North Nehalem Hatchery

At milepost 8 on Highway 53, eleven miles in from Highway 101, Fish Hatchery Lane leaves the road for the North Nehalem Hatchery. The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife runs it at River Mile 10.3 of the North Fork Nehalem River, 160 feet above sea level, on water pumped from the river alongside. The grounds are open dawn to dusk, seven days a week. A concrete adult holding pond and twenty concrete raceways date from 1966. The department’s 2024 plan rates the pond in good condition and the raceways poor. The egg incubators, nine fiberglass stacks of sixteen trays each, went in in 2019. The department’s 2017 steelhead plan listed Chris Lauman as hatchery manager.

Coho in fall, steelhead in winter

The department names late September through January as the best time to come. Spawning and adult fish can be watched from October through February, and the calendar follows the fish. Hatchery coho reach the hatchery from late September through November, with peak spawning in early November. A wild North Fork coho stock comes in from early November through December and spawns mostly in early December. Hatchery winter steelhead enter the trap from November to March, with peak spawning in January. A wild steelhead stock, taken by anglers or at the trap, arrives from December to April and spawns mostly in February. The hatchery also rears fall Chinook and rainbow trout, though it collects no Chinook adults of its own.

From the property, a wooded trail runs an eighth of a mile down to a view of Umbrella Falls. Birds of prey, songbirds, and wading birds work the grounds. There is a camp host, and there are restrooms. In season, anglers fish from the hatchery bank for winter steelhead, coho, fall Chinook, and cutthroat trout. A platform for steelhead and salmon angling is reserved for holders of a Wheelchair License, Blind Angler’s License, Disabled Veteran Angling License, or Oregon Disabilities Hunting & Fishing Permit.

In early April, 65,000 winter steelhead smolts go into the North Fork and 40,000 more are trucked to the Necanicum River. In mid-April, 25,000 smolts of the wild stock follow. In late March or early April, 100,000 coho smolts are released at the hatchery itself. Every one is fin-clipped first, so an angler who lands one as an adult knows it is a keeper. The rainbow trout go unmarked to North Coast lakes. The operation is paid for entirely from license fees, and the 2024 plan staffs it with three full-time positions.

“Ripe!” or “Green!”

Nick Neely described the winter sort for High Country News in 2010. Almost 2,500 hatchery steelhead had come back that winter, and only 60 to 70 pairs were needed to parent the next 90,000 smolts. Once a week, employees swept large screens through a holding pond and lifted each fish by hand, calling out “Ripe!” or “Green!” Ripe hens were squeezed of their coral-orange roe into a bucket and released upstream. Mature bucks were carted off to nearby lakes.

Green fish were tagged or hole-punched through the cheek and loaded fifty or sixty at a time into a thousand-gallon aerated tank on a flatbed. The truck drove them 10 miles downstream to the Aldervale Boat Launch, backed into the river, and the stopper was pulled. Neely gives the swim back to the hatchery as six miles, a trip of one day to two weeks, during which anglers got a second cast at them. Eric Hammond, a hatchery employee, helped recycle 660 steelhead that year, the hardiest of them more than once. “We’re doing everything we can to get (fishermen) another opportunity,” he said. Kirk Schroeder, a department biologist, estimated that anglers brush up against only a quarter of any river’s steelhead.

Foley Creek and the North Fork

The hatchery’s predecessor stood on Foley Creek. According to a Portland State University watershed assessment by Joseph Maser, it began operating in 1926 to supplement wild cutthroat and winter steelhead. That was the same year the log drives that had run down the Nehalem since 1901 came to an end. A splash dam had stood on the North Fork, and an estimated hundred million board feet of timber were floated out of it. Fishing on the Nehalem held up through the 1930s all the same. One visitor remembered salmon jumping into her parents’ boat around 1918. One angler said he and a partner took 23 steelhead in four hours at River Mile 8 in 1938. Angling declined in the 1950s and improved somewhat after commercial gill-netting in the estuary ended in 1956.

The state’s 2017 steelhead plan says Foley Creek ran from 1926 to 1965 and that, by available records, its steelhead production was relatively minor. Maser dates its closing to 1966, the year the North Nehalem Hatchery began operating. Citing a 1977 federal report, he adds that hatchery runs had limited success because the fish were less resistant than wild ones to disease, which warm water in the lower mainstem made worse.

The present steelhead line, stock 32, was started in 1977 from fish taken out of the North Fork. In 1981 the Legislature and the department created the Salmon and Trout Enhancement Program, STEP, and for about a decade volunteers set hatch boxes in Nehalem tributaries. Bob Leighton, a longtime resident, said he alone put in over 300,000 coho and steelhead. The Nehalem hatch boxes were discontinued in 1991, because their fish could not be told apart from wild ones. The first mass-marked hatchery steelhead returned in the 1992-93 run, and no unmarked wild adults have gone into that brood since.

In 2009 the department closed the Nehalem basin to Chinook angling for the rest of the year. At a September meeting with agency officials, Leighton pressed for a pilot program to rear young Chinook at the hatchery, which the Tillamook Headlight Herald reported had never been done before. “At these meetings here...everybody’s a biologist,” he said. “Everyone has their own theories and nothing ever gets done.”

Drought reached the hatchery in 2015. In early June it released 1,550 rainbow trout averaging a pound apiece; they had been scheduled to go out in September at about two pounds.

A fin clipper, a river guide, and canned coho

In 2009, Joe Watkins, hatchery manager since 1996, asked Imie Camelli, head of the local food bank, whether she wanted hatchery coho from the Waterhouse Falls fish trap upstream. Early that season, food-grade fish went to waste because the food bank had no way to store them. Bill Campbell, a retired county planner, then worked with Darus Peake of the Tillamook Bay Boathouse Cannery in Garibaldi to can the salmon at cost. Neah-Kah-Nie High School students designed the labels and held labeling parties. By 2022 the project, the Smiley Brothers & Sisters Salmon Harvest, had sent thousands of cans to food pantries and school backpack programs, and the jacks were being filleted and delivered fresh to assisted living homes.

Jim Erickson, a medical technician turned full-time fishing guide, lived a few miles downstream, where he fed temporary ponds of steelhead before their spring release. He started the North Fork Nehalem chapter of the Association of Northwest Steelheaders. According to the chapter’s Bill Hedlund, he “was probably the main figure in the building of the disabled-angling structure at the North Fork Hatchery.” Hedlund added that Erickson “also taught many of us how to run the extremely technical whitewater stretch of the North Fork from the hatchery down to his house, where the river calmed down somewhat.” Erickson drowned on Dec. 28, 2006, at 72, when his raft hit a newly fallen tree and flipped. The chapter began memorial fixtures at the hatchery, among them a large map of the upper river marking its critical navigation areas, and announced a dedication at the boat ramp for June 13, 2009.

Beulah Clappe came to Oregon from South Carolina in 1952. “He brought me out here on a Greyhound bus,” she said of her husband, Harold. They settled in Nehalem for good in 1973, and four years later she was clipping fins at the hatchery. She worked with a crew of five or six, forty hours a week in a special trailer, for three or four weeks each September. Watkins guessed that millions of fish had gone through her hands. Asked which were steelhead, coho, or Chinook, she said, “I don’t know, they all look alike to me.” Her last day was Friday, Sept. 30, 2011, at age 80. She spent it clipping adipose fins from juvenile steelhead and releasing them back into the ponds. She put the retirement on Harold: “He told me this was it and the only reason they let me work here is because I bring them (the staff) fresh-baked goods.”