I’ve never been to a fish hatchery. So, visiting the National Fish Hatchery in Jackson, WY would result in both learning about the fish hatchery and obtaining cancel stamps 🙂

From the Grand Teton National Park Day 25 – GlampingWithCats.com blog, this facility was working to preserve and maintain two fish. The Finespotted Cutthroat Trout is raised in large numbers every year, about 200,000 fish. After a year in the hatchery, they are released into the wild. About half of the release fish are sterile to avoid excessively impacting the environment. The other fish is the Kendall Warm Springs Dace. This small speckled minnow is only found in the 85 degree waters of the Kendal Spring in the Bridger-Teton National Forest. The spring and 984 feet of stream compromise its total habitat. It is endangered, and the hatchery is maintaining a backup population of around 50 fish.

The hatchery information area had another tank containing smaller cutthroat trout. The trout size was limited by the size of the tank.

One interesting piece of information is that the cutthroat trout that is in the Oakley River has a distinctly different color tone than the Yellowstone River.

One of the workers acted as a tour guide. At the time of our visit, they were not harvesting eggs. My guess if we were a week or so earlier we would have seen the egg harvest.

The first place we went was inside the building which held multiple incubation chambers. Thousands of fish are in each chamber. The fish at this stage will survive by consuming the egg sac. See the blue area for the sac. The fish are raised in these chambers until they are big enough to go into larger chambers that are outside.

Larger chambers

Waste from the tanks is transferred to a pond that can be fished. The pond is not stocked but does contain fish. We saw fish at the edge of the pond and a fisherman testing his skill.

Unfortunately, no selfies from this visit. But I did take pictures of the various information boards.