Silver Creek Fish Hatchery

Two natural springs rise on the Silver Creek property in Navajo County. From them the creek runs northwest through open meadows toward White Mountain Reservoir. The Arizona Game and Fish Department raises trout on that spring water at two small separate facilities. The springs and the rearing structures are closed to the public year round, set among staff housing and maintenance buildings. Visitors enter through the main gate on Hatchery Road. AZBW puts the gate about 10 miles northeast of Show Low, and the department’s 2015 hatcheries report says about 11. The drive runs five miles east on Highway 60, five miles north on Bourdon Ranch Road, and a half mile east on Hatchery Way Road.

The fish raised here are Apache trout, Arizona’s state fish and one of its two native trout. The department says the White Mountains of Arizona are the only place in the world where Apache trout can be caught. Silver Creek is a small hatchery. It produces about 80,000 catchable-size Apache trout a year, and every Apache trout stocked in Arizona comes from it. They go into Silver Creek itself, the East and West Forks of the Black River, Sheeps Crossing on the Little Colorado, and the Little Colorado at Greer. The hatchery also raises rainbow trout. Garrett Fabian is listed as hatchery manager, and guided tours are given by appointment only.

Two seasons on the creek

The hatchery is closed to fishing, but the creek below it is open. The surrounding land is managed as a wildlife area, 840 acres by the department’s count, and it is open for fishing and hunting. An established trail follows the creek, and in wet weather it turns extremely muddy. The creek is fed from an underground stream and does not freeze, so the department’s 2022 fishing guide for Pinetop and Show Low advises fishing it in winter. The goWhiteMountains directory describes Silver Creek as a blue-ribbon coldwater fishery and notes the state-record catches the department lists from it.

The year is split in half. From Oct. 1 through March 31 the creek is catch-and-release only, with artificial flies and lures on a single barbless hook. Every trout must be released unharmed. For that season the guide suggests white bunny leeches, buggers, simi-seals, San Juan worms, egg patterns, shami leeches, or zebra midges. From April 1 through Sept. 30 bait and barbed hooks are allowed and anglers may keep four trout, the statewide limit since the regulations were amended in 2021. Nightcrawlers and PowerBait work well then. The guide also suggests hiking upstream, where fewer people fish, or working shade and cover.

The April opener draws crowds, and the creek does not always cooperate. In one spring, Brown Creek ran into Silver Creek for weeks with rain and snowmelt runoff. Department staff warned that fishing would be slow in the turbid water, though some anglers did well on black or white lures that showed against the brown. In 2024, flooding over the weekend before April 1 closed the property, and it was expected to reopen on Wednesday, April 3. The largest Apache trout on record for catch-and-release came from Silver Creek, according to former manager Ken McGown. It measured 27 inches.

Mallards, elk, and raccoons

The creek also holds native speckled dace and bluehead sucker. Mallards, teal, gadwall, and wigeons work the water, and herons, hawks, and eagles hunt it. Elk, mule deer, antelope, and rabbits are common on the property. The department notes that a few raccoons have been known to stop by and try to sample the trout.

An established hatchery, bought in 1978

The hatchery predates the state’s ownership. In 1978 the Arizona Game and Fish Commission acquired the land along Silver Creek to keep an established fish hatchery running and to open the ground to compatible public recreation. Chris Bagnoli of the department gave the figure as 871 acres in a 2014 guest editorial. The 2015 hatcheries report describes about 821 acres of deeded land at the headwaters, Silver Spring, and along the creek. The residences and office buildings went up in the 1990s. The state’s budget for fiscal 2010 set aside $1,900,000 from the Game and Fish Capital Improvement Fund for remodeling and expanding the hatchery. By 2015 Silver Creek was one of five coldwater hatcheries the department still ran. Since 1922 the department had operated 15 fish culture stations, and six were still in operation.

The fish’s own record runs alongside. The Apache trout was downgraded from endangered to threatened in 1975, and a federal recovery plan followed in 1979. Bryce Sisson, who in 2018 managed the department’s Tonto Creek Hatchery near Payson, named the cause plainly: “It was our stocking of rainbow trout and brown trout that put the species in peril.” In 2023 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed removing the Apache trout from the federal list because it had recovered. The proposed rule states that young from the Williams Creek National Fish Hatchery broodstock are reared each year at Silver Creek and stocked for sportfishing on state-managed lands.

A truckload for the Black River

The eggs begin in federal hatcheries. In 2018 Sisson was growing them at Tonto Creek from January, to be shipped to Silver Creek in October at four or five inches long. That March he described the year before, when no Apache trout were stocked. Federal hatcheries had tested positive for bacterial kidney disease, and Joe Marcino, a department fish pathologist, said the fish that tested positive had to be killed so they would not carry the pathogen into the wild.

Stocking resumed that spring. McGown had cared for the trout for nearly 25 years by then. He and a group of volunteers netted nearly 800 Apache trout from the outdoor raceway and fed them into a motorized funnel that shot hundreds into the tanks on his flatbed in a couple of minutes. They hand-sorted some to keep rainbows out. He drove them to the Black River on a road open for the first time since the 2011 Wallow Fire, through rain, snow, and hail that came and went in minutes. He took the river’s temperature before letting the fish go. “Very few occasions in my career have I stocked fish in the snow,” he said. “Birds are better fishermen than people are,” he added.

Back at the raceway, a dead fish now and then was left on the ground. “Beautiful fish,” McGown said, holding one. “As soon as we leave, all the ravens come in and pick this clean.”