NORTH POWDER — An icy wind moans through the sagebrush and dimples the water with whitecaps, but the newest residents of Thief Valley Reservoir are sheltered from the chilly gusts.

All 43,000 of them.

Two trucks loaded with rainbow trout backed down the boat ramp at the reservoir near North Powder on Thursday afternoon, Nov. 21.

The trucks, which took on their slippery, scaly cargo that morning at Oak Springs Hatchery at Maupin, south of The Dalles, disgorged the trout in less than 30 minutes.

The operation both replenished the fish population before the reservoir freezes and started an experiment that Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife biologists hope will give anglers at the popular fishing site a more exciting 2025 season.

Typically ODFW has stocked rainbow trout in Thief Valley only during the spring.

In April 2024 the agency released 10,500 trout in the reservoir along the Powder River in Union County about 10 miles east of North Powder.

But the reservoir, which was created in the 1930s to provide irrigation water to the Keating Valley, went dry this summer as it has in several years over the past two decades.

In the past, ODFW waited until the following spring to restock the reservoir with trout.

But this year Ethan Brandt, fish biologist at the agency’s La Grande office, decided to start restoring the fish population as soon as the reservoir started rising.

With the irrigation season long since finished, and autumn storms putting more water into the Powder, Thief Valley is refilling. On Thursday the reservoir was holding about 2,200 acre-feet of water, about 16% of its capacity.

That’s plenty of water to take on trout.

But not enough to make the restocking a simple procedure.

On Thursday afternoon an expanse of muddy ground a couple hundred feet long extended from the boat ramp to the water’s edge.

Which is why Mike Lance hauled a trailer holding several pieces of flexible pipe.

Lance is the assistant district fish biologist for ODFW’s La Grande and Enterprise offices.

After fellow ODFW employees Mike Bennett and Owen Davis arrived, each driving a truck topped with a metal tank containing thousands of trout, the trio set to the task.

They wrangled the heavy, awkward sections of pipe, assembling a pipeline stretching from water to the bottom of the boat ramp.

When the pipes were connected with metal clamps, Davis maneuvered one truck down the ramp, connected one end to the tank and turned on a pump.

A few seconds later, a torrent of trout belched from the other end of the pipeline.

The water nearby roiled like the surface of a hatchery pond where someone has just tossed a handful of food.

Lance splashed into the water with a 5-gallon plastic bucket to collect a couple dozen trout to be measured.

Most of the fish were between 5 and 8 inches long.

Anglers can keep fish 8 inches or longer, so it’s possible there will be some ice-fishing opportunity this winter.

The real purpose of this stocking, though, is to make for better trout fishing in 2025.

Although fish don’t grow as quickly in the frigid water of winter, Brandt said most of the trout released on Nov. 21 should be of legal size by this spring.

Lance said Thief Valley is renowned for its rapid growth of trout, and by the summer there should be some hefty rainbows in the reservoir.

Brandt said ODFW will stock trout again in the spring as usual, probably about 10,000 fish 8 inches or longer.

With more than 50,000 rainbow stocked, Thief Valley in 2025 should be a fine place to fish.

Brandt hopes the trout will have more than a year to grow.

If the reservoir doesn’t go dry again in 2025, some of the trout released this fall and next spring should survive into 2026, and by then some of the fish could be true trophies.

Hank Rodman, a longtime Union resident who has been fishing Thief Valley for more than half a century, said earlier this year that during the spring of 2024, anglers were catching rainbow around 20 inches long. Those fish were stocked in 2023 and survived over the winter because Thief Valley, thanks to record-setting rain in August of that year, didn’t go dry.