Warm Springs Fish Hatchery

Steelhead coming up Dry Creek from the Russian River reach the end of their road below Warm Springs Dam, eleven miles west of Healdsburg on Dry Creek Road. They jump seven steps to the top of a fish ladder, swim into a channel, and pass through a finger weir that lets them into the pond but not back out. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife, which operates the hatchery, says it traps between 3,000 and 5,000 steelhead a year. The ladder opens by mid-October. The best months to watch depend on the source. Kathleen Scavone, writing for Sonoma County Features in June 2026, gives December through April as the months fish can be seen going up. The Friends of Lake Sonoma name January through April, when wild steelhead swim up Dry Creek to spawn.

The place has two names. The state calls it Warm Springs Hatchery. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which built it, owns it, and pays for all of it, calls it the Congressman Don Clausen Fish Hatchery. Visitors reach it through the Milt Brandt Visitor Center, run by the Corps. Its exhibits cover the dam, the natural and early history of Dry Creek Valley, and the Pomo, the valley’s first people, with particular attention to their basketry. The center also holds Native American artifacts and tools, taxidermied animals from the surrounding country, a gift shop, and audio-visual and ranger-led programs. Behind the building, displays trace the life cycle of coho salmon, steelhead, and chinook. During the January–April spawning season the Corps arranges group tours. The Friends pay for buses, and Jane Young, the group’s executive director, told the Press Democrat in 2019 that about 4,000 students a year go through the hatchery’s educational programs.

Coho spawning runs from mid-November through February, and steelhead spawning from January to mid-April. In February or March the Lake Sonoma Steelhead Festival, free, draws thousands to the visitor center. At the 2019 festival, on February 9, children worked a fishing hole set up in the hatchery, and Marie Weilbacher, 8, of Petaluma, held up a steelhead she had caught.

Coho on a breeding matrix

The hatchery runs two programs. The steelhead program, operated by the state, is a harvest program. In a 2022 presentation by Ben White of the Corps and Darrick Muir of the state, its output was given as 300,000 yearling steelhead, with an expected return of 3,000 adults a year. Scavone counts more than 300,000 fish released to the Russian River annually. The coho program, operated by the Corps, is a recovery program, and it is younger.

According to California Sea Grant, coho were on the brink of extirpation in the Russian River watershed by the late 1990s, although that watershed had once held the largest coho population in the Central California group. The Sea Grant program dates the hatchery’s broodstock work to 2001. The Press Democrat put the opening of the Corps’ “breeders and seeders” program at about 2000, and the state says the early 2000s. Each year juvenile coho are collected from Russian River tributaries and raised to maturity. They are then spawned according to a genetics breeding matrix, and their offspring are released as juveniles into historic coho streams of the lower watershed. In 2019 the Press Democrat reported that the breeding stock was kept in a building not yet open to the general public. White, then 15 years with the coho program, scanned and tagged fish there. Scavone photographed Rory Taylor of the Corps checking fish, and Kenneth Leister working with coho.

The hatchery’s water comes from Lake Sonoma and usually runs 52 to 58 degrees Fahrenheit year-round. In the drought of 2021 it reached 62 degrees by late July. Pathogens increased, juvenile production fell, and part of the coho broodstock was moved to the hatchery at Casa Grande High School in Petaluma. For 2022 the Corps planned what the presenters called “unprecedented gate changes” at the dam, to draw on the cold-water pool at the bottom of the lake.

Feeling for ripeness, 1982

The hatchery began operating before the dam it serves was finished. The state gives October 1980 for the start of operations, December 22, 1980, for the first adult steelhead, and January 1981 for completion. The 2022 presentation says the hatchery has been in service since 1982, and Scavone gives 1983. The original plant had eight rearing ponds, a fish ladder, a spawning area, adult holding ponds, incubator stacks, and start tanks. In 1990 twelve more ponds and new tanks and stacks were added to take eggs and fish from the satellite Coyote Valley Fish Facility at Lake Mendocino.

On December 9, 1982, a Press Democrat photographer watched workers herd fish into a canal leading to the inspection table. Dave Highland, Jerry Cartwright, and Jim Monical felt the bellies of the females to judge whether they were “ripe.” Fish that were not ready went back to the holding ponds.

