Cascade Hatchery

Thirty concrete raceways lie beside the old Columbia River Highway where Eagle Creek comes down out of its basalt canyon. Each is 78 feet long and 16 feet wide, and creek water reaches them by gravity. This is Cascade Hatchery, run by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife on 3.8 acres the U.S. Forest Service owns, 100 feet above sea level, 2.5 miles west of Cascade Locks off Interstate 84 at Exit 41. The 2024 program plan lists a staff of four full-time positions. The only visitor facility ODFW names is a camp host.

The coho ponds by the State Trail

Visitors walk the coho ponds on a self-guided tour. The paved Historic Columbia River Highway State Trail runs past them, and the hatchery sits inside the Forest Service’s Eagle Creek Recreation Area, which requires a day-use fee or recreation pass. A display on the east side of the building explains the salmon. ODFW lists wading birds and waterfowl among what can be seen at the ponds. A bid the department opened in spring 2026 called for new structural steel and new predator wire over the East Ponds to keep birds off the fish.

The hatchery raises coho. Under the 2024 plan, eggs incubate in 66 stacks of vertical incubators, 15 trays to a stack, and the fish leave at several sizes for several rivers. Unfed fry go to Bonneville and Clackamas hatcheries. Fingerlings go to Clackamas. Smolts go to the Nez Perce Tribe for the Lostine River, to the Umatilla River, and to Leavenworth National Fish Hatchery and the Wenatchee basin. Friends of the Columbia Gorge describes the same traffic from the trail. Each year millions of fingerlings raised for the Umatilla, Nez Perce, and Yakama tribes leave by tanker truck for other creeks, and others go by truck to the Oxbow hatchery in Cascade Locks for release into Herman Creek.

The State Trail east of the hatchery has been impassable since mid-December 2025, when heavy rain brought down the Ruckel Creek landslide. The debris lay up to 12 feet deep, full of large boulders and trees. The Oregon Department of Transportation began clearing it on Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2026. The Forest Service is then to judge the trail and the slope above it for safety.

Spawning in the riffles

ODFW gives August through November as the best time to come, when Chinook and coho spawn in Eagle Creek itself. According to the 2024 plan, adult coho of the Eagle Creek and Tanner Creek stock return from late September to mid-November and spawn in October and November, with a peak in November. Friends of the Columbia Gorge calls the creek in fall an excellent place to watch Chinook. They can be seen from vantage points along the creek-side road, or from a fish-viewing observatory built in 1915 for the old highway.

Friends advises looking where the water riffles over rocks. There the female swishes her tail above the gravel to make a redd, or nest. The male stays beside her while she releases eggs and he releases milt. The fertilized eggs stick to the gravel, and she swims upstream and fans more gravel over them with her tail. She guards the redd for a few days. The male goes off to find other females. Both soon die, and their bodies feed eagles and scavengers.

The Forest Service asks visitors to look without touching, to throw no rocks, to poke no salmon with sticks, and to stay out of the creek during spawning season.

A roadhouse site and the Mitchell Act

The ground was busy before the hatchery came. Friends of the Columbia Gorge writes that the new highway drew so many auto tourists that the Forest Service opened its first public campground at Eagle Creek. Friends dates that campground to 1915, and the Forest Service dates its opening to 1916. A 1916 restroom nicknamed “Big John,” the first flush toilet in the Forest Service, still stands in the area, though it is closed. On the hatchery’s own site, Friends says, a roadhouse lodge and cabins operated from 1915 to 1937.

The hatchery’s authority goes back to 1938. That year Congress passed the Mitchell Act, named for Hugh C. Mitchell, director of fish culture for the State of Oregon. A 1946 amendment let federal agencies use state fish and wildlife agencies to build and run hatcheries. Under that act, Cascade Hatchery began operating in 1959 as part of the Columbia River Fisheries Development Program, which was meant to enhance declining fish runs in the Columbia River Basin. The 2024 plan dates the concrete adult holding pond and the raceways to 1960. It describes the pond, 210 feet by 35, as “very irregular” in shape.

On October 30, 1996, auditors working for the Bonneville Power Administration visited the hatchery. At that time it held, spawned, incubated, and reared its own coho under manager Alan Meyer. The audit found the program in general compliance with most standards, but short of its adult return goal. It found that about six more raceways were needed to meet density criteria, and it recommended rebuilding the adult holding pond. Today the arrangement is different. Under the 2024 plan, no adults are collected at Cascade, and the Tanner Creek coho are spawned at Bonneville Hatchery.

Fire, flood, and slush

The hatchery’s trucks have carried more than fish. In 2007, ODFW disinfected trucks that normally hauled fish from the Cascade and Willamette hatcheries and used them to bring fresh water to storm-damaged communities near Vernonia. The effort was coordinated by Hal Boldt, the state’s fish liberation coordinator.

In September 2017 the Eagle Creek Fire burned through the drainage above the intake. Over Labor Day weekend, the workers who lived and worked at the three Cascade Locks hatcheries were evacuated. A small number stayed at Cascade to watch the facility and the fish. The power went out on Sept. 5, and for ten days ODOT delivered diesel to run the generator.

On Friday, Sept. 15, ODFW began moving about 1.65 million coho and 132,000 spring Chinook. Brett Requa, east region hatchery coordinator, explained the reason:

“Rain is forecast next week in areas scorched by the Eagle Creek Fire, and we expect to see mudslides and debris flow. This could overwhelm the screens on our water intake, reducing or completely shutting off the flow of water that sustain these fish, so we want to get them moved now.”

The fish rode in transport trucks carrying oxygen. About a million coho bound for the Umatilla and Lostine rivers went to Leaburg Hatchery. Coho for the Yakama went to Leavenworth and Willard national fish hatcheries, and the Chinook went to Sandy Hatchery. The last of them left on Saturday. Union members who came back for the job called it the Great Fish Evacuation, and their account puts the number at nearly 2 million fish. Requa thanked the firefighters “for saving all the structures at our three Cascade Locks fish hatcheries.”

By March 2018, ODFW counted 1.75 million evacuated juveniles, many of them already headed downriver. Half the Leaburg coho had been released into the Lostine River with the Nez Perce Tribe. The other 500,000 waited in acclimation ponds near Pendleton, in the care of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. Fry were being raised at Cascade again. ODFW said full production would wait on the stability of the Eagle Creek drainage. “Our ability to move these fish to Leaburg Hatchery was critical to salvaging production after the fires,” said Andrew Gibbs, acting east region hatchery manager.

In March 2021, ODFW reported to its commission that the hatchery “is well known for battling extreme weather events.” That winter it held 7.1 million fish and eggs. In December, two weeks of rain sent silt and timber down Eagle Creek, and a large tree lodged on the intake. Staff from The Dalles Screen Shop pulled it free, and no fish or eggs were lost. In February an ice storm came through the Gorge. For nearly a week, two people worked the intake around the clock in alternating 12-hour shifts, clearing slush with brooms and shovels. At one point the raceways filled completely with slush, and staff could not tell whether the fish beneath it were alive. When it thawed, all of them were.