Umatilla Hatchery

From exit 168 on Interstate 84, Highway 730 leads to Patterson Ferry Road, and Patterson Ferry Road turns north to the Columbia River and the Umatilla Hatchery. The grounds cover 23 acres at an elevation of 277 feet, on land owned by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s 2024 program plan puts the site 3.5 miles west of Irrigon. A 2017 steelhead management plan says about two miles.

Ten Oregon ponds and twenty-four Michigan ponds

The rearing units date from 1991, and the 2024 plan rates every one of them in good condition. Ten concrete Oregon ponds, each 91 feet long and nearly 19 feet wide, lie beside twenty-four Michigan ponds of the same length, 9 feet across and 2.75 feet deep. Indoors are eight fiberglass Canadian troughs and 552 plastic vertical incubators. ODFW sends visitors to the Michigan ponds, where automatic feeders dispense feed throughout the day and the fish can be watched as they eat. Four remote wells and one Rainey well supply the water, at up to 3,800 gallons a minute. The staff is seven permanent employees and one six-month employee.

Anglers fish at the hatchery outfall, which ODFW describes as good fishing. The agency’s wildlife list for the grounds names wading birds, deer, osprey, eagles, hawks, and owls. There is a visitors’ center with restrooms, and the site is ADA accessible. The best season runs from April to October. In 2015 Marc Garst, manager of the Irrigon-Umatilla Fish Hatchery Complex, said the complex typically saw between 3,000 and 4,000 visitors a year. That spring the complex closed to the public from May 26 through July 15 for repairs and construction. On April 15, 2024, ODFW closed the Umatilla and Irrigon hatcheries again for maintenance, saying they might reopen near the end of June.

Eggs from upriver, smolts sent back

No adult fish are collected at the hatchery. Every egg comes from a satellite site. Chinook and steelhead returning from the ocean are trapped at Three Mile Falls Dam, about four miles up the Umatilla River from its mouth, near the town of Umatilla. Under the 2024 plan, fall Chinook are taken there from September through November and held and spawned at the dam, with spawning peaking in November. Spring Chinook are collected in May and June and moved to Walla Walla Hatchery, where they spawn in early September. Summer steelhead are trapped from September through April and held at Minthorn Springs, about four miles east of Mission, where they spawn in April and May. Their green eggs then travel to the Umatilla Hatchery for incubation and rearing.

The work is split between the two co-managers. ODFW operates the hatchery, and the Confederated Tribes operate the satellites. Those satellite sites went up over sixteen years: Bonifer in 1983, Minthorn in 1985, the Three Mile Dam adult facility in 1996, the South Fork Walla Walla facility in 1997, and Pendleton in 1999. Imeques C-mem-ini-kem and Thornhollow, completed in 1994 and 1995, hold young fish before release.

The young fish go back up the Umatilla to those satellite sites. In the 2024 plan, 600,000 fall Chinook spend two weeks at the Pendleton site and are released in mid to late May. About 202,500 spring Chinook move to Thornhollow in late January for release in early April, and 607,500 more go to Imeques in late February. In mid-March, 150,000 summer steelhead go to Pendleton. They are let into the river in mid-April at a size of 4.5 fish to the pound. Each release group leaves with the adipose fin clipped, and part of each also carries a coded wire tag.

The 2017 plan dates an approximately one-week volitional release period, before the fish were forced out, to 1997. According to the tribes, as recorded in a 2022 scientific review, volitional releases were abandoned in 2012 in favor of a single-day forced release for each production lot.

The steelhead are endemic Umatilla River stock, and both the hatchery and the wild fish are listed as Threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act. For several years broodstock came entirely from wild adults. From brood year 2014 the program took 70 wild-origin and 40 tagged hatchery-origin fish. The 2024 plan gives 70 natural-origin and 34 hatchery-origin adults, with no hatchery-by-hatchery crosses.

Seven hundred at the river mouth

ODFW’s 1997 funding proposal opens the river’s record with the Lewis and Clark journals. In the spring of 1806 the expedition found a large village at the mouth of the Umatilla, where 700 Indians were awaiting the arrival of the spring Chinook. It was one of the largest villages seen between The Dalles and the mouth of the Snake.

A century later, the Hermiston Power and Light hydroelectric dam went in at river mile 10 in 1910, and the Threemile Falls irrigation diversion at river mile 3 in 1914. The proposal says these two are believed to have caused the largest decline of salmon and steelhead in the basin. Before the decline came the largest run of Chinook “within memory of white men,” in 1914. That year, according to Van Cleve and Ting, writing in 1960, Indians and non-Indians caught “thousands upon thousands of salmon from spring to fall” at the two dams, where fish gathered below the new structures. Declines followed in the years after. The Oregon Game Commission recorded the last sport harvest of spring Chinook on the Umatilla, 41 fish, in 1956. By the 1997 proposal’s count, Chinook and coho had been effectively eliminated from the river for more than 65 years.

Hatchery steelhead smolts have been released in the basin since 1967. In 1981 ODFW began reprogramming its hatcheries to supply salmon and steelhead smolts for the Umatilla, and salmon were reintroduced to the river beginning in 1983, the year the Bonifer site was finished.

A master plan and a shortage of water

The Northwest Power Planning Council approved the Umatilla Hatchery Master Plan on October 11, 1989. The plan was submitted jointly by the Confederated Tribes and ODFW. The following September the Council reissued it in a single volume, noting continued requests for copies from the public and from fishery managers. Dulcy Mahar, director of the Council’s Public Involvement Division, signed the introduction. The hatchery was built and began operating in the fall of 1991, funded by the Bonneville Power Administration. Its purpose was to partially mitigate fish losses caused by Columbia River hydroelectric dams. The Council authorized it to produce up to 290,000 pounds of salmon and steelhead a year and to test Michigan-type rearing against Oregon-type rearing with supplemental oxygen. By the 1997 proposal, more than 15 million fall Chinook, 6 million spring Chinook, and 700,000 summer steelhead had been stocked into the Umatilla system.

The same proposal named water as the first condition for full production. The original steelhead goal of 210,000 smolts was never reached and was revised because of water shortages at the hatchery. The adult return target of 9,670 steelhead was later cut to 5,500. In 2006 a broken pipeline forced the fish to be evacuated. In 2017 well and electrical problems forced the early release of all 150,000 summer steelhead juveniles straight into the stream. In 2020, according to Maureen Hess, a biologist with the Council’s Fish and Wildlife Division, deteriorating wells again sent some juvenile Chinook and steelhead out earlier than usual.

The returning fish are counted at Three Mile Falls Dam. Hatchery steelhead returns there ranged from 165 in the 1987–88 run to 1,895 in 2001–02. On October 29, 2012, Lance Clarke, who led ODFW’s monitoring of the hatchery, reported that 388 hatchery-raised adult steelhead had passed the trap at Three Mile Falls. ODFW expected about 800 that season.