Wednesday September 16, 2026
Yakima Herald-Republic —
The music of AC/DC was playing as fish hatchery workers took their stations last week to artificially spawn spring chinook salmon.
“We’ve got No. 1, at 8:45,” yelled Charlie Strom, who is the Yakima Basin production manager for the Yakima Klickitat Fisheries Project.
The salmon were from holding tanks at the Levi George Supplementation and Research Facility in Cle Elum after being trucked from the adult trapping facility at the Roza Dam on the Yakima River earlier this year.
The first step was to kill the fish with an aluminum bat, and cut the gills. The milt was extracted from the males and the eggs from the females.
The eggs are fertilized, and a thus, a new generation of salmon started.
It was a short show on Wednesday. Only five females and five males were “ripe” enough. They were sorted from the Yakima Klickitat Fisheries Project’s holding pool of 428 spring chinook that were captured this year at Roza. The YKFP is a collaboration between Yakama Nation Fisheries and WDFW.