Visitors Welcome at Fish Hatchery

The Fountain Green State Fish Hatchery is open every day of the week for visitors, however, there are no self-guided or walk-in tours at this time. If you are interested in touring the hatchery, please call for an appointment the day before at (435) 445-3472. Tours are conducted from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

The hatchery is located northwest of Fountain Green at 1600 West, Fish Hatchery Road. When traveling on Highway 132 between Nephi and Fountain Green watch for the signs just north of Fountain Green.

There is a pretty good chance that anyone who plans or likes to go fishing in Utah will catch a fish that may have come from the hatchery. It all starts with thousands of eggs which hatch and become some of the thousands and thousands of fish swimming in tanks just waiting as they grow. It is truly fascinating to watch the fish in their various stages of growth.

Raising fish is a year-round project and always in demand because most reservoir fisheries are heavily used and not able to sustain themselves through natural recruitment or reproduction of the fish in the pond.

So the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources (DWR) has implemented a management program dependent on stocking hatchery-reared fish statewide. The Fountain Green facility is just one of the division’s hatcheries, but it is also the only one that is open to the public year-round.

The hatchery is a great location for the whole family to visit as it provides an opportunity to view some of Utah’s fish species close up and a sense of the work that must go into

stocking Utah’s lakes and streams.

To grow healthy fish requires clean water and one of the things Fountain Green is well known for is its clean, pure water. The water comes from an artesian spring that flows from the base of the San Pitch Mountain range known as “The Big Springs.”

This spring is the source of water for the hatchery and is channeled through multiple tanks where the fish grow and are separated by size.

The Fountain Green hatchery raises 1,000,000 fish or about 180,000 pounds of trout yearly. Species include Rainbow, Cutthroat and Tiger Trout. The fish raised here are used to stock primarily the lakes and reservoirs in the region along with other waters throughout the state.

The DWR recently collaborated with several groups and landowners to restore Colorado River cutthroat trout to part of their native home in Range Creek. An interesting video about the project can be viewed online at https://youtu.be/anZmezolJuw.

For more information, call (435) 4453472.

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