THE OUTDOORS : Trout Paradise Lost : Fishermen of the Black Canyon Area of Colorado River Should Have Been There in the 1970s

Huge trout no longer have a huge following here, unless you count the people who gaze at the thousands of pictures on the walls of the Willow Beach Marina.

It’s impossible not to notice the five-pounders, the 10-pounders, or even the 21.3-pound rainbow trout mounted in a glass case on the wall behind the bar.

“Were all these fish caught here?” a first-time visitor, seemingly amazed at the display of photographed trout, asks a sales clerk.

She nods, smiling to others who know as she does that this weekend fisherman is building his hopes on history.

The fish that made the stretch of Colorado River immediately below Hoover Dam one of the country’s best rainbow trout fisheries have long since disappeared. The 3,000 or so pictures on the Willow Beach “Wall of Fame” are mostly of fish caught before 1980, and scientists to this day can only theorize about what caused the decline.

For the first time this decade, however, bigger trout are showing more frequently, perhaps indicating that all hope is not lost for the embattled fishery.

“Upriver, this year is the best it’s been since the flood went over,” says Bill Tennis, 75, a regular here for the last 40 years. He is referring to the high-water conditions in 1983, when Lake Mead flowed over the Hoover Dam spillway, sending a 450-foot-wide waterfall cascading down the dam’s 726-foot concrete walls. “The moss is growing back and they’re bringing in some pretty nice fish.”

Tom Ard, 39, a Glendora resident who has come here almost every year since he was 7 years old, agrees, saying: “I’ve seen more four-, five- and six-pounders than there were a couple of years ago.”

A 10-pound rainbow was caught in December of 1987 to back their claims of the fishery’s possible rejuvenation.

Still, these fishermen are admittedly over-optimistic if they think that the trophy-sized rainbows that made this stretch of river famous will thrive again as they once did in the confines of Black Canyon, where jagged lava peaks and walls 1,000-feet high rise like moonscape from the water’s edge.

There have simply been too many changes in the river.

Duke Crowe, 72, arrived here just after World War II. He witnessed the taming of the mighty Colorado by a series of dams built to meet the needs of Los Angeles. “It was isolated back then, wonderful,” Crowe recalls. “In those days, if you saw three boats in the area, it was a big deal. You’d go over and shake their hands and ask where they’re from.”

The late Cliff Barnson, called by locals the greatest trout fisherman ever, was here before the completion of Hoover Dam in 1936, when, as Tennis puts it, “the river was a river.” Barnson died in his sleep of heart failure two months ago.

In the 1930s, navigation by boat was hazardous and access by land was limited at best, according to Crowe.

What trout there were--Nevada fisheries personnel say there were none until they began stocking just before 1960 but Barnson, Tennis and Crowe, revealing wallet-sized photos of trout they caught in the late 1950s, say otherwise--were mostly sub-three-pounders.

“They were not the real big ones . . . no trophies, just native fish that were in the river,” Tennis says.

Labor demands grew, though, and towns such as Boulder City, Nev., Bullhead City, Ariz., and Parker, Ariz. sprang up to house the builders of dams and their families.

Davis Dam was erected in the late 1940s and Lake Mohave was created; the river above it backed up and access was improved. The rapids Crowe spoke of disappeared, giving way to deep channels and swelled shores. Ringbolt Rapid, an insignificant ripple between Willow Beach Resort and Hoover Dam, is now recognized as the southernmost rapid on the Colorado River.

“It’s roaring in September,” jokes owner Ron Opfer of the Willow Beach Resort. “On a scale of one to 10, it’s a .0025.”

Farther downriver, Parker Dam was built and Lake Havasu was born. Recreational opportunities grew in the area and the crowds flocked to these reservoirs on the river.

The numbers of fishermen increased rapidly in the late 1960s as word spread of a tremendous rainbow trout fishery at 600 feet above sea level in the middle of a desert, where temperatures have reached 127 degrees.

No snow. Not even the scent of pine. Just plenty of rainbow trout, which grew abnormally fast in the nutrient-rich water that flowed out of Lake Mead at a cool and comfortable 52 degrees.

