History

Wishkah History

The 50-acre property where the Wishkah Hatchery is located was first homesteaded in 1889 by the Ackley family. The Mayr Brothers Logging Co. of nearby Hoquiam purchased the property, by then a farm, in the 1950s.

Mayr Brothers, which also owned the 2,000 acres surrounding the site, reached an agreement with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) in 1973 to establish and run a steelhead rearing program for 10 years, in part out of concern for the impact the company's logging operations were having on salmon. Due to his experience in both forestry and fisheries management, Terry Baltzell was hired that year to run the hatchery program and to work in the company's timber operations. By 1983 Terry, who remains the facility manager today as an employee of LLTK, was spending about half his time running the hatchery, and the Mayr Brothers' investment in the hatchery operation had topped $1 million.

In 1986, the same year LLTK was founded, Mayr Brothers went bankrupt. A group of local state legislators, referred to as the "Coastal Caucus," secured funding to purchase the hatchery and negotiated to have WDFW operate it. (One of those legislators, Brad Owen, is now in his third term as lieutenant governor of Washington State.) WDFW in turn reached an agreement with LLTK for the organization to take over operation of the hatchery and begin a chinook recovery program.

Creating a Model Landscape Hatchery

Since 1986, the Chinook recovery program has served to maintain the genetically distinct Wishkah Chinook population. LLTK added coho rearing to support a popular Grays Harbor Fishery, and chum rearing for an educational program that takes place at the facility.

Over two decades, LLTK's Wishkah staff worked to make the Wishkah Hatchery a demonstration of one of LLTK's founding principles: that hatcheries might be used, in concert with habitat restoration, to help recover wild salmon populations and support sustainable fisheries. We were proud when the Hatchery Reform Project's Hatchery Scientific Review Group cited the facility as a "model" for a "landscape hatchery."

The Wishkah property now includes seven off-channel ponds to provide refuge and rearing habitat for both wild and hatchery coho, which often spend more than a year in fresh water before migrating to the ocean. The ponds have become host to a variety of other fish and wildlife, including Chinook and chum salmon, cutthroat trout, lamprey, peamouth, and newts. Shortly after we completed construction of the ponds, chum salmon were observed knocking rocks loose from the sides to create a gravel bottom they then used for spawning, a remarkable demonstration of the adaptability and resilience of salmon.

Long Live the Kings brought in large woody debris to create logjams in the Wishkah River which provide improved habitat for both naturally-spawning and hatchery salmon and steelhead.

The contributions of the Wishkah Hatchery to the local landscape extend far beyond the hatchery fence. Habitat recovery and restoration projects have supported myriad species of fish and wildlife in the Wishkah River and in neighboring watersheds, where decades of intensive logging have drastically reduced available habitat. The hatchery has become an important center for community education-hosting thousands of visitors, from school children to graduate students, local legislators and citizens, hunters, birders, and fishers.