6-18-2026 

             For today's blog, we did a lot more than yesterday, and a little more labor-intensive, but before I get ahead of myself. Started the day as normal, and after we were ready, to go to the Hatchery on the Umatilla Reservation. Our tour was given by Emily Meshke, the assistant manager there, with a few appearances from some of the workers: Brian Startzl; his position was Tech 3; Sunhawk Thomas was a temp they just recently hired, and Anthony; I didn't catch his last name or his position. The tour was really informative compared to the hatchery we went to the other day. Emily stated that they built this hatchery in the late 1980s, might have been the 90s, don't quote me. Today, though, most of their buildings are state-of-the-art except for one, and they mentioned that the bathrooms have an odor they can't get rid of. Anyway, Emily started the tour by giving us the history of the hatchery, and that their mission was first food mission-based for the nearby tribes, and the first foods and salmon specifically considered the most important, and are a vital part of the livelihood of Native Americans. As well as their goal of conserving the natural habitat of the salmon. It kind of was the same process as the other hatchery, just a little more advanced with their technology. Some of the things they shared were that the lights play a part in their behavior; if they kept them on constantly, the salmon would smolt earlier than they were supposed to. 

              Anthony provided some more insight into the workings of the clipping trailer thing, and stated that the way Wellpinit uses the trailer was the reason their numbers were so low because those types of trout don’t typically like the constant flow of water and will avoid it compared to salmon who kind of go more with the flow, literally. As well as the fish they are marking are called Spring Chinook, and get pumped thought these tubes to get measured for length and the clipping of their fin and if there is even a little bit of fin left on the fish it will get sorted to a separate white bucket where two other workers there will manually clip it off, but if it’s a clean cut from the machine they have this monitor that tracks the fish and will show you a before and after. They shared a lot of other information about the facility, like how much water they pump and the studies they perform there. They did say in their bigger tanks that they called raceway’s holds the bigger salmon that is almost ready to be released; each tank holds about 200 in each raceway, and in total they have roughly 850 fish total. Emily did mention they are experiencing high mortality and they aren’t definite on the cause they think it may because of study that was performed on them, or change in temperature in the water, due to the low snowpack, and if this is the reason they are going to have to find a more viable option for the future because they predict it will be like this for the next 3 years. Before I finish this section, their goal is to raise 500,000 fish. 

               The second half is more of the labor-intensive portion of the day; we went to this nursery, where Gail was sort of our supervisor, where she gave us a tour of the nursery and showed us what we were going to be doing after we had lunch. I think the tour was my favorite part of the day, except that in each greenhouse it was extremely hot and humid. For the most part, I knew most of the plants she showed us, but I forgot what they had looked like, and I only knew them because I used to work for a restoration crew and met up at a nursery in Yakima, and they had most of the plants, as well as planted them. The labor I mentioned was after lunch, and in all honesty, it wouldn’t have been that bad if it wasn’t hot outside. We just clipped down some of the trees and got rid of the dead ones and put the healthy ones in this grid of wire fence, and that was about everything. I didn’t mind this either; it was kind of nice to just be moving and get out of your head...... well, sort of.  

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