How Now, DWP? : Cattle Grazing Along Owens River and Its Tributaries Is Said to Be Hurting the Water, but Ranchers, Tired of Being Cast as Environmental Villains, Say They Aren’t the Problem

Acting on a tip from a Los Angeles Department of Water and Power employee, Jim Edmondson of CalTrout visited the Eastern Sierra last summer to inspect a stretch of the Owens River a few miles north of Crowley Lake.

Edmondson, a regional manager for the fishermen’s activist group, said that, although he had been told that cattle-grazing practices on DWP land in the area were harming the river’s trout fishery, he wasn’t ready for what he found there.

“I was shocked and outraged by what I saw,” Edmondson said. “So much water had been diverted for flood irrigation for livestock-grazing practices that the result was an Owens River I could long-jump across. The river was choked by emerging aquatic vegetation, which is an indication of nutrient loading from cow manure. There were cutoff meanders that were killing thousands of fingerling trout.”

The visit prompted Edmondson to complain to the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board, the state agency with the responsibility for protecting water resources in the Eastern Sierra.

Meanwhile, another fishermen’s group, the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, wrote to the State Water Resources Control Board, complaining about damage to the wild trout fishery in Hot Creek a few miles away. They said that cattle-ranching abuses on the Chance Ranch, a property upstream from Hot Creek also owned by the DWP, along with upstream diversions by the city of Mammoth Lakes, were ruining the fishery on a section of the stream.

Because of the complaints, the Lahontan agency launched an investigation to find out whether cattle grazing or any other uses of the Owens River watershed in Inyo and Mono counties was harming some of the state’s best trout fisheries.

Fred Blatt, an environmental specialist for the Lahontan agency who is leading its assessment of the Owens River watershed, said his staff has already done on-site inspections of the area, and that he has requested information from the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the DWP and others who either own or use land along the Owens River and its tributaries.

“We’ve asked for water quality data, locations of stream diversions, irrigation return flows, volumes, locations of grazing allotments or activities adjacent to streams, the months of the year cattle are used on those allotments, the number of animals and so on.

“We haven’t come to any conclusions as yet, but at some point in the future we’re going to assess whether there are any problems along the Owens River watershed with water quality or degradation of beneficial uses.”

Blatt explained that the state agency has looked at all of the waterways in their region, which extends from the Oregon border into Southern California, and designated what they call “beneficial uses” for each one. Those might include such diverse uses as cold- or warm-water fishing, agriculture, drinking water or a variety of others. Once they designate a waterway as a trout fishery, as they have for the Owens River and many Eastern Sierra streams, they are responsible for protecting that use.

“Say we find a stretch of a cold-water fishing stream where all of the trout are gone, and there’s nothing left but suckers and tui chubs,” Blatt added. “Then that ‘beneficial use’ has been degraded. We would be concerned about that, and we would want to know what is going on down there that causes this public use to be lost.”

According to Darrell Wong, an associate fishery biologist for the state Department of Fish and Game, cattle-grazing practices are causing serious and widespread harm to fisheries here.

“If you take water out of a creek and spread it out over a pasture to grow forage, it’s going through cow flops so it’s turning brown and also warming up tremendously in the process,” Wong said. “Then it drips back into a river or stream and brings in the warmer water and high bacterial counts. For trout, the water quality there has been reduced considerably.”

Wong added that fisheries here are being hurt even more by the erosion of river and stream banks in the watershed.

“Cows tend to move toward the riparian areas along the banks, and to graze on that vegetation,” he said. “When the vegetation is gone, the root systems that normally hold the bank together and slow down the water flow are also gone. Then the flows that should be building stream out and make the water shallower and create vertical cut banks, with more dirt always flopping in the creek. The silt covers rocks on the river or stream bed that are fish-spawning habitat and also habitat for aquatic insects, a food source for trout. So what you get is a whole multitude of things that are bad for aquatic systems.”

Wong and Edmondson say that the most serious abuses from cattle grazing here tend to occur on land owned by the DWP. The agency owns almost all of the land along the Owens River in Inyo and Mono counties, and the majority of those lands are leased out to cattle ranchers.

According to Wong, the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which also lease out hundreds of thousands of acres of their Eastern Sierra lands for cattle grazing, have formed management plans that embrace the “multiple use” concept.

