Bonneville Fish Hatchery — Local services in Washougal

The Bonneville Fish Hatchery is a great place to visit!! We were visiting sites in the Columbia River Valley and planned to check out the Bonneville Dam. As we were heading to the dam, we noticed a sign for the hatchery and decided to check it out. We wound up really enjoying the place. The hatchery is down a driveway on the left just a bit before you get to the security gate for the dam, and it is definitely worth the trip. There is no admission cost.

The hatchery has a lot of hatching pools with small fish. There are some ponds with larger sturgeon and other fish. You can buy fish food for a quarter and feed the fish. The hatchery is beautifully landscaped and of course you have views of the trees and rocky outcroppings from the valley. There is a giant old sturgeon named Herman who is featured in a pond with an underwater viewing building. Park benches and even a few picnic tables can be found scattered around the hatchery. There is plenty of parking available and a very nice gift shop with a cart outside selling grilled hot dogs. In the back of the gift shop you can buy custom blended Italian sodas or other drinks and snacks. We enjoyed the hatchery so much that we actually came here a second time when we had a few extra hours before flying home. If I lived in this area, I would come here often. It's a relaxing place to spend a couple hours, and the dam is only about 5 minutes away so you could spend some time...

I totally found this place by accident. I set out to do something totally different but missed my turn. I got off the highway to navigate and just happened to see the entrance so wandered in.

Full disclosure, I love fish. I have multiple aquariums and find them fascinating.

Anyway, it started snowing because of course it did. But I was still able to see tons of beautiful fish in the big concrete tank ponds. They could hear my footsteps and giant schools of them would rush over thinking I was going to feed them.

The best part was the sturgeon pond. It has an above-ground viewing area as well as a below-geound area where you can watch them from a window. They're beautiful and will swim right up to the glass and pass you and you get an idea of how absolutely giant these animals really are.

It was winter and all of the buildings were closed. There wasn't much to do in the snow besides walk around and look but I ended up staying for an hour watching the sturgeon.

It was free to park and walk around. I did see some fish-feed dispensers but because it was winter (I'm assuming) they were empty. There were plenty of parking spots but...

A truly disappointing experience. The hatchery itself was great but the gift shop not so much. We went in with our toddler to get a t shirt and some coffee. We realized that there was a lot of things he could get into so one of his stood with him the entire time we were there. For whatever reason the person working thought they needed to hover over us and watch us like a hawk. They also kept looking at us while we were ordering our coffee with our son standing next to us. Not even 10ft away from us the entire time. Our son then was crouched down looking at a big gnome statue. He got close to it so I knelt down and told him that he needed to be careful and not touch it. They decided that they needed to tell me condescendingly that it was pretty expensive and we needed to be careful. I was literally right there making sure he didn’t touch it. Needless to say we ended up not buying anything after being...