It’s Sink-or-Swim Situation for Gila Trout : Wildlife: Natural disasters and failure to protect river habitat combine to push fish near endangered status. Next decade is crucial to assuring future of species.

Gila trout flourished millions-strong in the waters of the Mogollon Plateau at the turn of the century--as the hardy fish had for thousands of years.

By the 1960s, development and government efforts to stock the area’s water for fishermen had pushed the only trout native to this rugged southwestern New Mexico wilderness to near extinction.

Now after a quarter-century of work to save the gold and copper-colored fish--one of the first species worldwide considered endangered--its status is still shaky.

Officials blame natural disasters. Environmentalists say bungled government recovery plans and acquiescence to ranching interests in the Gila National Forest are at fault.

“It’s more complicated than you would think--in trying to figure out what the species needs, what it takes to restore them and how they respond to events over time,” said Bruce Anderson, U.S. Forest Service biologist and 17-year member of the Gila Trout Recovery Team.

Officials were close five years ago. The ink was drying on proposals to down-list the 10,000 remaining Gila trout living in five streams from endangered to threatened.

But two years of drought culminating in an unusually hot wildfire, coupled with a fierce hailstorm, hit Main Diamond Creek, home to the largest Gila population.

The combination wiped out 80% of the species and set the 22-year recovery effort back a decade.

“It was a powder keg,” created by years of a now-defunct Forest Service policy to suppress all fires, Anderson said. “It charred the area and then the hail raked tons of ash into the stream bottom.”

It would be at least five years before the fish could once again live in that creek and others nearby.

“Three years ago our morale was pretty low,” said recovery team leader David Propst of the New Mexico Game and Fish Department. “But in the last two years we’ve regrouped and are moving forward. We’re getting streams renovated and establishing additional streams (as Gila habitat).”

But environmentalists say the fish hasn’t got a fighting chance because the Forest Service has allowed the destruction of at least two important stretches of Gila trout habitat--Upper Black Canyon and South Diamond Creek--with uncontrolled cattle grazing. They also contend the Main Diamond fire and hail wouldn’t have devastated the area if cows hadn’t already ravaged the riverside.

Jim Norton of the Wilderness Society said his agency is fighting, and may challenge in court, a Forest Service proposal to increase the number of cattle that can graze on its 145,000-acre allotment leased to the Diamond Bar Ranch. The ranch includes Upper Black Canyon and South Diamond.

“It’s typical of the Forest Service,” Norton said. “They bend over backwards to accommodate the commodity interest. In this case, there’s one rancher who is damaging 145,000 acres--85% of it wilderness . . . and the Forest Service is coming down on the side of the rancher instead of coming down on the side of the fish.”

At the request of several conservation groups, Arizona State University zoology Professor Robert Ohmart recently walked through Upper Black Canyon.

“This is one of the worst degraded streams I have ever seen,” Ohmart said. “What I’m seeing in there is the result of many, many years of lack of management. It’s deplorable.

“There’s no question that the Gila trout, if it was in there, would be in trouble,” Ohmart said. “There’s not enough vegetation to stop runoff. Even a mild rainstorm will bring a sediment load into the stream. The banks are beat out and very wide.”

Last year, the state Game and Fish Department recommended reducing the Diamond Bar allotment from 900 head of cattle to 300 because of “profound impact on terrestrial and aquatic livestock habitat.”

And preliminary results from water quality tests by the state Environment Department show high sediment loads that “literally smother the fish eggs and inhibit the trout’s feeding ability,” said Jim Piatt, the department’s surface water quality bureau chief.

Officials defend their actions and say the path to saving a species is not written in black and white. While they say the cost of the recovery effort is hard to gauge because it is a joint effort by the Forest Service, New Mexico State University and the state and federal Game and Fish departments, they guess the shoestring operation has run from $1 million to $2 million over the 25 years.

“We learned a lot off of those losses and based on what we learned there we have improved our strategies to recover the fish so no one disaster will wipe out a population,” Propst said.

The fish nearly disappeared after the state Game and Fish Department and federal agencies brought other trout subspecies--brown and rainbow--from the Pacific Northwest and deposited them in the streams of the pinon- and juniper-studded forest for miners and other fishermen.

“They brought in thousands and thousands, mainly in the 1940s and ‘50s,” Anderson said.

The genetically similar species hybridized until the Gila nearly was bred out of existence.

On a recent trip into the steep-forested canyon that houses McKnight Creek, where 202 Gila that survived the 1989 fire were placed, not a trout was in sight. Anderson wasn’t worried because he saw no sign that a recent major catastrophe, such as flood or fire, had hit the area.

The trout, which originally swam 300 miles of river in the wilderness areas north of Silver City, is now found in about 35 miles, Anderson said.

Officials insist the future of the few thousand remaining Gila is bright--but only if the recovery team can get more money, more manpower and a hatchery.

“At this point, we need to get this species up and going,” Anderson said. “Genetically, they’re on the edge. We need to accelerate and get it over that hump.”

Yet even with a hatchery and no more setbacks, Anderson predicts it will take another 12 to 15 years before the Gila is assured of survival.