“Those agencies have constraints on grazing for the protection of other uses,” Wong said. “On the DWP lands, up until now, there really has been no such ‘multiple use’ concept. The livestock operators have been the primary use, basically. That’s a problem for aquatic systems.”

The fishermen’s complaints and the position taken by the DFG has touched off a verbal brawl with the area’s ranchers. Accustomed to their historic roles as pillars of Eastern Sierra communities, the cattlemen are angry at being recast as environmental villains, and they are firing back.

Some ranchers said that the DFG is trying to use cattle ranchers as a scapegoat for its own mismanagement of the area’s fisheries.

Gary Giacomini, the president of the Inyo County Cattlemen’s Assn., called the DFG an “out-of-control train,” and disputed practically all of Wong’s and Edmondson’s charges.

“Their stuff about water quality is way off base,” Giacomini said, “and parts of CalTrout’s complaint to the Lahontan Board are ludicrous, because we’ve been having such a drought the last few years that there isn’t enough water in the pastures to ever allow it to run back into a river or creek to put pollutants into it.”

And although Giacomini conceded that there were problems with river and stream-bank destabilization, he contended that it was caused almost entirely by the irregular flows of the DWP’s water transport system.

Brian Tillemans, a range and wildlife specialist for the DWP, defended the ranchers and his own agency’s policies. “I think there’s been a disproportionate blame put on the cattle industry rather than looking at the whole picture,” he said. “The people at CalTrout and the DFG are fishery biologists, but when it comes to cattle grazing and range practices, they have little basic training. I think people get in trouble when they extend their expertise into areas they are not familiar with.”

Giacomini said some of the solutions proposed by Edmondson, such as resting an area of the watershed from grazing for three to five years at a time, would put cattlemen out of business. “I think the first thing CalTrout and the Department of Fish and Game need to do is a little bit of study in private economics before they come up with some of these blanket solution ideas,” Giacomini said. “If they’re talking about resting an area for three to five years, what they’re really talking about is the cessation of grazing. You don’t just quit making Ford cars, and then tell your employees three years later, ‘Come back, we’re firing up the factory again.’ ”

But the CalTrout regional manager insists there is no reason that cattle ranching can’t be practiced in a way that is compatible with maintaining healthy fisheries in the area.

“I was approached at a public meeting by one of the ranchers, and he was very hostile and upset and made some ‘in-your-face’ type comments, “ Edmondson said. “One thing I want to get across is that CalTrout is not interested in harpooning the livestock industry. What we are interested in is preserving that industry in harmony with the other user groups. That’s what we’re after--a balance.”

Wong agreed, adding: “Grazing and healthy aquatic systems can be compatible, but you’ve got to manage the grazing. Until now, the management has not been sufficient, especially along the Owens River and its tributaries.”

The Lahontan agency is aware of the contentiousness of the Eastern Sierra’s expanding “grazing versus fisheries” debate. Blatt emphasized that his agency has not gone into their assessment of the Owens River watershed with any preconceived ideas.

“We didn’t necessarily want to jump to the conclusion that grazing was causing problems down there,” Blatt said. “We just want to find out whether there are any activities that are causing problems or might potentially cause problems. If there are, we’re going to try to find a solution.”

Besides looking into the effects of livestock grazing, for example, they also have been looking into the complaints about water diversions by the town of Mammoth Lakes and, ironically, about outflow from the DFG’s own Hot Creek Fish Hatchery.

Ultimately, the Lahontan agency has the authority to restrict any use of the watershed that they determine to be a problem, but Blatt said that they prefer to work toward a diplomatic solution in these kinds of conflicts.

“We’ve found that getting all the interested parties together and working in a group to try to come to a consensus on how to solve the problem is the way to go,” he said. “Not sitting there with an ‘iron hand’ and saying, ‘This is what you’re going to have to do or we’re going to put waste discharge requirements on you.’

“When someone refuses to cooperate, as a last resort we can go to a regulatory approach and say, ‘You’re causing a pollution problem, and so we’re going to ask for a report of waste discharge which requires you to tell us how you’re going to manage things so that this doesn’t happen.’ ”

The water agency will report its findings at a board meeting in Mammoth Lakes this July.