Pyramid Lake Fisheries Hatcheries

On the western shore of Pyramid Lake, at the small Paiute town of Sutcliffe, a pipeline runs east from the Lake Operations facility out under the water and draws cold lake water from a depth of 50 feet. For most of the year Pyramid Lake Fisheries runs only one of its hatcheries, and in 2026 that one is Lake Operations. The fisheries’ Dunn and Koch hatcheries nearby are listed as dormant. Outdoors at Lake Ops are the rearing pools, the raceways, and the spawning channel. In spring, visitors can see thousands of fingerlings and stocking-size cutthroat trout there.

In March, yearling cutthroat are put into circular tanks. The outflow from those tanks is turned down the spawning channel to the lake. Mature fish in Pyramid Lake pick up the scent of the juvenile “attraction” fish and swim up the channel. At the head of the channel, hatchery crews crowd them with nets and sort them by sex and maturity. The fisheries calls this “the high point of the year and the main attraction for visitors.” Weekly spawns take place in April. In a normal year the crews take up to 1.5 million eggs and raise 800,000 to 1 million trout for release.

Photographs on the fisheries’ pages show the work. Students from Susanville watch personnel sort trout at the head of the channel. Denise Shaw strips eggs from a female cutthroat to be sent to the Numana Hatchery. On April 4, 2024, a Nevada Independent photographer found Brandon Brady, a Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe member, and Justin Jackson, of the e-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone, sorting fish at the Sutcliffe hatchery. On March 19, 2026, the fisheries posted that it was “extremely short staffed.” It asked for volunteers to sort trout, mix eggs by hand, and haul fish on the egg-collection days of the 2026 spawn, all Thursdays: April 2, 16, 23 and 30. Tours are open to any organization during the spawning season, which can run from March through May. In the operator’s words, “Classes from kindergarten through high school and adults enjoy the drama of spawning Pyramid Lake fish.” The receptionist in the front office of the administration building at 603 Sutcliffe Drive books them.

Eggs to Numana and back to the lake

The eggs taken at the channel do not stay at Sutcliffe. They go to the Numana Hatchery, 8 miles north of Wadsworth on Highway 447. It is the largest hatchery in the system, with a capacity of 20,000 pounds of fish, and it incubates up to 800,000 eggs a year. There the fish are raised from fry to fingerlings. Ten to 15 percent of them are marked with a coded-wire tag or an injection of bright plastic elastomer, and the work is done in a portable tagging trailer the fisheries built. Every tagged fish also has its adipose fin clipped. Anglers who catch one are asked to bring in the nose for the biologists.

The fingerlings then return to Sutcliffe. Each trout must be at least 4 inches long, and at Lake Ops it is acclimated from the fresh water of the hatcheries to the saline, alkaline water of the lake. The lake is about one-sixth as salty as the ocean. Research on tagged fish found that the best returns came from trout released in October, once the inshore water has cooled enough for them to survive and before the lake’s invertebrates decline. At that size a young trout can switch from hatchery pellets to food it finds in the lake. The fish have to start in fresh water at all because Lahontan cutthroat are obligate freshwater spawners, and their eggs cannot survive in Pyramid Lake.

The fall stocking falls in the same weeks as the opening of the fishing season. The 2026-27 season opened Thursday, October 1. The Sutcliffe Spawn Channel was among the waters closed to anglers. Western Outdoor News reported that opening-day boats called the fishing “mediocre.” Captain James Smith of California Dawn Sport Fishing landed 40 cutthroat to 18 pounds. “At any other lake, we would find the action spectacular,” he said, “but we have been accustomed to up to 100 fish days in early October.” Kathy Wilson of Moss Landing, who fishes every opener with guide J.D. Richey, landed 27 by herself.

Peter Dunn, Dave Koch, and Captain Numana

The accounts of the hatchery system’s start differ by a year. The Nevada Independent, citing the Nevada Department of Wildlife, says Pyramid Lake Fisheries was formed in 1973, at a time when Lahontan cutthroat were being taken from other Northern Nevada lakes to rebuild the Pyramid population. The fisheries’ own pages date its start to 1974, when the Tribe took on fishery management. Construction began that year on the Dunn Hatchery at Sutcliffe, and fish production started there in 1975. The hatchery is named for Peter Dunn, a tribal member who lost his life during the early phases of the program. It reuses 95 percent of its water. Because it is small, production is limited to 2,500 pounds of fish, and it has incubated up to 400,000 trout eggs a year. It has also served as a training base where tribal members learn fish husbandry. Photographs from the 2011 spawn show Desmond and Betsy picking eggs at Dunn while Robert Eagle talks shop.

Lake Operations followed in 1980, built mainly for acclimation. Numana Hatchery was completed in 1982. It is dedicated to the people of Pyramid Lake and their work to restore the Hupa-Agai, the cutthroat trout. Its name comes from Captain Dave Numana, a tribal leader, rancher and peacemaker. In 2009 a High Desert Terminal Lakes Grant paid for new filtration at the three trout facilities to remove ammonia and nitrates, along with ultraviolet systems to disinfect water during egg incubation. After those upgrades, the fisheries says, chemical treatments were no longer needed to control fish disease.