Donald F. Estey’s annual report for the 1984–85 season records the routine in numbers. The ladder opened October 18, 1984. The first steelhead entered the trap on November 19 and the last on April 5, 1985, for 837 in all, along with 76 coho and eight chinook. The single chinook female gave 4,000 eggs. Another 380 adult coho were trucked in from the Noyo River fish trap, and surplus steelhead were trucked to the Russian River and released above the mouth of Dry Creek. Young fish were started on Bio-Diet and then fed Oregon Moist Pellets. Every visitor entered through the visitor center, where they were counted: 202,033 that season, with 27,055 in May alone. Archaeologists Adrian and Mary Praetzellis wrote in 1984 that only the hatchery staff actually lived on the seventeen thousand acres of government land around the lake.

A dam, a housewife, and a congressman

The hatchery exists because of the dam, and the dam took decades. The Press Democrat dates the idea to 1937, after floods on the Russian River. In 1941 the Corps recommended a dam on Dry Creek. Congress authorized Warm Springs Dam in 1962, Sonoma County signed a contract in 1964, and ground was broken in 1967. Congressman Don H. Clausen, who represented the North Coast from 1963 to 1983, spoke at the groundbreaking. The Healdsburg Museum’s Russian River Recorder prints the date of that ceremony as August 20, 1967. According to the Recorder, Clausen procured the funding for the $330 million dam and the $10 million hatchery, and the hatchery was named for him in recognition.

Opposition rose against him. Gail Jonas, described by the Recorder as a Healdsburg housewife turned organizer and co-chair of the Warm Springs Task Force, began the group’s fight with the Corps in 1972. The Recorder says the Task Force appealed to former Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, whose order halted the project. The Press Democrat says the Vietnam War had already drained federal funds and that work stopped in federal court in 1974. A countywide referendum that November favored the dam, 51.3 to 48.7 percent, by the Recorder’s figures. In July 1974 supporters organized the Citizens for Community Improvement, with Milt Brandt, an insurance executive from Healdsburg, as first president. After lawsuits, one of which reached the U.S. Supreme Court according to the Friends, construction resumed in 1978, and Clausen spoke at a re-dedication.

The fight continued while the hatchery rose. On August 20, 1979, workers were building it, and Bob Harder of the Corps said the dam was more than half done. The Taxpayers Organized Against the Dam put Measure A on the 1979 ballot to pull the county out of the project. That November voters rejected it three to one. At Task Force headquarters, Les Ayers and Les Perry drank beer, and at the CCI celebration Brandt and others opened champagne. The dam was dedicated on June 18, 1983, when Homer Johnstone and Nick Esposti unveiled a marker. Lake Sonoma began filling on November 1, 1984. In June 1991 the CCI became the Friends of Lake Sonoma, with Brandt once again its president. Before the reorganization, it had paid to bus local schoolchildren to the hatchery.

Ka Ho Wa Ni and the sedge beds

On September 14, 1979, Bevan Trembly, a Warm Springs Guardian, was booked on a citizen’s arrest after allegedly assaulting a federal ranger during a protest against the dam. His sign read “Ka Ho Wa Ni,” which the Press Democrat reported was the Pomo name for the hot springs at the head of Warm Springs Creek, meaning “place where the hot water flows.” In the 1850s Alexander Skaggs began building one of the first hot springs resorts there, about nine miles west of Geyserville. The Friends say it drew more than 300 guests a day in its heyday. It closed in 1942, and its site, in the Friends’ words, “is now seen only by the fish.” In 1869 a writer for the Russian River Flag rode out from Healdsburg and noted that eleven miles out, Dry Creek “is entitled to its name, as it is perfectly dry.”

The Dry Creek Rancheria writes that Native use of the valley goes back more than 10,000 years, and that spawning steelhead and salmon were there even longer. Before the reservoir filled, the Corps met with tribal members, among them the weavers Elsie Allen, Mabel McKay, Lucy Smith, and Laura Somersal, who had gathered sedge and willow in the valley. At the hearings Somersal said: “We used to be able to gather sedge from the Warm Springs area. Because of the dam going in, we can’t do it anymore.” Allen explained that sedge needs places “where the current is not too swift, so that enough sandy soil has accumulated.” Each move of the sedge began with a ceremony of prayer and singing led by a Native representative. Lauren Carriere counts over 18,000 plants moved to almost three acres. Reg Elgin, historic preservation officer for the Dry Creek Pomo Rancheria, gives another figure: “In 1979, they transplanted 39,000 plants.”

According to the Rancheria, many Native people carried their elders’ warnings that the dam would one day suffer a disastrous fate, citing the earthquake faults nearby and the harm of drowning the land. Elgin recalled that advocacy groups had asked that the reservoir be named Lake Pomo. “They promised to name it after the Indians, but didn’t,” he said. “We’re thinking that we would like to take it back. Then it would be Lake Pomo after all.”