Cole M. Rivers Hatchery

From Highway 62 at milepost 29, by Casey State Park, Takelma Drive runs north three-quarters of a mile to Cole M. Rivers Drive. The drive crosses the Rogue River to the hatchery on the east bank. The hatchery stands about half a mile below William Jess Dam and Lost Creek Reservoir, at 1,545 feet, 30 miles northeast of Medford. The Medford Mail Tribune puts its entrance 157 miles from the sea.

An observation deck stands over the collection pond and the adult holding ponds. The fish reach that pond by a ladder. Migrating adults enter, climb, and are trapped, hatchery returns and naturally produced swim-ins alike, and a barrier weir at the pond ends their way upstream. Winter steelhead are taken there from late February through early June. A viewing room looks onto the spawning area, where the adults are spawned and the eggs set to incubate. Display ponds hold trout and steelhead raised on the place. Birds of prey, wading birds and waterfowl work the ponds and the river edge.

Anglers fish the Hatchery Hole for winter and summer steelhead, coho and spring Chinook in authorized seasons. The grounds also have a boat ramp for small boats, trails, restrooms and a camp host. Casey State Park, next door, keeps day-use picnic and boating grounds.

Fin clips and the weekly count

The hatchery raises spring and fall Chinook, coho, summer and winter steelhead, and rainbow trout. ODFW calls it the largest producer of hatchery fish on the Oregon coast. Its annual goals run to 1,703,250 spring Chinook smolts, 75,000 coho, 220,000 summer steelhead, and 132,000 winter steelhead each for the Rogue and the Applegate. In 2016 a staff of 14 full-time and five seasonal employees did the work.

Winter steelhead smolts leave in late April or early May. The screens are pulled from the rearing ponds and the fish go into the river on their own. The next day the stragglers are crowded out.

Since 2007 every release has been adipose fin-marked. An automated process in a marking trailer does the clipping, and the trailer moves around the state. It has lately reached Cole Rivers in March. The public may watch the marking, which generally runs from late February to early April. ODFW asks visitors to call ahead.

Roughly once a week the fish are counted out of the pond and ladder and sorted. The season’s return to date is then set against a 10-year running average. The Corps of Engineers reads the counts on a recorded telephone line, after the water conditions for Lost Creek and Applegate reservoirs.

A hatchery ordered before the dam

The dam came out of floods. A Rogue Basin flood control project was started in 1935. In Steve Beyerlin’s account, it heated up in 1956, after the Flood of 1955. At a public hearing in Grants Pass on 15 November 1956, testimony held that “any flood control plan detrimental to the fishery resource would be unacceptable, both locally and to the Federal and State fishery agencies.” The Rivers and Harbors Act of October 23, 1962, authorized the project, two years before the Christmas Day Flood of 1964.

The Final Environmental Impact Statement for Lost Creek Dam, dated May 8, 1972, set down what the dam would cost the fish: “The project will effectively isolate the upstream drainage area from use by anadromous fish. Maintenance of anadromous and resident fish populations will be dependent upon the fish hatchery (Cole Rivers) for artificial spawning and rearing.” An 11-mile stretch of free-flowing stream would go under the lake. The statement estimated that the river above the dam gave spawning ground to 13,020 spring Chinook and 500 summer steelhead. The hatchery was then under construction and due to be finished in January 1973. It was to produce 425,100 pounds of fish a year, enough to cover those losses and the losses from the Corps’ dams planned on Elk Creek and the Applegate. Its list of species included kokanee.

Beyerlin gave a briefing to Curry County in 2019, and by his account the hatchery was ordered built and operating before the dam could be. Construction finished in 1973, and work on the dam began. William Jess Dam was completed in 1977. It blocked 10 miles of the mainstem and parts of the Middle and South forks.

The sources date the hatchery’s start differently. The Southern Oregon Historical Society dates the Corps’ handover of the hatchery to the State of Oregon to 1973. The Mail Tribune has written both that it went online in 1973 and that it has operated since 1974. The Corps still owns it, and ODFW runs it under agreement. Elk Creek Dam, one of the three the hatchery was built to answer for, has since been removed.