Two smaller hatcheries raise Cui-ui, a long-lived sucker that can reach 40 years of age and today is found only in Pyramid Lake. The operator’s About page gives the Paiute people’s name for themselves, the Numu, and the name Kooyooe Ticutta, Cui-ui eaters. The Koch Cui-ui Hatchery at Sutcliffe was built in 1974. It is dedicated to Dave Koch, the first to pioneer Cui-ui culture. The Big Bend facility at Wadsworth, on the Truckee River, was built to raise trout fingerlings for the river. It was later converted to incubate Cui-ui and release the larvae into a wetland, so they can enter the river and drift down to the lake on their own. The About page notes that up until 1971 the Cui-ui “had to fare for themselves.”

The 41-pound trout

The fisheries’ home page cites the world record Lahontan cutthroat, 41 pounds, caught at Pyramid Lake in 1925 by Johnny Skimmerhorn, a Paiute. In 2002 the California Academy of Sciences magazine California Wild found the stuffed fish “decaying” in the bottom of a display case at the Nevada State Museum in Carson City. The same article says Pyramid’s trout once grew to 60 pounds or more, and that Clark Gable and President Herbert Hoover came to the lake to fish for them. Tom Trelease, a lifelong Reno-area resident, told the magazine that the Paiute caught the trout during the spawning run, dried them in spring, and ate them through the winter. “My grandmother used to buy them from the Indian people who would go around town in their Model-T’s and sell them,” he said. “They were two to three feet long.”

Derby Dam was completed outside Wadsworth in 1905. It diverted about half the Truckee River’s water to farms near Fallon and blocked the spawning run. By 1967 the lake had dropped an estimated 80 feet, and a delta rising at the river’s mouth kept fish from reaching the lower river. The accounts of when the trout disappeared differ. The Associated Press, writing in 2014, put the last river spawn in 1938 and said the cutthroat had died out by the 1940s. California Wild says the giant trout were gone from the lake by 1940. The Nevada Current called them functionally extinct by the 1940s. Mervin Wright, executive director of Pyramid Lake Fisheries, doubted those accounts in 2023. “We have stories here about my father’s generation, my grandfather’s generation, catching Lahontan cutthroat trout from 1940 to 1960 at Pyramid Lake, but that story was never heard,” he said. “It’s hard to believe that someone came out here and surveyed every square foot every cubic yard of this lake and determined there’s not one trout left in this huge body of water.”

The About page says hatchery programs stocked cutthroat back into the lake from 1949 through 1982. The sources also give different dates for the federal listings. The operator says both the trout and the Cui-ui were listed as endangered in 1966 and that the trout was downlisted to threatened in 1973. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service gives March 11, 1967, for the Cui-ui’s endangered listing. It lists the trout as endangered on October 13, 1970, and threatened on July 16, 1975. The Nevada Independent adds that the 1975 reclassification opened the fish to recreational fishing. By 1991 Congress had approved the Truckee River Settlement Act, which requires that the Tribe be consulted on all decisions about Truckee River water.

“They call our fish mongrels”

In 2002 California Wild found Brian Niewinski, the Tribe’s laboratory and resource manager, leaning over a tank of eight-month-old trout a week before their release. “I’m hoping one of these guys will grow to be 15 pounds or more,” he said. “We want to please the angler.” Lisa Heki was leading the Fish and Wildlife Service’s recovery effort at the time. She had found accounts suggesting that trout in streams near Pilot Peak, on the Nevada-Utah line, had been moved there from Pyramid Lake before the giants disappeared. A U.S. Geological Survey biologist, Jennifer Nielsen, compared the surviving populations and found that the Pyramid hatchery fish were not pure Lahontan. The Tribe held to its lake-raised strain. “They call our fish mongrels,” tribal member Elwood Lowry said of the federal view. Niewinski argued that without DNA from the original Pyramid trout, no one could say for certain which modern strain matched it most closely.

According to the Nevada Independent, Pilot Peak eggs came to the federal hatchery at Gardnerville in 1995, and in 2006 the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Tribe restocked the strain into Pyramid Lake. The two lines of fish are still kept apart. At the federal Marble Bluff facility, 3 miles up the Truckee, only fish identified as Pilot Peak are passed upstream. The tribe’s fish swim into the Sutcliffe channel. Mike Sevon, a retired Nevada Department of Wildlife supervisor, recalled watching federal staff, more than a decade earlier, pull federally raised fish out of the tribal spawning channel.

Lahontan cutthroat eventually returned to spawn in the Truckee, and the sources date that return differently. The Nevada Current reports that the trout spawned between Pyramid Lake and Derby Dam in 2012, for the first time in 80 years. The AP reported in June 2014 that about 90 Lahontan cutthroat weighing up to 25 pounds had spawned that spring in the lowest two miles of the river, the first time in 76 years. Terence James, vice chairman of the Tribe, noted that the tribe’s hatchery had raised cutthroat from outside the Truckee basin since 1974. “It’s a very exciting success story for the tribe,” he said. “We haven’t seen this happen for a very long time.”