THE OUTDOORS : NEVER SAY DIE : High School Students in Petaluma Fight Against All Odds to Keep Their Creek Alive for Fish

It was a blow to the students at Casa Grande High School last year when the administration announced that the small building adjacent to the playing field did not meet earthquake codes and therefore was off limits.

The long-since abandoned greenhouse had been the lifeblood of the United Anglers of Casa Grande, a group of 34 students who, after raising $7,000, had converted the dilapidated building into a fish hatchery.

With it, they all thought, they could make a world of change in this fast-growing community of about 40,000. Its closing, they say, represented a formidable setback to their efforts at restoring life to nearby Adobe Creek, and to the preservation of a nearly extinct strain of steelhead trout that still uses the waterway.

“There is no life in some of these creeks, and this community even declared this one dead,” said Tom Furrer, a wildlife and forestry specialist at the school. “But (Adobe Creek) is the last one with even a whisper . . . and we want to protect that (particular) gene pool.”

According to Forrest Reynolds of the Department of Fish and Game, which has offered the students some support, every creek has its own genetic strain of fish.

“All the (San Francisco Bay-Sacramento River Delta) tributaries had some steelhead population historically,” he added.

But years ago, when Petaluma began diverting water that would normally have run into Adobe and neighboring creeks from six natural springs in the Sonoma Mountains, the steelhead and salmon populations dwindled and became extinct, or in the case of Adobe Creek, nearly extinct.

Adobe Creek, like the other tributaries of the Petaluma River, is almost completely dry during the summer, with a few fish managing to hold over in isolated pools until the winter rains come. Steelhead, like salmon, are anadromous, spending their adult years in the ocean before returning to their native creeks to spawn.

And since the chances of getting the city to allow enough water into the creek to maintain a year-round flow is very unlikely, the hatchery would have served as the creek’s replacement.

“Our way of looking at it in that creek--of course it would be best to have water year-round--is that if we’re able to put fish in during a high, outgoing tide . . . they’ll go right out of the river in two days,” Furrer, a former state park ranger who also has worked with the Alaska Department of Wildlife, said. “They’ll be imprinted on the water so they’ll return, and as soon as they do, the kids will then take the eggs and (raise the fish), so the hatchery in this case is taking the place of an all-year stream.”

As part of a pilot program, the tanks and raceways in the makeshift hatchery were full of the 2,000 juvenile rainbow trout--which under the right conditions grow into steelhead--and 500 catfish, purchased from a hatchery in Ft. Bragg, Tex., when the closing was announced.

“One minute we were feeding the fish, and then Mr. Furrer came in and told us,” said United Anglers President Julie Lambert. “It was really disheartening to us and the community. It was not just in the campus papers, but all the local papers. The public got really upset.”

The catfish were dumped into nearby Lucchesi Pond. The rainbows--except for a handful earmarked for Adobe Creek, where it was hoped they would return as spawning steelhead--were put into a dairy farmer’s private reservoir. The kids would have to start practically from scratch.

“When they closed everything down, we knew we had to start a new hatchery,” John Conley, a United Anglers member said. “We made the plans (for the new hatchery) ourselves.”

Despite an estimated cost of $240,000, an astronomical sum for students used to earning minimum wage in their jobs after school, Furrer said that the United Anglers are well on their way.

“The kids have already raised $130,000,” he said, adding that his students have applied for 65 corporate grants and have several pending. “We’re over halfway there.”

The students hope to break ground on the new hatchery at the start of the next school year.

The United Anglers of Casa Grande High, a school with an enrollment of slightly more than 1,300, was formed as a club about five years ago.

The creekbed that Furrer claims has been “raped of its riparian habitat” has been trashed by the inconsiderate and trampled by the playful youth of the community. Destruction by motorcyclists is still evident in the form of tire tracks and uprooted vegetation.

But the efforts of the United Anglers, in the eyes of many, have been enough to warrant the youngsters’ acceptance in the community, not as children but as people working to positively affect the environment. Charley Malnati, 68, who has lived alongside the creek for 35 years, gives the United Anglers access and acts as a watchdog, should poachers try to interfere with the return of the steelhead.

“I really admire what they’re doing,” he said. “They’re really into it. . . . I see at least one or two down there every day.”

Chevron chose the United Anglers over hundreds of other entries for one of its conservation awards, which Lambert and Darcy Hamlow accepted earlier this year at a reception in Washington.

“Just seeing all those adults believing in us . . . they were all saying, ‘Let us shake your hands,’ ” said Lambert, 17.

The $1,000 check that came with the award will go toward building the new hatchery.

The United Anglers’ restoration efforts began with a massive cleanup that lasted two years. There was the painstaking removal of broken glass from gravel beds used by steelhead to lay eggs and the gathering of bottles and cans.

“There were sofas, love seats and even a half a car,” one of the students said.

Then came the reforestation of the barren banks surrounding the primary spawning area, about a mile up from the Petaluma River, behind Malnati’s house. Hundreds of small redwoods, willows and fir trees now line the section of stream, providing cover and habitat for the spawning fish.

Last March, according to Furrer, the young conservationists saw the first fruit of their labors when a fin-clipped steelhead showed in the newly wooded area and began to spawn.

“The first one was found under a bridge by three students on a Sunday,” Furrer said. “There were three little voices on the phone telling me that they had found a fish and thought it was one of ours. . . . When I came down and found it was a fin-clip, all three of them broke into tears. . . . It was five years’ worth of work right there.”

One of the students said: “We sat and watched from the grass. You could see the red (eggs) all through the gravel.”

Previously, four king salmon had been seen making their way up the creek to spawn, the first salmon officially recorded in the creek this century.

But although the DFG supports Furrer and the United Anglers, giving them permission to work in the Petaluma River system, it is somewhat skeptical as to whether the United Anglers will be successful in keeping the creek alive.

Regardless, DFR officials have nothing but praise for the United Anglers, mostly because of the educational value of their program, which is the primary goal of the students anyway.

“The big thing they will have accomplished is in bringing to the community a public awareness regarding the value of the streams and to protect what can be easily lost,” said Bill Cox, a Sonoma County biologist for the department. “I only wish they had a creek behind their school with a much higher potential for success. Adobe Creek is very limited.”

Cox said that although Adobe Creek probably ran year-round before the diversion into a reservoir began about 80 years ago, it was probably never adequate for healthy steelhead reproduction because “the amount of water that flows into the diversion in the summer is very low.”

Initial goals for the new hatchery, according to Furrer, are to raise 10,000 striped bass and 10,000 steelhead for eventual release into the system. Furrer’s long-term goal is to run a pipe from the creek to the hatchery--about half a mile--and “have the fish come right back into the classroom.”

But with only seven underclass students returning next year, Furrer and the United Anglers face additional challenges.

A championship golf course under construction will be bisected by Adobe Creek. One benefit could be running water, as proposed in the design of the golf course. Yet the flow could be too strong and the water too rich in nitrates to support the returning steelhead.

Meanwhile, motorcycles, trucks and ATVs are still tearing across the dry streambed; the beer cans and broken bottles seem never ending. Finances are sure to be a problem, and housing developments are on the rise.

“We’re up against a lot of odds,” said Lambert, who will graduate this month. “But nothing will stop us.”

Said United Angler Sandra Von Arb: “We’re not going to let the creek die. No way!”