In 1980 Medford troopers caught two men taking chinook salmon from the hatchery and lodged them in jail. The local papers ran the story, and what had become almost a daily problem dried up overnight.

Biologist on the Rogue

The hatchery is named for Cole M. Rivers, a biologist on the Rogue for 20 years. In 1961, as a Grants Pass game commission fish biologist, he reported on Rogue River angling to the Jackson County chapter of the Izaak Walton League. In July 2021 Dan Van Dyke, ODFW’s Rogue district fish biologist, wrote of a drought summer and turned to Rivers for the worst one on record. Van Dyke wrote that, according to Rivers, the drought years of 1930 and 1931 created havoc with fish life, and fish loss was reported from almost every part of the basin.

Returns, algae, and a failed power line

Beyerlin’s 2019 figures traced the spring Chinook. By his count, hatchery adults returning to the pond averaged 19,643 a year in 1981–1990 and 24,518 in 1991–2000, against the goal of 13,020. From 2005 through 2018 they averaged 4,881. Naturally produced spring Chinook entering the pond were not counted until 2016.

The Hatchery Hole had opened to fishing in the early 2000s, when hatchery spring Chinook returns ran well above broodstock needs. ODFW put emergency angling rules on it in 2017 and again in 2020 after poor returns of early fish. From May 1 through July 31, 2021, all angling there was closed. Van Dyke wrote that the closure was meant to secure broodstock “during a continued downturn in performance,” and to free the Oregon State Police to patrol the upper Rogue, where wild spring Chinook hold in summer.

The hatchery’s operation was set to go out for competitive bidding in 2017. Corps officials in Portland instead sought a sole-source agreement for ODFW to keep raising and releasing 2.8 million salmon, steelhead and trout. In December 2018 ODFW reported a loss of fish eggs and gave excess algae and aging infrastructure as the likely cause. Alex Rachowicz of Rogue Valley Anglers Fly Shop in Medford recalled fish losses in 2018, 2020 and 2021. In 2020 the Archie Creek Fire destroyed Rock Creek Hatchery, its production moved to Cole Rivers, and pond space grew short.

In April 2021 the main power feeder failed. It was a direct-buried cable 4,675 feet long, running nearly a mile from the Lost Creek dam generators, and the Mail Tribune called it 50 years old. Crews found multiple faults along one 2,270-foot section. Splices did not hold, and the whole line had to be replaced. Generators ran the hatchery, but they could not heat the water in the hatch house.

In February 2022 manager David Pease said about 2 million spring Chinook fry should have been out of the hatch house by January 1, but they were too small. “It’s going to effect everything,” he said. The Corps had also tried to tap into Pacific Power, but the attempt stalled on the need for a new generator and electrical panel. “We decided that wasn’t going to be a viable option,” said Corps spokesman Tom Conning. The hatchery ran on new power on 21 August 2023.

The Corps lists more trouble: a water delivery and treatment system it calls ineffective and insufficient, with poor water behind disease outbreaks, low-oxygen events and fish loss; concrete wearing on the raceways and the ladder; roofs with substantial leaks. In 2023 ODFW reported the loss of 866,694 steelhead fry. The agency found the cause in human error at ODFW, compounded by infrastructure that made the risk hard to isolate. All the sac fry for Rogue summer steelhead were lost, and the loss reached into the 2024 half-pounder fishery and the 2025 adult fishery. ODFW had held back 82,000 summer steelhead smolts in 2022 and released them in April 2024 to soften the blow.

Congress put more than $5 million toward repairs in fiscal years 2022 and 2023. Sens. Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden secured $4.06 million, which covered the power line, a transformer and new roofs and paid for a water system design without building it. In 2026 another $9,460,000 was set aside to rebuild the water supply. The Corps expects that work to be finished in 2035.

On August 12, 2024, a trail camera at the hatchery caught two people. They returned August 27 at about 8 p.m., wearing motorcycle helmets, and entered the stream around the fish trap trying to spear or gaff salmon. The two in the photographs later came forward, and State Police investigators cleared them. In 2025 masked figures came to the outflow fish trap before dawn. Troopers found the camera’s antenna ripped off and the camera pushed aside. ODFW staff found the lock on the trap cut and an unknown number of salmon netted from it.