Rock Lake Hatchery

From the first Santa Rosa exit on Interstate 40, the way runs a mile to River Road, turns right at the gas station on the corner onto County Road 69, and goes two miles more to the hatchery entrance on the right. Rock Lake Fish Hatchery lies about two miles south of town near the Pecos River, in Guadalupe County. The New Mexico Department of Wildlife runs it as one of six state hatcheries and calls it the state’s primary catchable trout-rearing station. Visitors are welcome during business hours.

Spring water from Rock Lake

The hatchery draws all its water from one source, Rock Lake, an artesian spring 290 feet deep whose water holds at 60 degrees Fahrenheit the year around. The same underground spring may also feed smaller Swan Lake nearby, a state inspection report notes. A supply line collects the overflow about 50 feet below the surface, a depth chosen to keep pathogens out of the hatchery. There are no pumps or siphons, and gravity does the work. The water runs down a series of steps, which aerates it, and is then divided between the cold-water raceways and the warm-water rearing ponds. The New Mexico Environment Department puts the flow at 3,000 to 3,500 gallons a minute. A 2008 Department release gives 3,500 to 4,000.

Before the hatchery, Rock Lake overflowed to irrigators downstream or into the Pecos. When the hatchery was built, the Department agreed with those irrigators that it could divert the water if it returned it to the Ortega-Borsich ditch or to the river. On January 17, 2019, Daniel Valenta and Sandra Gabaldon of the Environment Department’s Surface Water Quality Bureau walked the grounds with assistant manager Alonso Abeyta. They recorded an average discharge of roughly 4.23 million gallons a day and found the receiving water “clear with no smell or color.”

Trout in the raceways, bass in the ponds

The trout live in two sets of covered parallel raceways. Ryan Darr of the Department described them as large concrete troughs, with water that flows through but “is not recirculated or distributed to any other part of the hatchery.” Rock Lake raises about 300,000 catchable-sized rainbow trout a year for stocking statewide. According to Darr, most go to winter trout waters, where trout cannot survive the warm summer water.

Beyond the raceways are the ponds. In 2019 the inspectors counted 18 one-acre ponds, two quarter-acre ponds, and two settling basins, all lined with an impermeable membrane. They hold bass, walleye, catfish, bluegills, and tiger muskies. Department releases from 2008 and 2009 say the hatchery also produces about 20 million walleye a year, about half from eggs collected at Conchas and Ute reservoirs. Fish go into a pond only once its water is producing enough phytoplankton and zooplankton to feed them. When the fish have eaten the zooplankton, they are taken out and stocked in one of the state’s lakes.

Out of Blue Hole, south of town

The Department dates the hatchery to 1964. The Environment Department’s inspection report says Rock Lake State Fish Hatchery began operation in 1965. An earlier hatchery stood in town. Stella Salazar, owner of the Santa Rosa Blue Hole Dive Center, told New Mexico Magazine in 2022 that when she was growing up, Blue Hole was part of a fish hatchery. The magazine says the hatchery was “exported south of town” in 1964. After the fish moved out, divers moved in. Local legend has it that a dive instructor from Albuquerque who went by “Peaches” began bringing his students to the 81-foot-deep hole.

For decades the station south of town raised rainbow trout. Then whirling disease reached the state system. A 2009 Department magazine article described the state’s hatcheries as plagued by the disease and by drought for a decade, with four of the six infected at one point. It named Rock Lake and Glenwood as the only state trout hatcheries the disease had not reached.

Seventy-seven thousand bass for Elephant Butte

The warm-water hatchery began with money. The 2004 Legislature authorized $300,000 from the state’s General Fund toward the first phase. The rest came from $2.5 million out of the Game Protection Fund, which is fed by hunting and fishing license sales, and $900,000 in federal grants. In 2006 the Department acquired another 140 acre-feet of water rights and about 30 acres of adjoining land, and Phase I began. A Department release in April 2007 described New Mexico’s first warmwater fish hatchery taking shape at Rock Lake as an $8 million project. Its second phase was to add seven more one-acre ponds, four smaller ponds, a hatchery building, and an educational center. The $4 million first phase, with 11 one-acre ponds, was finished in the fall of 2007.

The first fish came from Colorado. Largemouth bass hatched at the Las Animas Hatchery arrived at Rock Lake on June 13, 2008, at about half an inch long. On a steady diet of zooplankton they grew to about an inch and a half. On Tuesday, July 8, 2008, 77,000 of them were released into Elephant Butte Lake.

“This is an exciting time for the hatchery and for the state’s anglers who enjoy catching warmwater fish,” said the hatchery manager, Leonard Rice. “This also is a learning experience for us because we’ve never done this before.” Casey Harthorn, a warmwater fisheries biologist, said the bass should reach 14 inches in two to three years. That summer the ponds also held about a million catfish waiting to be stocked.

The 2009 magazine article counts 70,000 largemouth bass and 109,000 catfish raised and stocked in 2008, and reports that the hatchery harvested and stocked its first walleyes and tiger muskies the following year. “The numbers of fish coming out of the warmwater hatchery are only going to get larger as we learn more about the process, which can vary from hatchery to hatchery,” said Roddy Gallegos, the Department’s assistant chief in charge of hatcheries. Fisheries chief Mike Sloane put the cost of restoring the state’s hatcheries and starting the warm-water hatchery at about $10 million.

In early October 2009, Department staff met with leaders of Luna Community College, which has a branch campus in Santa Rosa. They discussed using the hatchery for schoolchildren, workforce training, and small-business development, and they talked about a commercial fisheries operation for the City of Santa Rosa. The Department was then starting the second warm-water phase, which included a Pecos Watershed Education Center. “Educating our youth on aquaculture is extremely important in the desert climate of New Mexico,” said state Sen. Pete Campos, the college’s president. The Environment Department records that Phase II construction was completed in August 2017.

Whirling disease, 2023

In April 2023 the Department announced that an annual disease survey had found whirling disease at low levels in rainbow trout at Rock Lake. New Mexico Political Report wrote that it was the first time since 2007 that the parasite had turned up in hatchery waters in the state. No clinical signs of an outbreak had been seen. Still, about 70,000 trout in the affected portions of the hatchery were euthanized. They were 6 to 10 inches long and around 10 to 15 months old.

“In a series of raceways it is possible for the upstream units to contaminate those that are downstream,” Darr explained. “All of the potentially exposed fish at Rock Lake are being euthanized.” He said some infected fish may already have been stocked. He also said the stocked waters were mostly winter trout waters, where the disease cannot complete its life cycle without a reproducing trout population. The source of the infection, the report noted, remained unknown.