Hot Creek Trout Hatchery

It’s so sad! Even when I fished more regularly, I thought it was so sad! Even when I was a little kid and thought it was cool to be able to buy fish food from a machine that in a different place would dispense M&M’s, I thought it was so sad! And hot. It’s always so hot here in the summer, even though nothing feels quite hot around Mammoth in the summer.
This is the first place I ever saw a cattle guard, and for years afterward I argued with my family – mostly my dad – about the contraptions’ effectiveness at preventing cattle and other animals from crossing them. As you can probably imagine, I was further floored the first time I saw a virtual cattle guard, also near Mammoth but not near the hatchery.
It is kind of cute to see the little rainbows and browns and brooks that will befuddle and dazzle and fight with you down the line. It’s not so cute to see the limpish, blobbish, deformed little fingerlings that definitely won’t make it; and there have always been quite a few to be seen when I’ve been here.
Your fishing-​license dollars at work, for good and for bad. It is pretty neat when they back the trucks up to the lakes and shoot all the trout out.

The long rearing ponds («raceways») of fingerling and other juvenile trout exploded in a frenzy of activity as the lunch truck passed. By chance, we went to see the Hot Creek Fish Hatchery just as a veteran Fish and Game employee named Dennis, fed the hungry horde their lunch from the back of his truck. It’s a big job raising 500,000 catchable-​sized trout per year, but Dennis took time out to visit with us once his fry were fed.
Dennis told us that the large springs that supply the hatchery flow at an ideal temperature for rearing trout. Given that the area is full of hot springs, a shift in the groundwater flow could put them out of business. At the hatchery, fish are grown up to about 4.5 pounds, and are released primarily into the Owens River and its reservoirs.
The opportunity to walk around one of the largest Rainbow, Brown and Cutthroat trout hatcheries in California, and to feed the fish yourself is worthy of 2 stars. Meeting Dennis and witnessing the lunchtime feeding frenzy merits a third star. A fourth star might be warranted if the hatchery grounds were spruced up and some interpretive signs added.