Lookingglass Hatchery

The last two miles to Lookingglass Hatchery are gravel. The turn comes at a sign on Palmer Junction Road, in Union County, and the road ends at concrete ponds and staff residences on Lookingglass Creek, shaded by lodgepole and ponderosa pine. The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife runs the hatchery on 22.5 acres owned by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, at 2,520 feet above sea level, with seven full-time employees and two seasonal ones. Inside the visitor building is a small display area with a viewing window. Outside, information signs mark the grounds: holding ponds, a settling pond, a fish ladder, and eighteen concrete raceways, each 100 feet long. Adult Chinook salmon are present for most of the summer, and the department names June through September as the best time to come. Birds of prey, wading birds, freshwater mammals, and hoofed animals use the creek and the woods around it.

Eighteen raceways under the pines

In 2022 a Columbia Insight reporter watched Rick Zollman stand at the edge of one raceway while tens of thousands of juvenile Chinook rushed toward him. Zollman works for Nez Perce fisheries, though he is not a tribal member himself. The fish leapt from the water when he waved, conditioned to expect food. Each raceway held roughly 65,000 juveniles that year, nearly 1.5 million fish in all.

Their parents came from five streams. Adults are trapped at weirs on Catherine Creek, the Upper Grande Ronde, the Lostine River, and the Imnaha, then trucked here. Lookingglass Creek’s own returns are caught at the hatchery weir and held on site. Collection for spawning begins in August, and spawning runs through August and September. A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service brochure follows what happens next. The eggs “eye up,” showing tiny visible backbones, and staff must “shock, pick, and enumerate” more than 1.5 million of them. The fry are reared in fiberglass containers called double-deep Canadian troughs until they are 2.5-inch fingerlings, then moved to the raceways for another year. According to Columbia Insight, the young fish are kept apart by the river their parents came from.

At eighteen months the smolts are pumped onto trucks and hauled to acclimation pens on their parents’ home waters, where they spend their last weeks before release. By then, the 2022 account says, they no longer swim toward people expecting food. Lookingglass Creek fish skip the trip and go straight into the creek from the hatchery. Winter is the hard season. The intake and raceways can fill with slush ice, and staff mix well water into the creek water to hold it off.

The weirs also decide which fish reach the spawning grounds. Under what managers call the sliding scale, the number of wild fish returning in a given year sets how many hatchery fish are let upstream, and how many wild adults are kept for broodstock. Hatchery fish are marked by a clipped adipose fin. “The weirs allow everything to be controlled,” Zollman told the reporter. “We don’t inundate the natural fish, but we don’t leave the spawning grounds empty.”

The hatchery runs two kinds of programs. The Grande Ronde work is conservation, meant to keep three wild populations from going extinct and to reintroduce Chinook to Lookingglass Creek. The Imnaha program serves harvest. Its adults are trapped at a satellite facility built in 1988, thirty miles up the Imnaha River from the town of Imnaha. Surplus Imnaha adults go to charitable food banks and to tribal entities for ceremonial and subsistence use. Under the Lower Snake River Compensation Plan, the hatchery’s yearly goals are 1,390,000 smolts released and 9,068 adults returning.

Old and Young Looking Glass

The hatchery is named for Young Looking Glass, a Nez Perce leader. The Fish and Wildlife Service brochure tells the story of his father. Old Looking Glass was 70 when he arrived late to the 1855 treaty council and found that others had already signed. “My people, what have you done?” he said. “While I was gone, you have sold my country. I have come home, and there is not left for me a place to pitch my lodge.” The brochure says he felt betrayed by his son and by Chief Joseph, who had signed. The treaty did guarantee the tribes continued access to traditional hunting and fishing grounds, including sites inside the 45,000 square miles ceded to the United States.

That guarantee shapes the hatchery today. The Nez Perce Tribe and the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation act as co-managers of Grande Ronde and Imnaha salmon. The accounts describe the creek’s management differently. The Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission credits the Umatilla tribes with reintroducing Chinook to Lookingglass Creek. A tribal brochure lists the creek as co-managed by the Umatilla tribes, the Nez Perce, and the state. Columbia Insight reports that the Nez Perce hold exclusive fishing rights to the creek, one of their traditional fishing places.

