After the Spill : State Officials Want to Let Nature Take Course on Upper Sacramento River, but Dunsmuir’s Economy Can’t Stand to Wait

Christmas is a little colder this year. Fishing season on 45 miles of the Upper Sacramento River ended four months early last July 14 when a Southern Pacific tank car derailed at the Cantara Loop bridge, ruptured and spilled 19,000 gallons of herbicide into the stream.

“I’ll never forget that smell--like rotten eggs and sulfur,” says Larry Green, an outdoor writer who lives upstream.

Mike Rode, a fishery biologist for the California Department of Fish and Game, recalls the “milky, light-greenish” color of the water.

Green saw trout thrashing and gasping on the banks, some eight feet from the water’s edge. But most of all he remembers “the deathly silence.”

“No birds singing along the river. Nothing,” he said. “You just had a sense of death. It was all gone in a flash.”

More than 100,000 fish were dead, along with the insects they lived on. Wildlife was hit hard. Riparian plant life was killed--that’s what metam sodium is supposed to do.

Worse, Ron McCloud’s cash register went dead. Business went belly up at Shasta Lake far downstream, although the lake was barely touched by the spill. The outside world’s perception compounded the catastrophe.

Dave Schwabel, who guides for salmon fishing 75 miles away on the river below Shasta Lake, said the fishing was great all season, but the people stopped coming.

“I was taking five calls a night, booking trips,” Schwabel said. “After the spill, I didn’t get any.”

In Dunsmuir, though, the destruction was real.

“It was like someone flipped a switch,” said McCloud, who runs a hardware store. “I haven’t sold a fishing rod (since).”

And he isn’t likely to until the river comes back to life. That’s at the heart of a disagreement about how to restore the Upper Sacramento to its status as listed in the book describing about a dozen of “California’s Blue Ribbon Trout Streams,” published only weeks before the accident.

CalTrout, the private conservation organization, sees this as a “golden opportunity” to recreate the perfect fishery, starting from scratch.

The DFG is cautious. Dave Hoopaugh, who has headed the aquatic investigation on damage and recovery, said: “Every time we think we know how to play God, we find out we don’t.”

The department’s idea, after some early waffling, is to leave it alone, let nature takes its course and study it for a couple of years--with Southern Pacific paying $10 million for the study.

Local merchants are impatient. They want fish planted in a limited section by spring, when the next season opens and the anglers start rolling in. If they do.

“They’re going to study the thing to death,” McCloud said. “This is the biggest bureaucratic boondoggle I’ve ever seen.”

The Upper Sacramento River and the Southern Pacific Railroad are as intertwined as worms in a bait box as they wind through the canyons of the Cascade Range in northern California. A fishing map even notes: “Hiking along the RR tracks is required to fish the area between Prospect St. and Cantara Rd.”

The river and the tracks literally divide this community of 2,300--a fading community, it seems, since logging vanished and the railroad cut back its local operations, leaving Dunsmuir no longer a major switching point but simply a place the trains pass through.

But it’s not a divided town, McCloud says. It’s more like a town wrestling with a problem while outside interests are telling it how to run its river. CalTrout, in its own report, even told Southern Pacific how to run its railroad.

The railroad--not fishing--built the town. “California’s Historic Railroad Town,” the brochures declare with pride. They celebrated “Railroad Days” every year. Then, with cruel irony, the railroad did the town in.

But try to find anybody in Dunsmuir to knock the railroad. For most of this century it put food on their tables and sent their kids to college. Outsiders are the enemy.

“Fish and Game has said this river belongs to the people of the state of California,” McCloud said. “But, by God, it’s in my back yard. We live with it.”

McCloud said he has collected more than 600 signatures on a petition to restock the river immediately with hatchery fish--the anathema of serious anglers, the fly-fishermen.

Louie Dewey, who runs the Cave Springs Motel at the north end of town, is among the minority who think the merchants are “shortsighted.” He caters to fly-fishermen, an issue that raises the hackles of those who feel CalTrout is pushing the DFG to create an elitist fishery.

“I’m a fly-fisherman,” McCloud said. “But the fly-fishermen who come into my store buy $5 worth of flies. The families and the grandkids who fish with bait have walked out with $100 or $200 worth of gear.”

Others wonder why there is concern, considering that Southern Pacific has paid settlements based on the projected income of the next four years to almost anybody--including McCloud--who could produce reasonable records of previous receipts.

Dewey said: “Ron McCloud took his share, and now he’s worried about his business in Dunsmuir. Well, he’s already been paid.”

Joe Kimsey at the Ted Fay Fly Shop said, “We got a very just settlement for four years--no problem. The claims agent was a fly-fisherman, so he knew what we were talking about.

