6/18/2026 First day at Harris Park

 Today we woke up at almost the same time, we all got ready and ate breakfast and made lunches. At first we were all kind of just sitting and waiting until 8:15am, but then time rolled around and we headed out to the CTUIR Hatchery to tour with Emily Emeske and while we walked around we got to see the it wasn't to similar to other hatchery's especially because they house three employees right next to the site and they have the control panel inside their homes to keep an eye on them while they are at home relaxing. This site was recently updated and they just got done with it in 2021, they're working to restore the natural habitat for these Umatilla and Walla Walla Chinook salmon. We learned that they release about 30,000 fish into the river next to the hatchery and a good portion next to Walla Walla, they hold 50,000 fish in these runway tanks and they actually get so big compared to half of the fish I catch in the Columbia sometimes. We went to where they do the spawning and they have this shelf full of trays where they hold the eggs that they fertilize, which in one tray it holds 4,000 eggs but overall they hold about 800,000 eggs overall and place them in these trays. They also put formalin as this antifungal because if one egg gets infected they could lose the whole tray of eggs. They said that since they just added more buildings and technologies the spawning building was their very first building.

They hold 200 fish per raceway but they have 850 fish in total, some Umatilla brood and some Walla Walla brood. They said they use about 6,000 gallons of water per minute in the adult area but it gets filtered and stuff before it is released to the river so it is clean and not at all like data centers with their hot water. There were efforts to save the fish and their habitats before the hatchery was built but nothing was solid enough and people tried to move the river and how much fish were in it. We then met some of the rest of the team and talked to them about their automatic marking trailer and how much of it they have to do, Anthony Cazearek is working 12 hour days to try to get everything done before the 4th so he is diligently helping in the trailer and doing his part to make sure the control panel for the marking is getting done and isn't messing anything up. We met Sunhawk Thomas the temp and talked to him even though he was just hired the day before, and we also met Brian Startzel to talk about what it is like to work at the fisheries and everything they did before and what they hope to do as they continue. 

At almost 10am we headed out for CTUIR Tribal Native Plant Nursery, we got there and met Gail Redberg. She told us about the nursery and how that was also one building with a barn to do the nursery, she said she has been there for 11 years and didn’t originally think she would work there but here she is now. We walked the nursery and talked about all the different kinds of plants that they care for there, she said they try to help restore the natives first foods which I never thought I would want to work at a nursery but she talked about how they also help try to restore shrub steppe in the hills. We walked the different greenhouses while she told us which plants they had like chokecherries, elderberry, sagebrush, water birch trees and even a willow tree. We watched Luis pot some cottonwood trees with each step from taking the tree saplings out of the cones, filling the taller pots with soil, putting the tree into the soil very carefully, then filling it with more soil but not to much so when you water the plant the soil won’t slip down and leave it uncovered.

After a while we talked about what we would be outside doing, then we had lunch and took a bit of time before we got to work. Outside they had a huge bunch of cottonwood saplings that were trying to grow but because of the overcrowding some of the trees in the middle started to die so that’s what we were doing, cutting some of the trees and setting aside the dead ones to be observed to see why they died. So we got to work, some of us snipped trees, some of us carried the trees to be put in this metal grid to separate them so they can grow, and some of us just had to set the dead ones apart. As we progressed we did a rotation but I was doing a little bit of everything, we started setting aside the trees that could be saved but weren’t exactly healthy and we took the dead ones to this side of the area to stack them and leave them for a later time. Overall I think I did like working at the nursery, I got hot and needed a break but everything about the nursery was interesting in its own way. Today was a good day and I enjoyed meeting these people to give a different perspective on things I thought I already knew.