A framed photograph in the Klamath Fish Hatchery office in Chiloquin shows the old wooden building engulfed in flames. Five years later, staff are working from a new facility built to better withstand a future wildfire.
The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife reopened the hatchery’s main building earlier this month, after the Two Four Two Fire destroyed the original structure in September 2020.
“It was completely destroyed by the time they got it out,” Hatchery Manager Gayle Mitchell said, looking at the photograph.
Mitchell and other staff were told to evacuate.
“We were like, ‘Okay, we'll evacuate, but it's not going to do anything,’” said Mitchell. “We found out how wrong we were.”
The hatchery manager at the time returned after the evacuation and saw smoke coming from the 100-year-old building. Firefighters focused on protecting nearby staff homes, where Mitchell and other employees live, but could not save the hatchery itself.
The hatchery is spring-fed, allowing water to continue flowing through the facility even after power was lost. The cold spring water also makes it an ideal place to raise trout.
Most of the fish survived the fire.
“We had some brown trout inside that building, but everything else made it,” said Mitchell.
Although the hatchery lost its main building, fish production continued.
“Every year we put out about a million fish, 100,000 pounds, give or take,” she said. “Since the fire it dipped for a few years, but last year we were back up at over 900,000 fish going out.”
Staff moved into a construction trailer that served as office space for nearly five years. The arrangement became even more challenging during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We were working out of the garden shed, but then we couldn't breathe each other's air,” Mitchell said. “So it's like 14 degrees out, and they'd open the roll-up door, and we'd sit there for our meetings in the morning.”
The fire also destroyed the trays used to hatch fish eggs. Staff had to bring in already hatched fish from other hatcheries, a riskier process than transporting the eggs.
The hatchery struggled to maintain its previous production levels following the fire. But the system was able to compensate for that.
“Our Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife folks are very resilient and creative, and you really wouldn't have noticed that they were struggling at the hatchery by the fish they were catching here,” said George Gregory, manager of the Lake of the Woods Resort, one of the many lakes stocked by the Klamath Hatchery.
This hatchery is one of 33 operated by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. The fish help support recreational fishing while reducing pressure on native fish populations, Mitchell said.
“It lets the wild fish be wild,” she said.
The hatchery stocks fish in lakes across southeast Oregon. Gregory said they see lots of people come to fish at Lake of the Woods.
“Our lake is not really conducive to trout self-propagating,” Gregory said. “So without the stocking program, the fishing here wouldn't be nearly as good.”
About 75% of the fish they release are sterile triploid trout, preventing them from breeding with wild fish.
Inside the new hatchery
The new hatchery building is where most of the fish begin their lives. Inside, rows of incubation trays hold thousands of trout eggs shipped from hatcheries in Oregon and California.
“We get eggs in, and we put them in these baskets here,” Mitchell said as she pulled open one of the trays. “Depending on the size of eggs, we can put 5,000 to 10,000 eggs or so in here.”
The Klamath Hatchery doesn’t produce any of its own eggs. Instead, it receives them from other hatcheries in Oregon and California. It usually takes around one to three weeks for the eggs to hatch, depending on how far along they are when they arrive.
After hatching, most of the fish are moved to outdoor ponds to grow. But some are kept in smaller tanks inside to keep them from growing too big, so they can be stocked in remote lakes by horseback.
“They put them in bags of oxygen and put them in saddle packs,” said Mitchell. “And then they take them three, four miles up to a lake that otherwise would not be accessible.”
Some other tanks are used for special fish, like a small number of salmon the hatchery is raising for conservation research. In another tank, the brown trout are mostly swimming at the bottom.
“They don't like a lot of activity. They don't like to be hand fed,” Mitchell said. “So we're able to put them in here, put them on automatic feeders, and just try to keep our interactions with them at a minimum.”
The new building also comes with some upgrades.
“We have a lot more egg trays. We have more tanks in here,” said Mitchell. “The lighting and the heating system is so new and fancy. It's given us all gray hair because we can't figure it out.”
The building includes a large maintenance shop, with tools for staff to repair everything from fish screens to tractors. During the rebuild, tools were spread across buildings, making it difficult to do maintenance work.
“You'd spend 12 hours trying to find the right tools,” Mitchell said. “Having everything here has made it much more efficient.”
Building the replacement hatchery proved more complicated than expected.
After construction began, crews discovered the site could not support the weight of the new building without reinforcement.
“They had the budget, and then they found out the soil wasn't good,” said Mitchell. “So they had to drive piles in it.”
The unexpected work added roughly $2 million to the price tag.
Crews also discovered indigenous and historic cultural resources during site cleanup, prompting a survey to ensure the building could be built in the original location.
The new hatchery was designed with wildfire in mind. The structure is built from concrete and other fire-resistant materials intended to better withstand future fires.
Behind the hatchery, a stream serves one final purpose. Fish remaining after the stocking season are released there to grow into trophy-sized trout.
“When we have free fishing days, we let kids come here and catch a fish out of here,” said Mitchell. “It's just a great place to come sit, watch some fish, hang out, see them in a more natural setting.”
Many of the trophy fish have already been shipped out this year, and the rest will be cleared out by July, headed to one of 50 lakes in Oregon for someone to catch.