“Your local merchants--and I don’t really blame them--they want to get a quick fix. You can’t do it--no way in hell. They can’t understand why you have to establish a native fishery first.”

Serious anglers prefer wild trout over hatchery fish because, they say, the wild strains grow larger, are harder to catch, fight better, look better and taste better--when they decide to keep them and eat them.

Biologists, including Rode, believe the wild trout that made the Upper Sacramento a trophy fishery must have a chance to come back before hatchery fish can be planted--while conceding that fewer than 4% of hatchery fish survive over the winter.

“We don’t want to take a chance of putting the hatchery fish in and having them feed on these recovering micro-organisms,” Rode said. “We don’t want them competing with what few wild trout are out there now, and as the wild trout are coming back inter-breed with them, (although) they don’t contribute much to the genetics.”

Green was paid four years’ projected rent for a cabin he rents on the river. He’s willing to wait. Green said hatchery fish would devour wild fry.

Biological baloney, says Roy Haile, a retired Sacramento lobbyist who once founded a local Federation of Fly Fishers chapter. Now he has gone over to the pro-planting side.

“Putting hatchery fish in this river is not going to create a disruption in the food chain,” Haile said. “And if a few of them survive, has anything happened that hasn’t happened over the last 50 years?”

Haile says that although there were wild trout in the river, there hadn’t been any native trout for years--wild trout being defined as those that may evolve from hatcheries to spawn in the wild, while natives have pure genetic strains uncontaminated by hatchery fish.

“That pure strain of (native) trout doesn’t exist anymore,” Haile said. “It’s cross-bred (with hatchery fish).

“So what’s the problem with putting some good-quality hatchery fish back in the river and getting the economy of Dunsmuir back on track here? When we lost the fishermen we lost 30% of the tourist trade.”

Kimsey has an old newspaper photo of the Yankees on his wall, showing Frank Crosetti with Ruth, Gehrig and other immortals.

“He’s usually up here all summer fishing,” Haile said of Crosetti. “But he’s turned off now.”

It’s doubtful that Crosetti would come back to fish for hatchery fish.

“The majority of your business people downtown don’t even (fish),” Kimsey said. “They think that throwing a bunch of fish into the river is going to bring the fishermen back.

“There’s no (natural) food in the damn river, anyway. Even a dumb hatchery fish has to eat.”

But there are signs that the food chain is recovering. The spill occurred at the Cantara Loop, where a railroad bridge crosses the river to make a 180-degree, switchback turn about six miles upstream from Dunsmuir, near an apple orchard.

The apples look OK. Moss and algae are growing in the riverbed again. Tom Hesseldenz, CalTrout’s “streamkeeper,” or watchdog, for the Upper Sacramento, picked up a rock and turned it over, revealing stonefly nymphs. Mayflies and caddis flies were flitting about.

“Earlier, there were a lot of juvenile trout in the shallows,” Hesseldenz said.

They were believed to have moved in from tributaries or the unaffected two miles of river upstream between Cantara and the Box Canyon Dam that created Lake Siskiyou. McCloud said he has seen fish feeding on the surface.

“The river will entirely heal itself on its own, without any intervention,” Hesseldenz said.

Most people agree that it will, in time. But nobody knows. Biologists can find no precedents. Some anadromous fisheries have suffered from toxic spills when most of their populations were out to sea, but no large, resident fishery has been hit as hard as the Upper Sacramento.

“That’s what’s scary about it,” Rode said.

But the sterility also offers the opportunity of an outdoor laboratory. Flows and water temperature can be controlled through the dam. They can do almost anything they want to do.

Upon recovery, Dewey--and CalTrout--would like to see the stretch from the north end of town to the dam designated a wild-trout fishery, with artificial, barbless lures only and a limit of no more than two fish a day.

“Of course,” Haile said. “That’s where his motel is at.”

But Dewey and CalTrout also propose a large, flat, easily accessible area in town that once was a switching yard be developed into a “fishing park,” with hatchery fish and bait allowed. The merchants and the DFG seem to like the idea.

Haile was having breakfast with a reporter at the Hitching Post Restaurant when Kimsey and Dewey stopped at the booth.

Kimsey said: “Make (Haile) pay the bill. He’s got all the money in town.”

Haile retorted: “You’ve got all of it now. You’re the one that got the money (from Southern Pacific).”

They all laughed. There may be a bridge over these troubled waters.

Later, McCloud said: “The media has made a big splash about ‘Dunsmuir, the town divided . . . neighbor against neighbor.’ We’re really not. We’re just grappling with a problem. It doesn’t mean we’re at each other’s throats.

“It’s an emotional thing . . . economic survival on one hand, (and) destruction of a natural resource that hurts us all.

“The river will come back, but in the meantime, a lot of businesses could go under. Most people simply want the river put back the way it was.”