“They would make you lift anchor and give chase,” Crowe says of the spirited fish.

Joe Janisch, Arizona fisheries chief, agrees. “We’re talking monster trout,” he says.

Trout proliferation began in earnest when Arizona and Nevada began stocking programs, dumping fingerlings immediately below the dam. The fishery improved even faster after 1962, when the Willow Beach National Fish Hatchery, located a short distance upriver from the marina, took over that task.

George Engelage of Whittier says that, during a four-month period in 1972, he caught 10 trout weighing 6 1/2 to 16 3/4 pounds. In 1974, the 11-mile stretch between Hoover Dam and Willow Beach yielded 286 rainbows from five to 15 3/4 pounds each.

The fabled Barnson used a homemade lure he called the Big T to reportedly catch more than 1,000 rainbows of more than five pounds apiece.

Bill Richardson, former California inland fisheries chief, describes the stretch of river in 1974: “I don’t know of a place on the continent that compares to it. Lakes and streams on the High Sierra, Alaska, Canada, Montana, Wyoming and Idaho produce giant rainbows, but not in this quantity.”

The fishery peaked in 1976, when 476 rainbows of at least five pounds were caught. Only 244 were caught in 1977; 225 in ‘78; 186 in ’79 and 92 in 1980.

Fishermen became concerned as the fish became increasingly scarce. Biologists set forth to determine what was transforming a superb fishery into one of the “put-and-take” variety, as Janisch calls it today.

The hatchery stocks the river below the dam each year with 1,700,000 fish.

Fishermen blame the decline on the overflow of the dam in 1983, which introduced striped bass into the system. Biologists discount that theory, however, saying that striper predation in the river is minimal, adding that the water that flows into the river from Lake Mead is too cold for striped bass, most of which moved downriver to warmer water.

Nevertheless, the stripers have established a population and many of today’s striper fishermen are former trout fishermen. Tennis, himself, boasts of having caught a 29 1/2-pound striper. His wife, Kay, caught one weighing 22 pounds.

But whereas fishermen have their theories on the demise of “trout heaven,” all biologists have to go on is speculation here and an educated guess there.

“Nobody has a lick of data on this,” says Larry Paulson, director of Lake Mead research at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. “Everybody’s speculating. But I’ve said all along that the reason they lost the trout fishery down below Willow Beach and into Lake Mohave was the cutback of phosphorous loading from Las Vegas Wash.”

Phosphorous produces the algae that feeds plankton, which in turn feeds shad--introduced into the Colorado from Tennessee in 1955--which makes for a healthy trout fishery, according to Paulson.

“Back in the mid- to late 1970s, phosphorous flowed unimpeded into the lower end of Lake Mead and consequentially throughout the system (below it). Then in 1981, the Advance Wastewater (tertiary) Treatment Plant began to take the phosphorous out.”

Because the flow rate has increased considerably since 1981, the amount of phosphates entering Lake Mead has also increased, suggesting a possible reason for the increased moss growth below the dam and a somewhat improved fishery.

Janisch, meanwhile, claims that the building of dams and reservoirs upstream from Lake Mead serve as “nutrient traps” and that unless his department is able to supplement nitrates and phosphates, which he says are necessary to produce the aquatic insects needed by trout to survive, the fishery will never improve.

But as part of the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, the Willow Beach area falls under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Park Service, which Janisch says won’t allow such a program because of “concerns about altering the environment for downstream users.

“When Lake Mead was built in the 1930s, the system above it was wide open and every time you’d get spring rains and floods you would have large volumes of nutrients coming out of Lake Mead, which would rejuvenate the fishery, provide all the phosphates and nitrates, and the same would be true at Willow Beach,” he says. “Water would pass on through the dam and you would have a relatively productive system.”

The Glen Canyon Dam (built 286 miles above Lake Mead in 1966), is the primary culprit, he says.

Whatever the case, people such as Ard will still come here to fish the crystal waters, to tour beautiful Black Canyon and gaze at the desert bighorn sheep and coyotes on the hillsides, and to hope for the best.

“Trout fishing is most relaxing, and when I come here I just want to relax,” he says. “It’s still good fishing. The size is just not there.”

Not yet, anyway.