Fall River Hatchery

The entrance is on the south side of South Century Drive, a little past milepost 12. From Highway 97 the route runs by the Fall River exit, a jog south, and a turn west at the Thousand Trails sign. Inside the gate are ten concrete raceways, each 100 feet long, 20 feet wide and three and a half feet deep, fed by Fall River, which flows through the grounds.

The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife places the hatchery about 25 miles south of Bend, at 4,250 feet, on 20 acres in the Deschutes National Forest. The Bulletin of Bend calls it about a 45-minute drive southwest of town. The department’s visitors’ guide is plain about the place: visitor facilities are very limited, but it is worth a stop while traveling through the area. The grounds are open 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily, and the guide gives May through September as the best time to come. There is a campground with a camp host. Birds of prey, songbirds, wading birds and waterfowl share the water with the fish.

Raceways, troughs and a well

The hatchery holds water rights on the river for 20 cubic feet per second. In 1994 a domestic well was drilled and oversized to supply incubation water. It gives 250 gallons a minute at 46 degrees.

The department’s 2023 and 2024 program plans list the rest of the plant:

• two fiberglass rearing ponds from 1965, rated poor
• sixteen fiberglass rearing troughs from 2011, rated excellent
• vertical incubators from 2003, eight stacks of eight trays
• a dirt abatement pond from 1976, marked unusable

The plans also rate the raceways poor. Their facilities table dates the raceways to 1950, while the narrative in the same documents says the ten raceways were completed in 1952.

The facility is staffed with one full-time position. In February 2026 The Nugget of Sisters reported that Luke Allen, who runs Wizard Falls Hatchery on the Metolius, also manages Fall River.

Fingerlings for the high lakes

The plans put the hatchery’s funding at 75 percent federal money through the Sport Fish Restoration Program and 25 percent license fees. No brood fish are kept on the grounds; eggs and young fish arrive from elsewhere:

• Brook trout eggs come from Story Hatchery in Wyoming.
• Cape Cod rainbows are spawned at Roaring River Hatchery in December, and their eyed eggs go to Cole Rivers Hatchery. The young fish reach Fall River the following December.
• Crane Prairie rainbows descend from wild fish of Crane Prairie Reservoir. They are spawned at Wizard Falls, and the eggs are put through a triploiding process that makes them sterile.

The visitors’ guide adds that the facility traps and spawns brown trout at a remote site.

The smallest fish leave by air. Brook and rainbow fingerlings are reared to 200 to the pound and air-stocked into high lakes in July of odd-numbered years. Some go first to the Klamath, Marion Forks, Oak Springs and Wizard Falls hatcheries. The 2024 plan adds 30,000 brook trout fingerlings in even years for backpack stocking into high lakes. The visitors’ guide lists cutthroat fingerlings for air stocking as well.

Larger rainbows go to lakes and streams across the Deschutes District from March through August:

• 3,000 trophies at half a fish to the pound go to North and South Twin Lakes.
• 6,000 fish at a pound apiece go into Fall River from April to August.
• 1,000 fish at about three to the pound, each over three pounds, go into Fall River in October.
• 1,500 fish are held back for Free Fishing Day in June.

Free Fishing Weekend falls on the first full weekend in June. In 2015 the hatchery held a fishing event on Saturday, June 6, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

One program leaves the trout behind. Each year 100,000 spring Chinook smolts are released in late March into Wychus Creek, the Crooked River and the Metolius River, and another 100,000 are sent to the Pelton Ladder. Portland General Electric pays for this work, which aims to return spring Chinook above Round Butte Dam and to offset losses caused by the Pelton-Round Butte dams.

The river past the hatchery

The Bulletin describes Fall River meandering through meadows and pine southwest of Sunriver. It is spring-fed, so its flows and temperatures hold steady and the fishing stays consistent through winter. Fly angling with barbless hooks is the rule. The sources differ on the river’s length. The department’s visitors’ guide calls it just 12 miles long. The Bulletin has it flowing east 8 miles from its headwaters to the Deschutes near La Pine State Park.

Trout show in the calmer, clearer water, including the stretch past the hatchery, and anglers often spot a fish before casting to it. The Bulletin puts most rainbows and browns at 12 to 14 inches. The department reports rainbows to 4 to 6 pounds and browns to 8. In winter, small sinking nymphs take more fish, with a short afternoon window for dry flies. Josh White, owner of The Hook Fly Shop in Sunriver, recommends midge patterns in sizes 16 to 20 on light line with a fluorocarbon leader.

From Tumalo to Fall River

A 1996 department basin plan traces the line of hatcheries. The old Bend Hatchery was replaced by Tumalo Hatchery in 1919, and Tumalo was replaced by Fall River in the mid-1920s. On September 15, 1925, The Bend Bulletin reported on a “Fall river auxiliary hatchery” whose temporary structures had gone up about two years earlier. The state game warden was then weighing new buildings, travelling with a party that included the superintendent of the Tumalo hatchery and a member of the state game commission.

The department gives 1929 as the year the original portion of the hatchery was completed. A Deschutes County record dates the hatchery Ice House to circa 1920, “the beginning of fishery management in Oregon,” and calls it the only original building left on the property.

From 1950, Fall River was closed to angling from the hatchery dam to 300 feet below the ponds. It reopened beside the hatchery in 1955.

The summer of 1973

In May and June 1973 the hatchery suffered what a 1980 Oregon State University report calls the first hatchery epizootic of infectious pancreatic necrosis ever reported in Oregon. Bacterial kidney disease was found at the same time, and the kidney infection was detected June 1 along with the virus. Every fish on the place was destroyed. The 1996 basin plan counts 1.8 million fingerling rainbow and brook trout and 71,000 legal-size rainbows.

In the week ending August 5, Len Mathisen, director of the Oregon Game Commission’s Bend office, told The Bulletin that every fish in an eight-mile stretch of the river would be killed after Labor Day. The stretch ran from the springs past the Fall River Guard Station to the falls. “We feel strongly obligated to eradicate problems from the stream,” Mathisen said.

Tests had found the virus only at the hatchery and immediately downstream. East Lake, a major source of eggs, was being tested and was clean so far. The commission chose to treat the river above the hatchery as well as below it, so the hatchery would not be reinfected if the virus had come from upstream. The plan called for rotenone and fintrol over about three days, with chemicals at the lower end to neutralize them. “We’re confident we can do the job successfully, without any other detrimental effects (to the water itself, for instance),” Mathisen said.

In September 1973 the river and its tributaries were treated with rotenone. The 1996 plan records the treatment as successful. The hatchery was disinfected and stood unused for nine months, and it did not return to full production until 1974. That year the river was restocked with brook, rainbow and brown trout of various sizes.