Seven Springs Fish Hatchery

The Seven Springs Brood Pond, known as the Kid’s Pond, lies at the Seven Springs Fish Hatchery, about 22 miles north of Jemez Springs and 4 miles north of Fenton Lake. Only anglers 11 years of age or younger may fish it, and the limit is three trout a day. On May 7, 2024, the pond was stocked with 496 rainbow trout. The Los Alamos Daily Post fishing report for that month noted that it also held some wild brown trout and some Rio Grande cutthroat trout from an earlier stocking.

The hatchery stands on Forest Road 314 in the Jemez Mountains. It is one of six hatcheries run by the New Mexico Department of Wildlife, and visitors are welcome during business hours. Its work is to produce and distribute the Rio Grande cutthroat trout, New Mexico’s state fish. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service described the fish in 2002. It has red to orange slashes in the throat folds beneath the lower jaw and irregular spots crowded behind the dorsal fin. Its sides are light rose to red-orange, and its belly is pink or yellow-orange. The same document records that at Seven Springs, cutthroat eggs hatched in 32 days in 50-degree water.

The Forest Service keeps the Seven Springs Picnic Area close to the hatchery. It has seven picnic units beside the Rio Cebolla, the stream that flows into Fenton Lake and on below it. The site is for day use only and has no water and no restrooms. The Forest Service asks that fish be cleaned away from the tables.

Teams and scrapers at the ranger station

Trout were raised on this ground before the state hatchery came. Ponds were built on the site in the early 1900s for that purpose, according to Roy E. Barker, chief of the Fisheries Division of the Department of Game and Fish. He wrote in the January–February 1962 golden anniversary issue of New Mexico Wildlife. The state chose the site in 1932. It was U.S. Forest administrative land known as Seven Springs Ranger Station. Construction started in 1933 with WPA labor, crews who used teams and scrapers to scoop out the two large brood lakes and the earthen ponds. The department’s present hatchery listing gives 1936 as the year the hatchery was built.

Barker wrote that the springs were not of great volume, 500 gallons a minute of 52-degree water. The hatchery had been established mainly to serve the surrounding country. By 1962 it produced about 22,000 pounds of trout a year, less than the area needed, and trout were brought in from other hatcheries to make up the difference. Its main job, in Barker’s account, was to keep a brood stock of New Mexico cutthroats that yielded about one-half million eyed eggs a year. “These eggs are not available to us from any other source,” he wrote.

Barker also described what brought the public to all five state hatcheries of his day. Every year thousands of visitors stopped to look at the big fish in the show pond and feed them, and they wished they had a net “to catch some of the ‘big ones.’”

One of the men who tended those ponds was Tom Moody (1916–2010). After his wartime discharge he returned to the department and served first as foreman of Seven Springs. He later held the same post at the Parkview and Red River hatcheries.

Whirling disease and the cutthroat conversion

The department intended to reach full production of Rio Grande cutthroat by 1998, the Fish and Wildlife Service noted in 2002. Three things delayed it: whirling disease, the disinfection and renovation that followed, and difficulty rearing the fish. Seven Springs was among the four of the state’s six hatcheries infected with the disease, and it was renovated after the diagnosis. Afterward the department drew hatchery water only from springs and wells, never from rivers and streams. It also covered raceways to keep out predators that spread the parasite.

In 2002 Seven Springs was converted to raise only native Rio Grande cutthroat. That year Director Bell announced an opening celebration for September 28, after the major renovation was complete, and dedicated the hatchery to cutthroat restoration. A later department article by Dan Williams listed Tony Jacobson as manager. It put the hatchery’s output at about 35,000 trout a year for waters statewide, among them Costilla Creek, the Pecos River and high-mountain lakes. The department’s current listing counts more than 72,000 trout raised for stocking since 2002.

The restoration work depends on pure fish. In 2004, during a stocking, department and Vermejo Park Ranch staff found a few rainbow trout mixed in with the cutthroats. Further investigation turned up more rainbows inside the Seven Springs hatchery system.

Fish carried out of the burn

The hatchery has also held cutthroats rescued from wildfire country. In 2022 the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire burned habitat for all three genetic lineages of the Rio Grande cutthroat, in the Canadian, Pecos and Rio Grande drainages. That year, trout rescued in June from Rio Valdez were held at Seven Springs, to be spawned there to begin a brood stock of the Pecos lineage. Game and Fish fisheries chief Mike Sloane stressed the importance of the Pecos populations, both for the species’ survival and for future restorations. A photograph from that season shows Jacobson moving cutthroats from transport tanks into buckets for release in a creek.

Another rescue brought trout from Macho Creek. Chantel Cook, a fisheries biologist with the Santa Fe National Forest, called that population a core conservation population, important for its genetic diversity. Sloane described the decision to take them as a proactive one. Jacobson said it was the third time in seven years the hatchery had cared for fish from wildfire-impacted areas. The Macho Creek cutthroats were kept in an outdoor raceway and fed insects caught in electric bug zappers.