Klamath Hatchery

Families come to the outdoor ponds at Klamath Hatchery to watch the trout grow, and fish food can be bought to throw to them. The ponds lie along Crooked Creek off Oregon 62, the road to Crater Lake, eight miles west of Chiloquin and short of Fort Klamath, at an elevation of 4,120 feet. Behind them stands the hatch house the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife opened to the public on June 1, 2026. It is concrete, slightly larger than the wood-framed building it replaced, with a tall retaining wall at its back. The 57-acre grounds also hold fish-viewing areas, a picnic area, restrooms, and trails. The department’s guide lists birds of prey, songbirds, upland birds, wading birds, waterfowl, and freshwater mammals among the wildlife to be seen. Fishing is closed on the grounds. The department points anglers to nearby Klamath Lake and its “monster wild rainbow trout.” The access road still has soft shoulders in several sections from fire damage.

Spring water and a hatch house

The water rises from hillside springs. The department’s marker at the hatchery counts a dozen of them, forming Crooked Creek. Its 2024 management plan names five. Both give their temperatures as 45 and 49 degrees. Because the hatchery is spring-fed, water kept running through it even after the power failed, and the cold water suits trout.

Gayle Mitchell, the hatchery manager, lives on the grounds with other employees in the staff homes. Inside the hatch house, rows of incubation trays hold eggs shipped from hatcheries in Oregon and California. Klamath produces none of its own. “We get eggs in, and we put them in these baskets here,” Mitchell told a Jefferson Public Radio reporter on June 5, 2026, pulling open a tray. “Depending on the size of eggs, we can put 5,000 to 10,000 eggs or so in here.” The eggs hatch in one to three weeks, depending on how far along they are when they arrive, and incubation runs from October through July. One tank holds a small number of salmon raised for conservation research. In another, brown trout keep to the bottom. They are Mitchell’s favorite fish. “They don’t like a lot of activity. They don’t like to be hand fed,” she said, so they are kept on automatic feeders. Of the building’s new lighting and heating, she said: “It’s given us all gray hair because we can’t figure it out.”

Most of the fry go out to the concrete ponds and raceways. Behind the hatch house runs a stream where fish left over after the stocking season are turned loose to grow to trophy size. On free fishing days, children are let in to catch one there. “It’s just a great place to come sit, watch some fish, hang out, see them in a more natural setting,” Mitchell said.

Saddle packs and helicopters

The counts differ by source. The visitors guide gives about 3 million fish a year. Mitchell put it this way: “Every year we put out about a million fish, 100,000 pounds, give or take.” About three quarters are sterile triploid trout, which cannot breed with wild fish. “It lets the wild fish be wild,” she said.

Rainbow trout make up most of the output, with brown trout alongside. Legal-size fish go to more than 30 waterways in Klamath, Lake, and other counties. Fingerlings go to lakes from the southern Cascades east to the Idaho border. In 2023 the manager then, Greg Lipsiea, described the rainbows at release as fingerlings of 2 to 4 inches, 10-inch fish, and upward of 16,000 two-pound trophies. He called Diamond Lake, one of their destinations, “one of the best productive lakes in the state.” Every other year, fingerlings go by helicopter into lakes in the Mountain Lakes and Sky Lakes wilderness areas. Other fish are held back in small indoor tanks so they will not grow too big for the trip by horse. “They put them in bags of oxygen and put them in saddle packs,” Mitchell said. “And then they take them three, four miles up to a lake that otherwise would not be accessible.”

At Lake of the Woods, George Gregory manages the resort. “Our lake is not really conducive to trout self-propagating,” he said. “So without the stocking program, the fishing here wouldn’t be nearly as good.”

The hatchery has also taken part in a pilot to return spring Chinook to the Klamath Basin, about 10,000 fish over four years by the 2026 count. In 2023 some of the 6-inch fingerlings carried radio transmitters, to learn whether they could migrate from the rivers that run into Upper Klamath Lake. “So far we’ve seen the first release was successful,” Lipsiea said then. The marker records an older program: coho salmon, “desert adapted” cutthroat for the warm, alkaline waters of southeast Oregon, and native Willamette River rainbows for the Klamath Basin. That work earned the place the name of an “exotic trout” hatchery.

