Spring Creek Rearing Station

The Spring Creek Rearing Station stands on the Snake Creek Road southeast of Great Basin National Park, about 2 miles outside the park border, near Baker in White Pine County, Nevada. The road is dirt and well graded, and it gets no winter maintenance. Visitors are welcome from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., and station staff answer questions about the work. A Baker resident of more than 25 years, writing for the Desert Survivor blog in May 2026, puts it plainly: “There’s not much to see, but if you’ve never seen where trout are raised to stock streams and lakes, it’s worth a short visit.”

Raceways in Snake Creek Canyon

What a visitor sees is in the raceways, long strips of running water, each holding trout of a different age. The younger, smaller fish are fed three times a day and the larger ones twice. In an episode of the public-television program Outdoor Nevada first aired March 6, 2024, the host walked the raceways with the station manager, Buck Douglass, feeding each group in turn while a flock of wild turkeys wandered in. When the feed struck the water, the host asked whether the fish took it for “a giant caddisfly or something.”

No eggs are hatched at Spring Creek. The station takes in small fry from the department’s Gallagher Hatchery in the Ruby marshes, about 200 to the pound. Douglass said they grow about an inch a month and reach about 9 inches in nine months. The National Park Service gives the stay as 9 to 10 months and the yearly output as about 125,000 catchable-size trout. On the day of the filming Douglass had 95,000 fish in the raceways, 4 or 5 inches long, meant for the following spring. They were rainbow trout of a triploid, sterile strain. He explained that the station raises that strain so the fish cannot hybridize with the native cutthroat once they are released. He also said the whole program is paid for by fishing-license sales: “None of this is tax dollars.”

A spring out of a limestone crack

The raceways draw on a spring above the station that issues from a fracture in the limestone. Its water runs crystal clear and holds at 57 degrees the year round. Douglass called that temperature ideal for trout and said it was the reason the station was built here. In his account, Snake Creek runs too cold in winter and too warm in summer.

By his account the spring historically ran about 2 cubic feet per second. Over roughly six years of drought it fell below one. Then came a winter of exceptional snowpack, and when the melt began the spring returned to full flow, gray with the color of limestone. The gray water ran through the raceways for about two weeks without settling out, and the fish, he said, did not seem to mind. Then it cleared and has run steady since.

Asked how long the spring had been there, Douglass answered, “Who knows?” He added that it is a sacred site to the Shoshone. When the Southern Water Authority sought to take water from the area, Shoshone people came up and held a ceremony at the spring to bless and protect it, and Douglass said he had the honor of being present. In his telling, they came historically because the water comes out from Mother Earth. They made spirit quests there and gathered mint and berries.

The spring’s neighbors downstream are still studied. On one summer field day, teenagers from the Ely Shoshone Tribe toured the station with the park’s fish biologist, Jonathan Reynolds. They then learned to electrofish in Snake Creek, collecting data used to manage the native Bonneville cutthroat trout.

From the raceways to the Las Vegas ponds

Each spring’s planting begins at the end of February, while waters in the north are still iced over. The first loads are hauled south to Boulder City, Mesquite, and the urban ponds of Las Vegas. By mid-March those waters are too warm for trout, so the trucks turn north to Lincoln and Nye counties as the ice retreats. Stocking ends by the end of June, because July water is too warm. A second, narrower window opens in September and October and closes when the lakes ice over in November. Douglass described that fall stretch as “quite busy.”

The Outdoor Nevada episode follows one small load. The host pulled on waders and helped a worker named Mike corral fish in a raceway. He netted ten in his first swipe, and those were weighed to set the count. Then the crew netted fish into the truck until they reached 200 and drove to a pond at Sacramento Pass. There the host lifted the tank gate on a countdown and held it up, and the trout poured out. “They’re trying to go back up stream,” the host said. The technicians who do this work deliver the fish themselves and are required to live in department housing at the station.

Agents and managers since 1953

John Brooks served as Fish and Game Agent at Spring Creek from July 16, 1953, to August 1, 1983. In 1981 the Nevada Department of Wildlife ran five fish propagation facilities, Spring Creek at Baker among them, with a combined capacity of 400,000 pounds a year. A National Park Service page last updated in 2015 counts four facilities. The department now lists three hatcheries and a single rearing station, Spring Creek, which it places near Baker.

Late in 2024, while the station was shorthanded, fisheries staff from across the state came to cover shifts, feed fish, and haul loads. In its activity report for the June 2025 Wildlife Commission meeting, the department bade farewell to Buck Douglass, its longtime manager at Spring Creek, and wished him well in retirement.