Four dams and the early broodstock

Congress authorized the Lower Snake River Compensation Plan in 1976 to make up for the fish lost to four lower Snake River dams. Its Grande Ronde spring Chinook program was set up in the late 1970s, after the basin’s runs collapsed in the middle of that decade and sport fishing closed. Managers believed too few native fish were left to supply broodstock. In 1978 they released smolts of Rapid River stock from Idaho into Lookingglass Creek. The hatchery was completed and dedicated in 1982, and its original intake screens date to 1980.

The early years went by stock and brood year. Disease and short supply stopped the use of Rapid River fish from 1980 through 1984, and Carson stock from the Willamette River hatchery program filled in. Rapid River fish came back in 1985 and stayed through the 1999 brood year. The hatchery met its goal of 900,000 smolts in most years from 1983 to 1992, but adult returns stayed well short. Between 1987 and 2001 the best year reached 42 percent of the goal. Lookingglass strays made up a majority of the spawners in the Minam and Wenaha rivers for many years, streams that were meant to stay wild. The state adopted a Wild Fish Management Policy in 1990, and in 1992 the basin’s natural spring Chinook were listed under the Endangered Species Act. Starting in 1995 the program was reworked. Managers began captive broodstock from Catherine Creek, the Upper Grande Ronde, and the Lostine. They started supplementation with local wild adults on the Lostine in 1997 and on the other two streams in 2001, and they made significant changes to the hatchery itself.

A creek emptied and refilled

Lookingglass Creek’s own run had already gone. Redd counts from the 1950s through the 1970s show more than 1,000 adults in a typical year. The Inter-Tribal Fish Commission holds that the completion of the lower Snake dams in the 1970s, together with the building of the hatchery and its weir in 1982, led to the extirpation of the native fish. The Fish and Wildlife Service brochure says only that by 1992 the native population “vanished despite good habitat.”

That year the Umatilla tribes began a reintroduction with Rapid River fish. Their returning adults matched the old native stock on every measure biologists tracked. After objections from NOAA Fisheries and rules against the non-local stock, stocking stopped in 1999. For several years the tribe had to block every returning adult at the weir, and the upstream population went extinct again. Columbia Insight puts the creek’s returns in the single digits when the conservation program began in 1997.

In 2001 the tribe released juveniles of the new Catherine Creek stock, raised from a neighboring Grande Ronde tributary. Their adults first came back in 2004, and fish were again passed upstream. In 2007 the first adults from fish that had spawned naturally in the creek returned. In spring 2011 and 2012 the runs were large enough to open tribal and sport fisheries for the first time in decades, and the 2012 run was estimated at 1,700 fish, about the historical size.

The run is still uncertain from year to year. In June 2025, after early projections made a season look impossible, a late push of Lookingglass fish crossed Bonneville Dam, and the state opened the creek to spring Chinook fishing from June 18 to June 29, from the mouth to Jarboe Creek. “This has been a unique year for predicting the run to Lookingglass,” said Ethan Brandt, district fish biologist in La Grande.

A tanker on the corner, a ladder in the creek

On March 29, 2024, a 53-foot hatchery tanker carrying about 102,000 smolts bound for the Imnaha took a sharp corner near the hatchery. It rolled onto its side, skidded on the pavement, went over a rocky embankment, and came to rest on its roof beside Lookingglass Creek. The driver, a department employee, had minor injuries. About 77,000 smolts spilled alive into the creek, and 25,529 died. Nez Perce staff helped collect and count the dead fish and scan them for tags. Managers expected 500 to 900 fewer adults in the Imnaha in 2026 and 2027, and 350 to 700 extra adults returning to Lookingglass Creek, where the survivors had landed. “This should not impact our ability to collect future brood stock or maintain full production goals in the future,” said Andrew Gibbs, the department’s hatchery coordinator for eastern Oregon.

In the summer of 2025 the hatchery finished a new fish ladder and new intake screens, according to a January 2026 report to the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission. The old passage was hemmed in by a diversion dam and a historic waterfall. The new ladder gives fish passage up the creek all year, for Chinook, steelhead, lamprey, bull trout, resident rainbow trout, and coho salmon, which were recently documented in the creek. The project was expected to stay under $5 million, half the original estimate.

Joe Oatman, a Nez Perce tribal member who directs the Harvest Division of the tribe’s fisheries program, told Columbia Insight what the returning fish are for: “It’s more than just catching a few fish to bring home. It’s about finding a place where we can pass on these traditions that have been there for countless generations.”