Crooked Creek and the CCC boys

The marker dates the start to the 1920s. That was when the Oregon State Game Commission began raising trout in sections of Crooked Creek, on land and water leased from the Klamath Indian Reservation. The department gives 1929 as the year of original construction. Bill Miller, writing in the Medford Mail Tribune in 2008, put it that “the fish hatchery we see wasn’t begun until 1929, and from then on it slowly grew in size.”

In the 1930s, men came up from the Klamath Falls camp of the Civilian Conservation Corps. They built rectangular wooden fish ponds and many of the residences. Around 1937, by Miller’s account, “the CCC boys” built the long headquarters building. It held offices, apartments for senior staff, two garages, and incubation nurseries for eggs and fry. In 1938, William Howland, superintendent of the Klamath Hatchery, went up to the first ranger training school at Crater Lake National Park, held July 5 to 20. He was one of its outside instructors, and fish planting was on the course list. In 1939 the Public Works Administration paid for workers to build a concrete dam and begin some of the concrete ponds.

The Living New Deal survey takes issue with the marker on two counts: part of the work was the PWA’s, not the CCC’s, and no wooden ponds remain, everything being concrete. It places the PWA marker on the large pond that regulates the flow. After the Second World War, more buildings went up and the property was at last purchased from the Klamath tribe. The marker sets that purchase in the 1940s or 1950s.

The Two Four Two Fire

In late summer 2020 the Two Four Two Fire started on Fremont-Winema National Forest land and spread quickly on gusty winds. By the time it was contained in late September, it had burned nearly 14,500 acres between Highway 97 and Highway 62. On September 8, hatchery staff secured the facility, gathered what they could, and evacuated. “We were like, ‘Okay, we’ll evacuate, but it’s not going to do anything,’” Mitchell said. “We found out how wrong we were.”

The next morning the manager tried to get back in. He could see the hatchery only from half a mile off, with flames moving across the hillside above it. Smoke rose from the hatch house and office complex, and someone called 911. Firefighting crews were stretched thin across the region, and only a few volunteer firefighters reached the site. They ran the hatchery’s pumps to draw water from the rearing ponds and used its tractor to clear brush and cut a fire line. The main building caught fast and was fully engulfed within minutes, so they turned to the rest. The four staff residences and several outbuildings stood. About 50,000 triploid brown trout were lost inside the building, 20,000 of them bound for Diamond Lake, along with the egg trays.

The accounts of what burned do not agree. The department called it the original 100-year-old hatchery building. Lipsiea said it had been built in the 1950s, a 225-by-75-foot office complex that also housed the main shop, and he called it “the heart of the hatchery.”

Staff worked out of a construction trailer for nearly five years. During the pandemic they met in a garden shed. “So it’s like 14 degrees out, and they’d open the roll-up door, and we’d sit there for our meetings in the morning,” Mitchell said. With the trays gone, already-hatched fish had to be trucked in from other hatcheries. Lipsiea said in 2023, “We haven’t had a hiccup in production.” Mitchell recalled a dip of a few years, then more than 900,000 fish going out in 2025. Gregory said of the department’s people that “you really wouldn’t have noticed that they were struggling at the hatchery by the fish they were catching here.”

Steel piles under the hatch house

Design work began within months. During debris cleanup, the department reports, crews found Indigenous and historic cultural resources within the project area. In 2023 Scott Patterson, the department’s fish propagation manager, said archaeological studies with the Klamath Tribes had found no evidence of artifacts. A full survey commissioned by the department concluded that the building could go back on its old footprint. Then engineers found the ground there too wet to carry a concrete building. The foundation was redesigned on 81 driven steel piles, with 50 more under the retaining wall. “Installing more than 130 steel piles was a major undertaking, but it ensured this facility will stand for generations,” said Ryan McCormick, the department’s chief engineer. The piles added roughly $2 million, and the whole construction came to $8.1 million. In 2023, Lipsiea had hoped to reopen to visitors in 2024.

In the new office hangs a framed photograph of the old wooden building in flames. “It was completely destroyed by the time they got it out,” Mitchell said, looking at it.