Quilcene NFH Built in 1911 and located about 50 miles west of Seattle, Quilcene National Fish Hatchery was originally established for the propagation of salmon and other fish. Today, the station’s mission is to restore and enhance fish runs in the Hood Canal and along the north coast of Washington State.

Nowadays the tanks at Quilcene hold coho salmon, fall chum salmon and summer chum salmon, which the Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service recently listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Each year the staff at Quilcene releases more than 3.4 million fish weighing a total of more than 44,000 pounds. Annually an average of 6.2 percent of the coho released survive to spawn or are caught in sport, commercial or tribal fisheries from Alaska south to Washington’s Puget Sound.

Summer chum runs, which have declined dramatically since the late 1970s, are a major focus at Quilcene. In 1992, the Service, the Point No Point Treaty Council and the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife began a rearing program at Quilcene as a component of a plan to restore this depressed stock of salmon.

The goal is to rebuild the naturally spawning population to be self-sustaining, at which time the hatchery will reduce or eliminate its production. A great deal of the plan’s success so far lies in habitat restoration and careful harvest management. (While summer chum are not deliberately targeted for harvest some are caught incidentally in coho fisheries in Hood Canal and the Strait of Juan de Fuca).

The program has been successful enough to launch a summer chum run at Big Beef Creek on the eastern shore of Hood Canal. An egg isolation building built this year will enable hatchery staff to take an even more active role in future fish recovery programs.

Each May since 1990, biologists have released some 447,000 coho yearlings, averaging 5 1/2 inches in length, into the Big Quilcene River. In addition, 300,000 presmolts have been transferred to tribal net pens in Quilcene Bay and 500,000 eyed eggs have gone to a Washington State hatchery to be reared in tribal net pens in Port Gamble Bay in the north end of Hood Canal.

Quinault NFH Quinault National Fish Hatchery is on the Quinault Indian Reservation, 81 acres on the north bank of Cook Creek, a tributary of the Quinault River. Quinault hatchery was established in 1964 as part of a conservation partnership between the Service and the Quinault Indian Tribe to restore and enhance depleted salmon and steelhead runs on the reservation and in other areas along the north coast of Washington.

Species native to reservation waters have included sockeye, spring and fall chinook, chum and coho salmon, and steelhead and cutthroat trout; historically, the Quinault Indians depended on the salmon runs for a large part of their diet. The Quinaults are a fishing people and when the runs began to thin badly in the early 1960s, there was cause for real concern.

The decline in fish runs proved doubleedged; the Quinault tribe also permitted extensive logging on reservation land, causing a degradation in fish habitat that in turn took a heavy toll on the fish population. Combined with an increasing commercial harvest, the population drop grew staggering.

Since then, said hatchery director Marjorie Park, herself a member of the Quinault tribe (as are five others of her seven-member staff), the hatchery has contributed significantly to a restoration of salmon and steelhead runs in the Quinault River, increasing a food supply and making substantial contributions not only to the tribal fisheries but also to Indian, sport and commercial fisheries of the Pacific Northwest.

Coho and steelhead production started with native fish from the Quinault River caught on hook and line by local sport fishermen, held in live boxes and transported to the hatchery. The fall chinook salmon were also started from native stock and later, native Queets River fall chinook were captured and added to production.