Uphill Battle : While Attempts to Restore Owens River Gorge as Fishery Continue, Others Find Challenges in Different Climbs

How much water do fish need to survive and to thrive in the Owens River Gorge?

What happened to the water the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power turned loose more than a year ago?

And will the gorge, dry since the early ‘50s, ever be a trophy trout fishery again, or will frustrated anglers be left to wander in the desert for another 40 years, watching the big ones get away in their minds every day?

Those questions remain unanswered 16 1/2 months after the DWP’s eight-foot-diameter penstock feeding water to three power plants ruptured and the fish hit the fan, backed by threats of legal action to restore the historic fishery.

Meanwhile, the gorge has people climbing the walls--and some of them care less about water or power or fish than challenging the vertical faces of the canyon.

“Oh, that’s a great climbing area,” said Randy Vogel, a Santa Ana lawyer who is vice president of the Access Fund, a climbers’ organization that pushes responsible pursuit of the sport.

Said Bill Leventhal, a climber from Topanga, as he perched on an outcropping over the 300-foot-deep gorge, “This has become the most popular sport-climbing site in this area.”

Marty Lewis of Mammoth Lakes said he was among the first climbers to “discover” the gorge about four years ago, and that its emergence has grown with an explosion in the popularity of sport-climbing--a safer form of rock climbing that uses pre-placed bolts for securing ropes.

“People from all over the world are coming to climb here,” Lewis said.

Climbers first tried the gorge as an alternative to Yosemite when it snows and Joshua Tree when the heat’s on, but it now has become established for its own virtues.

“It has some interesting geological features, (such as) basaltic columns,” Vogel said. “The top part is very loose-looking rock. Lower down, where people climb, the rock is very solid and compact. It’s some sort of metamorphic rock, like a basalt, but it’s very dense. It feels like granite, but it has gas pockets that were formed when this was all volcanic. It has very positive holds. The rock is very smooth, not rough like Joshua Tree.”

Along an accessible three-mile stretch midway through the 20-mile gorge, the climbers have drilled in bolts to establish 400-500 routes, each christened with climber whimsy: Dr. Claw, Love Stinks, No Mistake or Big Pancake, Hospital Bill, Cling On. . . .

Better still, the DWP, sometimes perceived as resistant to fishermen, apparently has no problem with climbers. It seems to find pride that the gorge has become “one of the major rock-climbing places in the country,” according to department spokesman Chris Plakos in Bishop.

“They have to walk down into the area,” he said. “We don’t allow people to drive down there because the road is so narrow and windy, but they’re more than welcome.”

Vogel said: “Climbers and the Access Fund have been able to have a real good working relationship with the Department of Water and Power. (These days) people are exploring stuff that is very steep or wildly overhanging that looks bad but turns out to be OK . . . developing sport climbs with routes entirely protected by bolts. The Owens River Gorge is mostly sport routes, which means it’s relatively safe for everybody. All the anchors are good.”

The top sides of the gorge are crumbly, so climbers start from the bottom on either side of the heretofore dry river bed. But soon they may get their feet wet.

Even before the penstock ruptured, the upper part of the gorge had a year-round flow of 16 cubic feet per second from a combination of springs and seepage from Long Valley Dam--enough to sustain a small, if stunted, population of brown trout, Owens suckers and tiny Owens tui chubs. The flow was sucked up at the Upper Gorge power plant, and the rest of the gorge remained bone dry.

Then, on June 21, 1991, under pressure to restore the fishery, the DWP summoned reporters from Los Angeles and turned 16 cubic feet per second back into the gorge in what Darrell Wong, a fishery biologist with the California Department of Fish and Game referred to wryly as “the great ceremonial turning of the valve.”

Sixteen c.f.s. is enough to fill about 600 swimming pools in one day, but a strange thing occurred. More than a year later the flow had gone only five or six miles of the remaining nine miles of the gorge to Pleasant Valley Reservoir.

“It came as a blow to the city,” Wong said.

“Everybody was real surprised,” Plakos said. “There seems to be some kind of (geologic) fracture system in there that’s sucking it up. We think it’s turning up in springs someplace else, possibly in Pine Creek or in that direction.”

The answer was critical because from the outset the two sides agreed that the problem wasn’t a water issue--that Los Angeles would receive the same amount of water at the end ofthe line, whether it came through the gorge or the penstock. The only issue was maintaining a power source for the plants.

But the “lost river” mystery made experts wonder how much water it would take to recreate the fishery, and how much water would be lost in the ground, never to reach L.A.

Wong says the Owens’ lowest flows on record from the early 1900s until the dam diverted the water in the early ‘50s was about 80 c.f.s. and in some years was as high as 200. Water marks on the canyon walls show that at some points the river was 45 feet wide with pools 14 feet deep.

In a recent agreement by the Gorge Re-watering Management Committee, whose members include representatives of the DWP and DFG and Mono County Dist. Atty. Stan Eller, it was agreed to aim for an average flow of 78 c.f.s.

Last week, without ceremony, the DWP opened the valve wider to allow 35 c.f.s. into the gorge, “just to see what it’s going to do,” Plakos said.

George Brodt, the DWP’s project manager, said the object is to add water until the stream bed is stabilized, then have two teams of technicians check flow rates, temperature and quality at 10 locations along the way.

“By finding out where the highest water losses are occurring . . . we will be able to have our geologists investigate the possible geologic features that are causing the river to flow underground,” Brodt said.

Initial results were encouraging. Instead of vanishing, by mid-morning the flow had advanced two miles down the gorge--much faster than the DWP had anticipated. The flow then was cut back to a more manageable 25 c.f.s., advancing at 1,200 feet a day.

But Wong warns that it may be years before the gorge is fishable again.

“When streams are dry for 40 years you just can’t turn the water on,” he said. “You have to prepare the stream to receive water again.”

Eventually, 40% of the water will flow through the gorge, the rest through the penstock to the power plants. But re-watering too fast would wash sediment into the lower stream, and the DWP wants to keep the stream and penstock flows separate to avoid damaging its turbines. That will require building a 150-foot flume for the river over the recovery pool below the middle plant.

Another problem is the tui chub, a tiny prehistoric fish less than an inch long that has existed on the 16-c.f.s. flow in the upper gorge.

“What we’d like to do is put the additional water in from Long Valley Dam,” Plakos said.

“We can’t do that, because since the main flow was cut off, isolating that area, the Owens tui chubs have established themselves in there. That’s a rare and endangered species and you can’t impact them, and adding additional flow would be an impact.

“So 40% of the historic mean flow is going to be flowing down the gorge, but not in the upper section because of the tuichub.”

Bypassing the upper section and releasing increased flows from the upper plant at 700 pounds per square inch of pressure also will require modifications, the DWP says, and the two major modifications will take two years. Marty Lewis figures that may be all the time the climbers have left.

“It’s a lot better with some water in there,” Lewis said. “But to turn it into a raging torrent has been forced on (the DWP) by Fish and Game. There are a lot of (other) places up here to fish. It’s going to make the climbing worse . . . a real hassle getting around down there. We can throw a rock in the river to cross it now.

“And whether the climbers and the fishermen can get along . . . they have different interests.”

Said Wong: “But when it comes back, it’s going to be an incredible fishery.”