Gnat Creek Hatchery

The first water a visitor looks into at Gnat Creek Hatchery is the show pond, where large rainbow trout and sturgeon move under the surface. A fish food station stands nearby for the public. Past it lie the raceways, fifteen of them in concrete, holding spring Chinook and winter steelhead. The hatchery sits 18 miles east of Astoria on U.S. Highway 30, between mileposts 76 and 77. An informational kiosk and picnic areas serve the day traveler, and the lot is large enough for school buses. The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife runs the station for egg incubation and rearing, and most of what it raises is released somewhere else.

Anglers have 2½ miles of easy access along the creek. Steelhead run from December through February, and May to July is the best time at Gnat Creek for spring Chinook.

Three trails up the creek

Three nature trails begin at the hatchery and wind through Coast Range forest and the Nicolai-Wickiup Watershed. Many of the plants, flowers and trees along them are marked. The Nicolai-Wickiup Watershed Walk is an interpretive trail just under a mile long. It passes a seldom-seen waterfall and loops through part of Clatsop State Forest. Tours on it have covered the watershed’s geology, its salmon and trout, its historical use, and the managed forest. In 2004 Roger Warren, then manager of the hatchery, described its beginnings: “The idea for this trail was hatched by a number of people who wanted to provide two things for local folks and visitors traveling Highway 30. We wanted to create a trail to view the beautiful waterfall and forest upstream, and we wanted a place to educate youth and adults about healthy watersheds.”

The Upper Gnat Creek Trail runs two miles. It follows the creek through stands of western hemlock, past interpretive signs, to a campground that is held first come, first served. The trail opened on a Saturday in June 2007. The Astoria Chamber Ambassadors cut a ribbon, and nearly 100 local Boy Scouts were the first to walk it. The state departments of Forestry and Fish and Wildlife built it with the Columbia River Estuary Study Task Force and the Oregon State Extension Service. “Multiple agencies came together, extending their cooperation and their resources to build this exhibit,” Warren said at the ceremony.

The creek beside these paths flows over an ancient basalt lava delta, Columbia River Basalt flows lifted by pressure to form the Coast Range. In about four miles it falls nearly 2,000 feet over several waterfalls to the lower Columbia. Great blue heron, kingfisher and American dippers stay all year. In spring and summer the salmon and steelhead come up the creek, with osprey and the occasional bald eagle, and on warm nights Pacific treefrogs sound from the woods. In fall and winter black-tail deer and Roosevelt elk often show on the upper trail. In cold weather nesting bald eagles and a pileated woodpecker can be seen.

Steelhead for three rivers, 1960

The hatchery was constructed in 1960 under the Columbia River Fisheries Development Program, known as the Mitchell Act, a federal effort to enhance declining fish runs in the Columbia River Basin. It was built to raise steelhead trout for the fisheries of the North Coast, the lower Columbia and the tributaries of the Willamette. A 1962 photograph by Peter W. Orr of the U.S. Forest Service labels it the Gnat Creek Fish Hatchery of the Oregon State Game Commission. The photograph was taken beside that year’s western hemlock looper control project in Clatsop County.

An audit conducted in 1996 and 1997, when Bob Mills was manager, set the hatchery about 17 miles east of Astoria. ODFW gives the distance as 18. The audit recorded the station’s production goals: 446,000 winter steelhead smolts for the Clackamas, Sandy, Tualatin, Gales Creek, North Fork Scappoose, Clatskanie, Lewis and Clark, and Gnat Creek systems, and 210,000 summer steelhead for the Clackamas, Salmon and Molalla. Water came from Gnat Creek, an unnamed stream and a well, and flows ranged from a high of 15,700 gallons a minute to a low of 1,200. The same audit also found that, because of reduced funding, the hatchery was not then rearing anadromous fish at all.

Oxygen for the summer ponds

By 2007 Gnat Creek was raising spring Chinook, typically around 850,000 a year, for the net-pen program overseen by Tod Jones of the Clatsop County Fisheries Project. That program belongs to the Select Area Fisheries Enhancement program, which the Northwest Power and Conservation Council started in 1993. Under it, hatchery juveniles are trucked to net pens in off-channel waters of the lower Columbia, reared there and released. When they return as adults they come back to the pens, where sport and commercial fishermen harvest them away from the wild stocks of the main stem.

Spring Chinook put on most of their weight in summer, when the creek runs lowest. That left a full bank of raceways, room for about 200,000 fish, standing empty. In five of the seven years before 2007, low water forced the crew to move Chinook to the net pens as early as Sept. 5. At that time of year, Warren said, the Columbia is still about 70 degrees and full of pathogens, and the young fish had to be treated with antibiotics.

Research into oxygen supplementation began in 2005. In the summer of 2006 a single low-head oxygen unit went into one raceway. In the summer of 2007 Jones and Warren built a makeshift system from materials donated by Longview Medical Supply, and the hatchery raised an additional 80,000 Chinook. “When this water passes through a pond of fish, the oxygen is depleted,” Warren said. “We replenish the oxygen when the water goes into the second and third ponds … effectively reusing the water two more times after we initially pass it through the first pond.”

A $108,000 grant from ODFW’s Restoration and Enhancement Program bought a permanent system of six oxygen generators and 15 dispensers. The dispensers supersaturate the water as it drops into the raceways and raise oxygen levels by up to 175 percent in the low-water months of July through October. Each pond runs on its own unit, so one failure does not starve the rest. The system was fully operational in all fifteen raceways by the fall of 2008, and the fish could be held until November for release into the Youngs Bay and Blind Slough net pens.

U.S. Rep. David Wu came to see the system on Nov. 29, 2007. During his tour Georgia-Pacific’s Wauna Mill handed Warren a check for $30,000 toward an outdoor classroom, a project of Warren and Lori Lilly of the North Coast Watershed Council. The classroom went up in 2008, and student groups of all ages visit through the year. That same year the hatchery staff took over duties at the nearby Blind Slough net pens.

A shipping container, and a closing notice

Warren and Jones both retired after decades in hatchery work. “When we retired we had all this information about how hatcheries need to operate more effectively and efficiently,” Warren said in 2019. As owners of Redd Zone LLC, named for the nest a salmon digs in gravel, they built a portable hatchery inside a shipping container. It keeps eggs in darkness and lets the fry swim or flush out without being handled. They handed its keys to the Skokomish Indian Tribe of Washington in late October 2019. “It’s been fun for us to realize our dreams,” Warren said.

On June 18, 2026, Jason Sweet, the Bonneville Power Administration’s fish and wildlife program executive director, notified ODFW that BPA would stop funding the SAFE program. Sweet wrote that there was “no direct evidence” that the off-channel fisheries had reduced harvest impacts on weak and ESA-listed stocks in the main stem. Gnat Creek is part of the Blind Slough Select Area Fishery, where an annual average of 560,000 spring Chinook have historically been released. “This decision by BPA caught us by surprise,” said Debbie Colbert, director of ODFW. Conrad Gowell of Wild Fish Conservancy took the other side, saying that hatchery fish stray into lower Columbia tributaries and that “there are better ways to spend funds on the recovery of ESA-listed fish.”

In July 2026 ODFW posted a one-minute video stating that sport fishermen stood to lose 34,000 returning adult fish a year and that Gnat Creek Hatchery would close. According to the agency, the end of BPA funding was set to begin October 1.