Trout, Beyond Doubt : Mt. Whitney Fish Hatchery Has Kept Eastern Sierra Waters Well-Stocked

The Mt. Whitney Fish Hatchery, like its nearby namesake, looks as if it will survive forever the harsh elements of the Sierra Nevada, as well as the demands of California’s freshwater anglers.

A copy on a wall of the Dec. 17, 1915 edition of the Inyo Independent carries the banner headline: “World’s Largest Fish Hatchery To Be Built Here,” and the story says it will be “one of the showplaces in the state.”

Later pictures show fish being transported to streams and lakes in tanks on mules.

And yet five years ago this classic stone fortress was brought to its knees by a microscopic parasite that created a crisis for the state’s entire hatchery system--a crisis, it seems in retrospect, that could have been ignored, with hardly any of the state’s nearly 2 million anglers the wiser.

The hatchery was shut down in 1984 because of disease-- myxosoma cerebralis --in the portion of its water supply from the north fork of Oak Creek that flows down the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada into the Owens Valley. The south fork supply was OK but insufficient in volume to sustain production.

The protozoa-borne ailment, harmless to humans, causes degeneration of cartilage and brain tissue in fish, prompting some to swim, or whirl, in circles when stressed and causing deformities in perhaps one-half of 1%.

The shutdown was a loss productively, historically and aesthetically. While most of the state’s 23 hatcheries are undistinguished tin-roofed buildings, Mt. Whitney is a picturesque structure that was built for $60,000 and would cost millions to duplicate today.

It is California’s second oldest hatchery, next to the one at Mt. Shasta that dates to 1888. It not only is one of only three in the Eastern Sierra, but one of only three producing eggs for the entire state.

Its shutdown was a crisis. Not only were 2 million fingerlings and 350,000 catchable-size fish purposely destroyed, but the entire system was at risk of crashing.

Bill Rowan, supervisor of the Department of Fish and Game’s Eastern Sierra hatcheries, said, “We were pushing everything off to the Fish Springs hatchery (near Big Pine) and had them loaded to the gunwales raising every fish they could possibly grow.

“We were sitting on the brink of a major disaster all the time. It’s scary when you have that many fish, and all you need to have is a power outage, then you lose your wells and your whole crop.”

But it remains a fair question to ask, if the disease is so harmless, why hit the panic button?

“It was the first time it was diagnosed at a state hatchery in California,” said Jim Riley, who has managed the hatchery for 20 years.

Riley lives in a ranch-style house on the property and has raised five children from two marriages there. He traces the panic to earlier years when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service placed whirling disease in the catastrophic category.

“They didn’t understand it and, historically, if you don’t understand something you run scared of it. So if your fish are exposed to it, you destroy ‘em, and that’s what we did.”

Then, over the next four years, the creek was fish-killed with the chemical formula rotenone three times, and the facilities at Mt. Whitney and the Black Rock rearing ponds eight miles away, where Mt. Whitney’s eggs are sent to hatch, were treated thoroughly with chlorine.

Riley said there has been no sign of whirling disease in the hatchery for six months but doubts it has been eradicated.

“It’s still in the water supply, still in the creek,” he said.

Does it matter?

“I think they’re gonna end up just living with it,” Riley said. “It doesn’t do any more damage than other things we live with.”

Nevertheless, the DFG was very cautious when it put Mt. Whitney back into about one-third operation this year. A couple of dozen new 25-foot-long aluminum troughs stand dry and idle in the breeding shed, perhaps never to be used.

Because the disease isn’t transmitted directly from fish to fish, the two-acre breeding pond at Black Rock is being used again, but Mt. Whitney, with 2,300 brooders, is not allowed to hatch any fish, just take eggs.

“One of these days we hope to get it back into full swing,” Riley said, “because we’ve got all those troughs where we used to raise a lot of little guys that were planted in the back country by air.”

Riley may never see it. He retires next year.

Where the Eastern Sierra would be without hatcheries is sobering to consider.

Without fishing, the economy of the Owens Valley would collapse. L.A. might as well take all the water it wanted.

Native, or “wild,” fish, Rowan says, would not come close to sustaining the sport. In fact, he smiles when someone talks about “wild” trout.

At the turn of the century, there were no game fish in the region until some private sportsmen, such as the Rainbow Club of Bishop, stocked the streams and lakes themselves.

Even now, few reproduce. A hatchery fish, even if he isn’t among the estimated 90% that are caught, lives no more than three years, usually less.

“We plant fingerlings,” Rowan said, “and that’s where the natives come from--the so-called ‘wild’ fish.

“I don’t care what these wild trout fishermen say, those ‘wild trout’ came from a hatchery.”

But the fingerlings are drawn from hardier, wilder strains than the catchable fish--mostly rainbows--and grow up in natural environments with stream smarts. They become more difficult to catch and, especially in the case of the German browns, thus give themselves time to grow to trophy size.

Most fishermen, Rowan said, don’t realize how many premium fish there are in the Eastern Sierra. The state’s hatcheries produce about 53 million catchables a year--trout, salmon, steelhead and catfish--at a cost of about $1.60 per pound, or 40 cents apiece average size, but some tip the scales better than that.

“There are brown trout in all the streams,” Rowan said. “People don’t catch ‘em because they’re fishing with salmon eggs, and they don’t know how. The average fishermen that come up here, all they can catch are the planted trout.

“One thing that really showed us was 1984. When we had the whirling disease wipe us out at Whitney Hatchery, we quit planting the north fork of Oak Creek. One guy was camped up there, and we went in there with a shocker to see what fish were left in there.

“This guy had been fishing this one little hole without getting a bite, and with the shocker we knocked six brown trout right out of there, and (he said) ‘Wow! Where’d those come from?’

“If everybody knew how to fish for these things, they’d clean ‘em out.”

Also in ‘84, the DFG allowed people to fish right out of the Black Rock rearing ponds before killing whatever number of the 350,000 remained.

“There were hordes of fish you could catch with a bare hook,” Rowan said. “We had people commenting, ‘I’ve never had enough trout for a meal,’ and ‘Wow! this is fantastic.’

“They loved it. (They asked,) ‘Can we do this next year?’ ”

Some people still fish that way, descending upon certain holes the moment a hatchery worker unloads a net full, while the fish are still too much in shock to scatter.

“It may not seem much like sport to do something like that, but there’s nothing we can do about it,” Rowan said. “That’s the only way some people can catch fish, and even then they can’t catch ‘em, which is amazing to me.

“They’ve talked about planting at night (or) about closing a section of stream for a day or so after it’s been planted. There’s no way they could enforce that. Night planting, I’m sure we’d have problems with people getting hurt.”

Rowan’s three Eastern Sierra hatcheries each has had its own crisis in recent years.

Hot Creek, a prime flyfishing site near Mammoth Lakes that is fed by thermal springs, is near a proposed geothermal power development that has been vigorously opposed by the DFG and sportsmen who fear the plant would seriously alter the quality of the water for the stream and the hatchery.

“It’s kind of on hold again,” Rowan said. “We were worried for a while that if they were to start that thing up we were going to lose water or temperature.

“Because of the drought, our springs are flowing considerably less than normal, anyway. We had to go to makeshift electric aeration to keep from losing our crop in the production ponds.”