“THIS IS WHERE EGGS GO,” Leonard Rice says, while pulling out a shallow drawer containing water and tiny apricot-colored spheres. The Glenwood Fish Hatchery manager is charged with spawning and raising Gila trout in the newly renovated facility on a tributary of New Mexico’s San Francisco River. As Rice inspects the eggs, however, he admits, “Some years just don’t have a great spawn.”
On-site today, a team of four works to spawn three-year-old Gila trout by placing a male over a bowl of female eggs, releasing its sperm, then activating the biological elements with a special solution. Only nature knows what factors play into the success rate. “It’s partly the fish, partly the weather, partly voodoo,” Rice says.
Once the eggs hatch, they’re raised at the 20-acre site before being spawned and then released into lakes and streams down the Gila and San Francisco waterways, including Gwynn Tank Pond, Gilita Creek, and where the Gila River’s West and Middle Forks come together near the Gila Cliff Dwellings.
Opened in 1938 as part of the New Deal, the state-owned Glenwood Fish Hatchery has raised mostly rainbow trout despite being in the heart of the Gila trout’s natural habitat. “The Gila National Forest is such a unique part of the state,” says Kirk Patten, chief of fisheries for the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish. “The Gila trout is part of that natural history.”
Fish swim in large pools.
Photograph courtesy of Glenwood Fish Hatchery/Loralee Pierce.
Once inhabiting hundreds of miles in the Gila and Aldo Leopold wilderness areas, the olive-yellow fish with black spots came close to extinction in the 1960s due to overfishing, habitat loss, and stocking of non-native rainbows. Conservation efforts helped bring the species from the brink, eventually being upgraded from endangered to threatened status in 2006. “That’s when we started to have conversations about converting Glenwood over to all Gila trout,” Patten says.
Initially, Gila trout were raised at what is now the Mescalero Tribal Fish Hatchery. In the 1990s, the Mora National Fish Hatchery took over and has served as the state’s lone source of Gila trout until now. The five-year construction project at the Glenwood facility included a new infiltration system, aeration tower, and production building. This season, the hatchery will exclusively spawn Gila trout. Mature fish will be held before release in a new brood-stock building.
“We designed the hatchery to produce around 85,000 catchable Gila trout per year, plus a smaller number of fish for recovery of Gila trout in the wilderness,” Patten says.
Glenwood facility improvements go rod-in-reel with habitat restoration projects in streams like Whitewater Creek by the nearby Catwalk National Recreation Area. Improving stream health and expanding hatchery production give the species a better chance to flourish in nature. “Our primary goal for Gila trout recovery efforts is to create a self-sustaining population that we don’t need to stock,” Patten says.
Read more: Plan your next outdoor adventure with this guide to fishing for native Gila trout in New Mexico's wild waters.
