Seattle · Self-guided audio walk

Ballard Locks and Old Ballard

Watch boats rise and salmon climb at the locks, then follow the brick street to Ballard's Scandinavian main street.

5Stops
1.8 kmDistance
30+ minTime

Photo by Kingofthedead on Wikimedia Commons

Two Ballards sit side by side. At the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks, boats drop between Puget Sound and the freshwater lakes while salmon climb a 21-step fish ladder past an underwater viewing window. A short walk south, Ballard Avenue's brick storefronts hold the old Scandinavian main street, with Bergen Place's benches at its head and the National Nordic Museum a block away. This loop strings a working waterfront and a small-town shopping street into about two hours on foot.

Hear it on the street

Get the turn-by-turn audio guide in the app. The narration plays itself as you reach each stop, hands-free and offline.

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Stop by stop

The route

Interactive map of the route. The full stop list below works without it.

Must see

Photo by Ursacascadia on Wikimedia Commons

Hiram M. Chittenden Locks

0:00

Watch boats rise and fall between Puget Sound and the freshwater lakes, then find salmon climbing the 21-step fish ladder.

You're standing above concrete chambers that move boats between two kinds of water. To the west, Puget Sound runs tidal and salty. Behind you, Salmon Bay and Lake Union hold freshwater. The two locks do the negotiating: the small one is 30 feet wide and 150 feet long, and the large one stretches 825 feet.

Watch a boat settle as the chamber drains, then head to the fish ladder on the south side. Salmon climb it in 21 steps, weir by weir, and an underground window lets you see them nose into the current. This ladder sits where salt and fresh water meet, which is rare. The Army Corps of Engineers finished the whole complex in 1917 and named it for Major Hiram Chittenden.

Building it lowered Lake Washington about nine feet and dried out a thousand acres of wetlands. Today these locks move more boats than any other lock in the country, and sockeye, chinook, and coho salmon still pass through every summer and fall.

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≈2 min walk to the next stop

Local pick

Photo by Steven Pavlov on Wikimedia Commons

Carl S. English Jr. Botanical Garden

0:00

A plant collection built from dredge spoil, with dawn redwoods, fan palms, and twenty kinds of magnolia.

This garden began as a lawn scraped bare when the locks were built. Carl S. English Jr. arrived in 1931 as an assistant gardener and stayed more than four decades, filling the dredge spoil with plants from around the world.

He traded seeds with botanists and asked ship captains passing through the locks to bring back specimens. His best find was the dawn redwood, a tree known only from fossils until botanists found it living in China in the 1940s. English obtained some of the first seeds ever shipped to the United States, and eight of those trees grow here now. Around you are more than 500 species and 1,500 varieties, including over twenty kinds of magnolia, fan palms from China, and Japanese flowering cherries.

The garden was named for English in 1974, and he kept working in it until he died in 1976. Something here is in bloom nearly every month, so the beds shift as the year turns.

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≈8 min walk to the next stop

Must see

Photo by ECTran71 on Wikimedia Commons

National Nordic Museum

0:00

Ballard's Scandinavian story in a zinc-clad building, from Viking finds to modern design.

The building in front of you holds Ballard's Scandinavian memory, but the story begins outside its doors. At the turn of the twentieth century, one in four immigrants to Washington came from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, or Sweden, and many landed here to fish and mill lumber. This museum began in 1980 inside a surplus school, then moved into this building in 2018. Its long central hall is called Fjord Hall, after the Norwegian fjord landscape, with timber bridges crossing above you.

In 2019 Congress designated it the National Nordic Museum. Inside, the permanent exhibit Nordic Journeys covers twelve thousand years, from four-thousand-year-old stone axes and a Viking grave to modern design. The collection holds nearly eighty thousand objects, and about a hundred more are on loan from the national museums of all five Nordic countries. Step inside and the hall opens above you like a long timber canyon.

Outside, the facade wears vertical strips of zinc that ripple like water.

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≈11 min walk to the next stop

Free preview ends here · stops 4 to 5 continue in the app

Bergen Place

A triangle of benches named for Bergen, Norway, with a mural of the five Nordic nations.

in app

Ballard Avenue Historic District

The old brick main street where Ballard was a mill town, now shops and restaurants.

in app

Good to know

Before you go

Do the Ballard Locks cost anything?

The Hiram M. Chittenden Locks and the fish ladder are free, and so is the Carl S. English Jr. Botanical Garden next to them.

When can I see salmon in the fish ladder?

Salmon climb the 21-step ladder in summer and early fall. The underwater viewing windows are open year-round, and you can watch boats rise and fall any day.

Is the National Nordic Museum worth it?

The zinc-clad museum tells Ballard's Scandinavian story, from Viking finds to modern design, and it pairs well with a wander down the brick storefronts of Ballard Avenue.

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Provenance · last verified August 19, 2026

Built from the Wayside route itself: the stops, their order, and the walk between them.

Photo by Kingofthedead on Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

Photo by Ursacascadia on Wikimedia Commons · CC0

Photo by Steven Pavlov on Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

Photo by ECTran71 on Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

Photo by Ntowle98 on Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

Photo by Joe Mabel on Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0

Photo by Lalit Gupta on Unsplash

Photo by Joe Mabel on Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

Photo by Jrozwado on Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0