Almont
Leo Ferraro sleeps with the fishes.
OK, Leo is just 8, and he doesn’t exactly sleep with the fishes. He sleeps in a nice bed in a home just above the fishes. This month, there are about 225,000 rainbow trout outside the family home at the Roaring Judy fish hatchery, a Colorado Division of Wildlife fish-rearing facility alongside the East River just outside this small fishing- and hunting-cabin town north of Gunnison.
Leo’s dad, Jim Ferraro, is the assistant supervisor of the facility. He has lived with his wife, Trudy, and their children in a home at the hatchery for 12 years. Ferraro, 43, has been with the DOW since 1983 when he began as a temporary summer worker.
“I have been around fish,” he said, “most of my life.”
Roaring Judy was named after a turn-of-the-century ranch in the green valley that snakes its way toward Crested Butte. The hatchery produces more than 200,000 rainbow trout each year and releases them into lakes and rivers. But the roaring success of Roaring Judy is measured not in trout, but in salmon. And in other ways, too.
Each year, the hatchery raises millions of kokanee salmon, the landlocked version of sockeye salmon and a treasure to anglers.
The 3-inch salmon are released into the East River through a series of underground pipes. The release is done at night to give the small salmon the best chance of surviving predators. The tiny fish make the downstream 23-mile swim to Blue Mesa Reservoir in about eight hours.
Three years and 10 months later, the toughest and luckiest of them – usually between 30,000 and 50,000 salmon – gather at the mouth of the Gunnison River and begin their fall charge back to the hatchery.
At Almont, most of them hang a left into the East River, using sensitive odor-detection organs to locate the waters of their birth. In this case, it’s Roaring Judy, where Ferraro and other workers capture them in holding ponds and, for several frantic weeks, strip the eggs and sperm from the salmon and continue the cycle.
The adult salmon die shortly after. Many make it to a dinner table.
“Every Friday in October, we have a salmon giveaway,” Ferraro said. “Licensed anglers show up and are given live salmon, maybe 10 fish per person, in a sack.”
And those salmon, the ones that make the tough swim from Blue Mesa and die at their birthplace, are the lucky ones – the 1-2 percent that survived to adulthood in a reservoir filled with salmon-loving predators. The main culprit: mackinaw or lake trout.
“Other trout, big rainbows and browns, along with herons and other birds, they all take a share, too,” Ferraro said.
And along their watery highway to the reservoir, many of the tiny salmon die a more unusual death. They are sucked into the irrigation systems of farmers and ranchers and spend their final moments flopping around in fields, often surrounded by cattle.
Ferraro was born in Salida to a family with a long history of Colorado coal mining. This work, he figures, is quite a bit better.
“I don’t think we realize just what a tough life those people had,” he said.
Although last week, if you visited the Ferraro home on the hill that overlooks the hatchery, you would have been reminded by the children that life can still be cruel and harsh.
“They,” said young Leo, nodding towards his father and mother, “took away the TV. We can’t watch it. I really miss it.”
Because in a majestic valley of rivers and lakes bordered by more than 2 million acres of national forest, with endless bike trails and a series of designated fishing ponds filled with trout just down the road, the Ferraro kids – Leo; Taylor, 13; Anna, 11; and Nicholas, 2 – were not much different from other kids.
“They’d sit in front of that thing all day,” said Trudy Ferraro, who initiated the no-TV rule two months ago.
Now, the children ride their bikes more often, go fishing a lot more and head into the hills on more frequent family camping trips.
Earlier in the day, Jim Ferraro sat in a worn chair in his hatchery office and mulled the unusual life.
“You do everything you can,” he said, “to give them the best chance in life.”
He was talking about salmon.
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
