Marion Forks Hatchery

At milepost 66 on Oregon Highway 22, a large pond holds adult rainbow trout, and visitors may feed them. The pond belongs to Marion Forks Hatchery, a state fish-rearing station on 15 acres of the Willamette National Forest. It sits at 2,580 feet along Marion and Horn creeks, tributaries of the Santiam. From late August through September, Chinook salmon spawn in Horn Creek, which the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife also calls the Marion Forks.

The conifer forest around the grounds holds deer, elk and grouse. ODFW lists American dipper, belted kingfisher, osprey, bald eagle and blue heron, with waterfowl in season. Birders reporting to eBird have logged 59 species at the hotspot named Marion Forks Hatchery and Campground, and the varied thrush is the bird eBird features for October. The grounds have a campground with a camp host, a picnic area, restrooms, trails and fishing, and they are ADA accessible. A U.S. Forest Service campground, North Santiam River fishing and wilderness trailheads lie close by. ODFW gives May through October as the best months to come, and Detroit Lake is about 18 miles west.

Raceways and round ponds of 1951

The oldest rearing works date from the opening year. In 1951 crews poured eight concrete raceways, each 80 feet long, 20 feet wide and two and a half feet deep, and forty-eight round concrete ponds 24 feet across. The department’s 2024 plan rates all of them in good condition. Fiberglass Canadian troughs came in 1986, and newer rearing troughs and stacked plastic incubators followed in 2013. Water passes through once and goes back out. It comes from Marion Creek April through September and from Horn Creek October through March. Four permanent employees keep the place, along with one seasonal worker hired for four and a half months.

Spring Chinook of the North Santiam stock are the main work. Their eggs are taken at Minto, a trap and holding facility below the dams. Adults are held there from late August into October, and spawning peaks in mid to late September. The eggs are water-hardened in iodophor and carried up to Marion Forks to hatch. Under the 2024 plan, the hatchery raises 704,000 smolts, each adipose-clipped and otolith-marked. They go back to Minto to acclimate and are released into the North Santiam in February and March. Others go to Clatsop County net pens at Tongue Point and Youngs Bay, to Big Creek Hatchery and to the Molalla River.

Trout pass through as well. Triploid rainbow fingerlings arrive from Wizard Falls Hatchery and are held for backpack stocking of high lakes in early June. In odd years, brook trout come from Fall River Hatchery for the same work in mid-July.

Horn’s claim and Young’s cookhouse

The place takes its name from the Marion Fork of the Santiam, now called Marion Creek. The Oregon Encyclopedia says Molala, Kalapuya and Warm Springs people probably broke trade paths along the river here. Euro-Americans followed, looking for a pass over the Cascades. In 1866 William Horn filed a homestead on the land, hoping to sell timber to the Oregon Pacific Railroad, which was then building east from Corvallis. The railroad stopped twelve miles short, and the claim languished until 1932.

That year Scott Young, recently of Cascade Locks, bought the deed. Young had built a power plant at Cascade Locks and was now burning right-of-way for the Forest Service; by his own count he burned 24 miles of the North and South Santiam highways. On October 23, 1967, Ivan Donaldson recorded an interview with him at Marion Forks. Young said the Forest Service had meant to put a concession at the forks. He applied, but from the letters he got he judged “they never intended to give it to me.” Studying the map, he decided the land was private and the Service did not know it.

The Young family built cabins and a cookhouse from salvaged lumber to feed road crews on Highways 20 and 22. The cookhouse grew into Marion Forks Lodge Restaurant, which was rebuilt after fires in 1947 and 1972. Rustic cabins and homes for a few dozen residents gathered around it.

Two dams downstream

The hatchery came to the community in 1951, and the sources tell its start two ways. ODFW’s 2016 genetic management plan says it opened as a state-funded facility. In that account, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began paying for mitigation production after Detroit and Big Cliff dams went up in the early 1950s. The Oregon Encyclopedia and a Corps brochure say the Corps built it, along with Minto, to make up for migrating fish lost to the dams. The encyclopedia adds a second purpose: stocking rainbow trout in the new reservoir. Today the Corps pays most operating costs and ODFW runs the station.

The dams stand on the North Santiam below the forks. Detroit Dam rises 463 feet, and Big Cliff, three miles downstream, rises 191. Construction began April 1, 1949. Nearly 200 residents of old Detroit were moved and Highway 22 was realigned, and Douglas McKay dedicated the dam on June 10, 1953. NOAA Fisheries notes that the Corps’ Willamette dams were generally built with no way for salmon and steelhead to pass up or down. The Minto trap was built in the mid-1950s to catch returning adults for Marion Forks.

The stock has been tended closely since:

• In the late 1970s, Carson stock Chinook from Washington were brought in for one generation.
• In the 1992 brood year, the hatchery sent 1,668,000 viable eggs to the Clackamas, McKenzie and Willamette hatcheries to cover their shortages.
• Before 1996, not every juvenile was marked, so an unknown share of wild fish may have entered later broods. After that, all were fin-clipped.

An independent audit team visited on February 6, 1997. Terry Jones managed the station then, and it also reared winter steelhead and cutthroat. Among its findings, the audit called for alarms at the intake, rearing ponds and headboxes, and for telephone pagers. Low-water alarms went in in 2008.

In May 2007, ODFW pulled a lot of Bio Vita Starter feed, made by Skretting of Vancouver, B.C. The FDA had confirmed it was contaminated with melamine, the chemical linked to that spring’s pet food recall. Steve Williams of the department’s fish division said none of the 870,000 spring Chinook given the feed showed ill effects. “FDA hasn’t found any cause for concern for fish or human health, but it’s something we’ve got to be cautious and prudent about,” he said.

In spring 2011 the Corps awarded $24 million to rebuild Minto, whose half-century-old trap had injured fish and endangered the biologists working it. The new facility was mostly finished in spring 2013. That same year, clinical BKD was found in hatchery smolts for the first time, possibly carried by adult fish above the intake. In 2014 the Detroit fingerling program ended; it had once put young Chinook into the reservoir. Production shifted to smolts released in the lower North Santiam below Minto.

Thirty-four years on the North Santiam

Greg Grenbemer grew up in Medford and studied law enforcement at Southern Oregon University. Three years in, a professor pulled him aside and scolded him for missing class to hunt and fish. The professor suggested the fisheries technology program at Mt. Hood Community College instead. Grenbemer finished it in May 1991, and two weeks later he was working at Marion Forks. At a Marion Forks barbecue and poker game he met Stephanie, who went on to teach first grade for 38 years in the Santiam Canyon School District. “It was a great place to raise kids,” he told The Canyon Weekly. “We were tickled when we got dial-up Internet.”

He later managed the Minto operation. On Tuesday, September 23, 2025, the paper found his crew spawning. Females sat in numbered slots on the left rack, their eggs drawn into buckets. Males sat on the right, their sperm drawn into small cups. The carcasses were to be trucked above Detroit Dam to feed nutrients back into the home streams. That season 5,000 marked fish and 1,000 unmarked fish passed the Minto ladders.

Grenbemer, 57, was working his last spawning season, with a final day set for Friday, September 26. He recalled that the operation did not mark hatchery fish until the 1990s, and that raising the count of wild fish became a goal. “We really didn’t have a lot of non-marked fish and we started trying to do that,” he said. “We’re feeling pretty good about what we’re doing right now.”