Fish Springs Trout Hatchery

Three miles south of Big Pine, in Inyo County, Fish Springs Road turns west to a state trout hatchery, open from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife runs it. Tule elk are often seen in the country around it, along with mule deer and, in the department’s words, “myriad other wildlife.”

Raceways and a tank room

The fish a visitor sees are in the raceways outside. These are concrete channels 1,000 feet long, fed by two groundwater wells that deliver water at a constant 60°. The department’s history page counts three production raceways. A consultant’s alternatives analysis prepared for the department by McMillen, Inc., dated February 2025, says six were added in 1972.

The trout start indoors. A hatchery building put up in 2009 holds twenty deep tanks. Eyed eggs shipped from other facilities hatch there in upwelling jars, and the fry stay until they reach about 2 inches, large enough to go out to the raceways.

By the department’s figures, the facility produces an average of 500,000 pounds of catchable trout a year, about half a pound apiece, for roadside waters in Inyo and Mono counties. It also supplies around 100,000 fingerling rainbows a year for stocking from the air. The history page names the catchables as rainbow and Eagle Lake trout. The Eagle Lake fish is a rainbow strain native to Eagle Lake and its Pine Creek tributary, known for its resistance to highly alkaline water. A program to preserve it began in the 1950s, as flows into Pine Creek diminished. A department release from 2025 lists rainbow, brown, and Lahontan cutthroat trout. The rainbows raised for anglers are now sterile triploids.

Springs from a lava escarpment

When the hatchery was built in 1952, its water came from a number of springs rising from a lava escarpment on the site. They flowed an average of 18 cubic feet per second at a constant 61°. The Wildlife Conservation Board paid for all of the construction, and the hatchery was dedicated on June 27, 1952, to rear catchable rainbow trout for the Inyo-Mono area. The fish were raised in two parallel series of earthen ponds about 1,700 feet long, which produced around 190,000 pounds of trout a year. Four staff houses went up the same year: simple concrete-block buildings with gable roofs and steel sash windows.

The springs had once been a source of native fish for the Big Pine Paiute Tribe. Tribal member Ross Stone has told of his grandfather living near the springs and his father fishing in the ponds. “The native fish were much better” than the planted trout, he maintained.

According to the Sierra Wave, Fish Springs went dry after two Los Angeles Department of Water and Power wells were activated in 1970. The department dates its conversion to wells and concrete raceways to 1972. The wells pump about 20,000 acre-feet a year, and the water circulates on to the Owens River. In 2024 Sally Manning, the tribe’s environmental director, told the Inyo County Water Commission that when both wells are running, one pumps 11,000 to 12,000 acre-feet a year and the other about 8,000. A five-acre pond beside the hatchery is dry. On a county tour in 2022, those present had to guess where its boundaries had been.

Loaded to the gunwales

In 1984 whirling disease shut down the state’s Mt. Whitney hatchery near Independence, and Fish Springs took on its production. “We were pushing everything off to the Fish Springs hatchery (near Big Pine) and had them loaded to the gunwales raising every fish they could possibly grow,” Bill Rowan, supervisor of the Department of Fish and Game’s Eastern Sierra hatcheries, told the Los Angeles Times in 1989. “It’s scary when you have that many fish, and all you need to have is a power outage, then you lose your wells and your whole crop.”

In 2003 the trouble was money. Layoffs of seasonal hatchery workers threatened to leave no drivers to deliver trout. Mono County officials received an emergency $10,000 to help rehire five seasonal workers at Hot Creek and Fish Springs. “The one thing we do not want to hit the angling rumor mill is that Fish and Game will not be stocking fish in Mono County for the rest of the season,” said Dan Lyster, the county’s director of economic development.

A bacterium from the Mojave River

In spring 2020 the bacterium Lactococcus garvieae was found in California for the first time, at the Mojave River State Fish Hatchery. The department looked to the two Owens Valley hatcheries, Fish Springs and Black Rock, to make up the loss. Together they held about two million trout, and both happened to be running their annual tests for infection. On June 25 the results came back positive, and both were quarantined. By July 21 it was clear the outbreak could not be contained. The remaining options were to watch the fish die slowly in their raceways or to euthanize all three million fish at the three hatcheries. On July 29 state officials began exposing the trout to high concentrations of carbon dioxide, then emptied and disinfected the raceways. “We got into this line of work because we love fish,” said Jay Rowan, the department’s hatchery production manager. “It sucks.”

With the fish gone, the wells were shut off, and the county watched its monitoring wells. In November 2020 Manning told the Water Commission that the water table was recovering in the deep aquifer, and that this was a chance to see whether the spring would flow again. The chairperson, Teri Red Owl, asked whether restocking and pumping could be delayed to allow more recovery. In January 2021 the water department’s Aaron Steinwand reported that disinfection was complete, that new eggs were close to arriving, and that one supply well would be turned on. He saw no obvious recovery in the shallow monitoring wells except those directly across from the hatchery, though two deep wells had recovered notably. Manning read the data as recovery and called for a recommendation to remove the hatchery or reduce its pumping. The Sierra Wave later reported that the water table in the area rose four to eight feet during the shutdown.

The infection returned in the summer of 2022. That June the Inyo County Board of Supervisors reconvened from Independence to the hatchery to see the effects of pumping. Supervisors, staff, tribal members, and locals arrived but could not enter the grounds because the bacterium was present. Manning and Noah Williams, the tribe’s water program coordinator, made their case, and it was on this tour that Stone spoke of his family at the springs. The department said its water use could be cut by 12 percent. The tribe wanted the springs running again. “The Tribe is asking for support; we’re not being asked to solve the problem,” said Leslie Chapman, the county’s chief administrative officer. In April 2024 the department’s Russel Black described two projects to the Water Commission: a mid-pond aeration system due to be finished in September 2024, and variable-speed valves to be installed from September to December 2024.

The afternoon of May 20, 2025

The February 2025 analysis listed several upgrades in its selected alternative, among them replacing the well houses’ diesel backup generators with propane. On the afternoon of Tuesday, May 20, 2025, the power went out in the Owens Valley for more than two hours. The hatchery runs on Los Angeles Department of Water and Power electricity and has backup diesel motors to keep the water pumping during outages. A software issue had left them non-operational. When a hatchery loses power, water levels drop, flows stop, dissolved oxygen falls, and temperatures rise quickly. The department estimated that 75 to 80 percent of the stock was lost, including eggs and fingerlings meant for the following year and catchable fish for that season.

“We’re devastated by the loss of these fish, which were the product of years of hard work and round-the-clock care by our expert hatchery staff,” said Russell Black, the department’s Inland Deserts Environmental Program Manager. The department expected the loss to affect Eastern Sierra fish plants for the next two seasons. It looked to its other hatcheries for eggs and fish and explored buying eggs from private vendors. A contractor had already been scheduled to come to the hatchery on Thursday, May 22, to diagnose the software issue.