“Spring came within a month and with it lots of mosquitoes and other flying insects which kept you on your guard at all times!  But we thoroughly liked the outdoor type of activity up there and here again, one of the principle activities was not operating the salmon culture part of the station, but rather getting enough fuel laid in from one season to another to operate during the long winter seasons.  The area was heavily forested so fortunately there was no big problem of supply.  However, transportation was something else.  We had to build what we called “tram roads” into the wooded area and this wood, of course, was all cut by hand since in those days we didn’t have power saws, as they do today.  The wood was cut into 32-inch lengths, split, and then hauled by tram car to an immense woodshed which held about 200 cords of wood.  You had to cut your wood a year ahead because the drying season took so long to get the wood into usable condition.

The reason for the huge amount of wood was that the hatchery building itself was heated by a steam boiler, fired by wood.  All of the houses, (foreman’s house, superintendent’s house, the cookhouse, commissary, two bunkhouses, two carpenters’ shops and fish culturist’s house)--nine or ten buildings in all--were heated with wood.  While the winters were not severe--the coldest reading that I recall was zero Fahrenheit--we did get a lot of snow, sometimes as much as two to three feet at one time and the cold weather was the norm from the first of October to the first of May.  So, it turned out to be a long season for firing the old stoves.

“Fishing was wonderful!  Man oh man, if the people down here could have seen the kind of trout fishing that we had--both lake trout and Dolly Varden trout, cutthroat trout and steelhead, not counting the salmon and bottom fishing that we had, they would have all moved to Alaska!  It was no trouble at all to go out and in ten or fifteen minutes to almost wear yourself out hauling in Dolly Varden and lake trout which were coming up the river to spawn.  You could see them, literally by the thousands, as they jumped over our weir in their upstream migration.

“Steelhead fishing was marvelous.  Cal Ryan, who was then foreman at the Yes Bay hatchery, landed a 27-pound steelhead one evening, fishing in the river just above the station buildings.