"We have some eggs and fry in the hatching area and troughs right now," he noted. "Currently, we are hatching out kokanee salmon eggs and raising rainbows, including some that are triploid to make them sterile. Eventually we could be raising rainbows, brook trout, kokanee and several strains of Colorado River cutthroat trout. Most of these will go to local waters, but some will be transported to other areas throughout the state.

"The construction on the main building is complete; we just need to put in some more screens and add a few other finishing touches. The raceways should be poured by early next year. Then we'll finish up by filling in around the raceways and paving a parking lot around the buildings. We're at a projected rate of 98,000 pounds of fish this year, and will be able to raise over 130,000 once we are fully functional."

In 1923, the state of Utah acquired a site near Whiterocks. The springs at this site made it perfect for raising fish, and by the end of the year a hatchery building was constructed along with a set of rearing ponds. As time and funding permitted, three sets of concrete raceways were added. These raceways provided a more productive system than the earthen ponds that the hatchery began with.

From the early to mid-1900s, Whiterocks was a state-of-the-art facility. Fish eggs, gathered from around Utah and other parts of the Western states, were placed in trays where hatchery staff could watch them until they hatched into fry. The fry were first moved to the troughs inside the building, where they were fed a high-protein diet of whatever meats the managers could find, including carp, roadkill and dead or old animals donated by local ranchers.

At first, managers stocked the fry into lakes and streams, but they soon learned that larger fish survived better, so managers began raising the fish longer. As the fish grew larger, they were moved to the outside raceways before being stocked into lakes and streams.

By the time Whiterocks was built, trucks had replaced horse-drawn carts as the preferred way to move fish. Fry and later fingerlings were placed in 10-gallon milk cans and were either driven directly to the water or to a trailhead, where they were taken to their final destination by foot or horseback. Most of today's 400 managed waters on the south slope of the Uinta Mountains were originally stocked by horseback.