Entiat National Fish Hatchery

What We Do

A smiling man in shorts and ballcap kneels at the edge of a river with a huge summer chinook salmon held out to the camera. — Brandon Pasley shows off a gorgeous summer Chinook salmon freshly caught near Entiat National Fish Hatchery.

While salmon returns to the Columbia River Basin from 2018-2021 were generally poor, Entiat's summer Chinook program has been successful, allowing a fishery on the Columbia and Entiat rivers to open.

We have a spring on-site, six wells, and an infiltration gallery to provide water to our summer Chinook. Eggs remain only on chilled well water from October until they are moved as fry to outside raceways in May. Well water is pathogen-free; and chilling it means development is slowed, so the timing for moving them is adjusted to maximize survival.

A uniformed Service employee in jacket and ponytail checks incubation trays in the hatchery's nursery. — Biological Science Technician Becky Christopherson checks on young summer Chinook alevins in the nursery's incubation trays.

A school of young fish swims underwater in a concrete tank. — The raceways at Entiat National Fish Hatchery are home for hundreds of thousands of summer Chinook salmon.

The fish spend their second winter outside, on a mix of well and river water. Once winter arrives, the water temperature in the Entiat River drops to just above freezing. We use river water to naturalize the growth cycle. This means fish develop at the rate they would naturally if they were in the river rather than in the hatchery. The challenge of keeping water flowing steadily all winter is substantial, but we successfully battle ice in the river and in the pumps, screens, and pipes.

Young fish are seen through a translucent flexible pipe filled with water as they are pumped from ponds to the river. — Young summer Chinook are pumped from the raceways to the river at Entiat National Fish Hatchery to begin their spring migration out to the Pacific Ocean.

After nineteen months at the hatchery, the fish are released in April to make their own way down the Columbia River, past eight dams, and out into the ocean. Reports occasionally make their way back to us from the coded wire tags collected when our fish are caught in other locations-- like Sitka, Alaska. You can follow our fish, too, by visiting the Fish Passage Center's website.