06/05/2026
News from the Rowdy Creek Fish Hatchery
Another great school year almost in the books! Yesterday staff finished up the last of twelve field trips to release juvenile hatchery Chinook Salmon at Shaa-xu-xat (Rowdy Creek Park). Fish were hatched in Del Norte County classrooms as part of the Salmon in the Classroom program run in partnership with the Rowdy Creek Fish Hatchery and Dan Burgess from Rural Human Services.
In addition to these release field trips, we've been hosting preschool through high school classrooms from Del Norte and Brookings at the hatchery for field trips. All said, we have had over 500 kids learning about salmon on Rowdy Creek this year so far! We would like to thank Dan Burgess, DN and Curry County schools, and especially the teachers for helping facilitate all these visits. It is extremely (and surprisingly!) difficult for teachers to afford/arrange bus transportation for local school kids to take field trips. We love talking fish, and we are honored that so many classrooms used these limited opportunities to visit the hatchery!
Now for the not-so-great news. Last weekend a traffic accident near the hatchery took out our power, and upon firing up the generator our pumps here at the hatchery would not turn back on. Attempts to repair the pump issue did not work and staff determined the best course of action for the survival of our fish was to conduct an emergency release. Last Sunday 35,000 Chinook Salmon smolts and up to 25,000 steelhead fry were quickly released from the hatchery facility into Dominie and Rowdy Creeks. These fish had not yet been clipped and coded wire tagged, which was scheduled to begin this week.
These situations are the hardest part of our jobs here at the hatchery. We are a flow-through facility and so when the flow stops, we have an extremely limited amount of time to either get the water back on or make difficult decisions that will impact tens of thousands of little fish lives. This was a particularly difficult event since we already released our first round of Chinook a few weeks ago and the remaining Chinook were only a few weeks away from being released down at the boat ramp. Our steelhead would have stayed at the hatchery until next spring but also had to be released. We currently have no fish on hand at the facility until broodstock collection this fall.
Circling back around to the "good" news: this was the best outcome for this particular situation. We are thankful to have our hatchery manager Steve living onsite and constantly checking on our fish and pumps. We are lucky to have staff that will drop everything to come up and help when the call comes in…in the middle of the night...on a Sunday. As a result, fish were all released to the creeks and we believe that losses were minimal given the urgency of the release event. We consider our Chinook this year some of the best we've ever raised—big and healthy and ready to migrate. Just as we always have the kids do during classroom fish releases, we wish each and every one of them the best of luck out there in the big post-hatchery world!
