. The city announced him with a News Flash on September 5, 2023, the way it announces road projects. There is even an official geocache, created jointly by the City of Issaquah, the Scan Design Foundation, and Geocaching HQ.
The adoption went past hospitality into maintenance, which is where adoption becomes real. Each Northwest troll has a designated host partner responsible for upkeep, and in Issaquah that duty sits with the city’s Arts program, which coordinates repairs, per Seattle’s Child. When wind has stripped boards off Jakob, they have been replaced with more recycled pallets, keeping the material story honest. And the city kept building programming on top: its IssaQuest Sustainability GeoTour, per the city’s own page, starts players at Jakob and walks them through downtown, up to the Issaquah Highlands, and out to the trailheads. A sculpture became a trailhead of its own.
Result: a second season and a sharper silhouette
What does a fourteen foot troll do for a suburb of 40,051? First, it gets the town linked. Jakob has his own TripAdvisor listing, and his Yelp page carried 79 photos and 16 reviews by June 2026, unusual volume for a free roadside artwork. KIRO 7 and KOMO both published where-to-find-him guides. Every regional troll roundup, and there are many, routes readers through Issaquah. For a city whose search results used to begin and end with Costco’s address, that is a different front door.
Second, it holds up. When a bomb cyclone tore through the Puget Sound region in November 2024, 425 Magazine’s dispatch was a relieved headline, Jakob Two Trees Still Stands Tall. The Scan Design Foundation expects the trolls to last at least three years and possibly fifteen, and the volunteer troll team plus the city Arts program exist to stretch that number. An icon that survives its first disaster stops being an installation and starts being a landmark.
Third, and this is the arithmetic that matters, the troll joined a machine that was already running. Salmon Days returns for its 57th year on October 3 and 4, 2026, per the festival site, still produced by the Greater Issaquah Chamber of Commerce, still drawing crowds in the 150,000 to 200,000 range that HistoryLink and Wikipedia document for its mature decades. The hatchery’s 300,000 plus annual visitors arrive on their own schedule, heaviest in September and October when the creek boils with returning chinook and coho. The Alps fill the summer weekends. What Issaquah lacked was January, and a troll does not hibernate. He gives the school-break Tuesday and the gray February Saturday a destination, and he stands a flat, stroller-friendly quarter mile from downtown’s shops rather than up a mountain.
The wider network says the model travels. Dambo has built on the order of 125 trolls worldwide, more than 40 of them in the United States, and towns that treat theirs as civic assets rather than lawn ornaments see measurable returns; in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, the flagship case in our own reporting, a two troll installation drew an estimated 100,000 visitors in its first season and roughly 5.99 million dollars in local spending, per Star Tribune coverage. Issaquah sits closer to a major metro than any of those towns, which cuts both ways: more day trippers, fewer room nights.
Honesty requires the cap. Jakob is one of six siblings, and a determined Seattle family can meet three trolls in a single day without booking a hotel. That shared novelty is priced into this scorecard: the uniqueness multiplier sits at a modest 1.065x, the Anchor pillar reads 71.5, and the composite lands at 80. What Issaquah owns outright is not the troll, it is the adoption. Among the six hosts, the municipal scaffolding under Jakob, an official page, transit directions, a repair program, a geotour, is unusually explicit, and it is the reason his crowds resolve into parking spaces and restroom hours instead of neighborhood complaints.
What the scorecard is really pricing
Downtown Vitality (88) is Issaquah’s strongest pillar because the troll, the hatchery, the depot block, and the festival footprint all sit within one walkable core stitched together by the Rainier Trail. Brand (68.5) is the weakest because four different organizations, city, DMO, chamber, and downtown association, tell the story in four different voices. The town has the goods and the governance; it has not yet chosen a single flag.
Takeaway: hosting is a favor, adopting is a strategy
Any town can be given a sculpture. Issaquah’s case shows the difference between receiving art and enrolling it. Publish the official page before the first tour bus asks. Assign maintenance before the first board pops loose. Route the transit directions, post the restroom hours, build the geotour that walks a troll selfie into the coffee shops. None of that requires artistic genius; it requires the things a functioning city government already does every day, pointed at joy for once. Administration, it turns out, is a love language.
The second lesson is about sequence. An adopted icon compounds an existing identity; it does not substitute for one. Jakob works in Issaquah because the salmon worked first, since 1936 at the hatchery and 1970 at the festival, and because three mountains of trailheads were already delivering visitors with empty afternoons. A troll on a bare lot is a photograph. A troll a quarter mile from a hatchery with 300,000 annual visitors is an itinerary.
For every suburb that suspects it is only a bedroom, the encouraging part is what Issaquah did not do. It did not buy a slogan, hire a rebrand, or build an arena. It accepted a gift, then did the paperwork with unusual seriousness, and the paperwork is what turned a temporary art exhibit into the town’s handshake. The fish gave Issaquah a season. The troll, formally adopted, is giving it a year.