A Fishy Experience...

My regular groupies, meaning Rebecca's clan and Mom, recently toured the Kamas Fish Hatchery, operated by our good friends at the Department of Fish and Game or Wildlife or what have you. I guess they are not good friends, but I'd buy the guy an ice cream if we were ever to meet him hitchhiking on the road to the Dairy Queen.

Tours only run a few hours a day, Thursday - Sunday from Memorial Day to Labor Day. This means we have been there a time or two when we just missed the last tour of the day. This time, we arrived just prior to a tour start time and as luck had it, were in store for the treat of a private tour. We really don't like to share.

The nice older gentleman explained how they capture salmon, squeeze out their eggs, fertilize them with "cream," then sell the babies to other hatcheries that actually grow salmon. That accounts for a large part of their operating budget, apparently, which is large enough to stock many lakes in the Uintah Mountains with fish each year (mostly rainbow trout).

We learned about the horrible whirling disease that requires the facility protect itself like Fort Knox (in the old days, you could go any time and walk around the many pools of fish). Once a lake or stream has the disease, it is virtually impossible to get rid of it. It is easy to re-infect, so the 40 year natural life cycle of the disease frequently starts over. When I was younger, the Fish and Game people poisoned or bleached Strawberry Reservoir to kill the bad fish. Now it is a healthy, thriving body of water that provides year round recreation. We asked if something like that could be done for the whirling disease, but it can't. The disease is harder to contain as a stream's ecosystem is very complex and many other species could be harmed, whereas whirling disease only affects fish.

Once the fish are big enough, they are loaded into trucks like this one or onto airplanes. They drive by or fly over lakes and rivers and dump their loads. We even saw their elaborate system for loading the fish onto the truck. Quite the operation. If you'd like to see the fish species poster I earned for not bothering him with too many questions and not falling into the fish pools, accidentally or otherwise, just ask. It's colorful.


I will say the tour guide (my polite name for him) completely catered the tour to Rebecca. I didn't mind that so much since she is the cutest one of the lot and was even amused when he was caught off guard by her forthright nature. He explained why outsiders like ourselves can't feed the fish even though there were large pallets of food throughout our tour. Rebecca simply insisted on feeding the fish. She was polite, but firm in her resolve and he caved. He also caved after being initially taken aback when she held out her hand and said, "I'm going to hold your hand." Clearly outside of his routing, but he quickly adapted and as a result, even though a few weeks have passed since, she still talks about the visit and wants to show off her fish poster. It's the same cool, colorful fish poster I have, so we are really a matched set.

I have included a fish movie clip for you to get the full effect of the tour. That is just in case you drive all the way to Kamas and miss the tour by 20 minutes, which would still be a relaxing, beautiful drive even at $4.00 a gallon. The tour guide would excite the fish with food or by making faces or whatever without telling me, so by the time I had the camera recording, they were already settling down. Hopefully you can get an idea of what it was like, even still. Enjoy.