Trudging for Trout : Volunteers Hike High Into Canyons to Plant Fingerlings

The trout this year were bigger than usual, and that was bad news. It meant fewer of them could be carried into the mountains, and, cramped as they were in small quarters, many weren’t in prime shape.

But Dan Apodaca, a 26-year-old Covina paramedic, shouldered his plastic-lined backpack Tuesday with 50 pounds of mountain water and trout fingerlings, to give them a good chance of survival: in the canyon streams of Angeles National Forest.

He was headed to a special stream; the crystal-clear one that runs by the one-room cabin his father bought when Apodaca was 2, and where he still goes to escape the stresses of his job.

Apodaca was one of a dozen volunteers who stowed in their backpacks or loaded onto mules sloshing loads of fish and water, then headed up steep canyon sides above Arcadia and Monrovia, going off-trail to get the trout as high into the wilderness as possible so they can grow, spawn and repopulate the streams.

The new trout in the neighborhood come from a hatchery in Ventura County, even though trout are indigenous to the Angeles streams. Each year, however, anglers take undersized trout, and fish the streams down to depletion levels.

So each spring, volunteers led by Glen Owens of Monrovia plant trout. The planting started in 1979, but stopped for three years during the drought because the water levels in the streams were too low for the fish to flourish. The practice resumed last year, and with 55 inches of rain recorded this year at Mt. Wilson, the streams are ripe for the new fingerlings.

And for the first time this year, the volunteers were joined by U.S. Forest Service workers. Together, the two groups planted about 300 fingerlings in Santa Anita Canyon, above Arcadia, and 75 more in Saw Pit Canyon in Monrovia.

“We do this to provide the public some fishing down here but mainly for the conservancy. They are able to spawn down here,” Apodaca said. “I do fly fishing with barbless hooks--I catch and release, so the fish can get bigger and other people can catch them. Some people need to be educated about catch and release. . . . I buy my fish (for eating) at the store.”

Determined to give his batch of 30 the best chance for survival, Apodaca hiked through at least two miles of the canyon’s obscure areas, where few people go.

In the wild, the trout is known to grow up to an inch a month in prime conditions and reaches maturity in one to two years, officials say.

“They will live long enough to get big and spawn up there,” said Apodaca, who was racing against time. Because the fingerlings were transported earlier in the day from the state Department of Fish and Game’s Fillmore hatchery in Ventura County, a few were weakened from the warmer temperature of a closed container and the lack of oxygen.

U.S. Forest Service Technician Steve Johnson attempted to resuscitate six fingerlings by holding the fish facing upstream so that cool running water could quickly pass through their gills, he said. Five revived to frolic in their new home.

Owens, who prodded the U.S. Forest Service to join in the effort this year, said more fish died this time because they were larger than he had expected, and were cramped in the 40-gallon trash container used for transporting them.

Because of their size, he brought less than half the number than in past years, he said. To sustain the fish, volunteers threw in blocks of ice to keep the water temperature between 45 and 65 degrees and supplied oxygen via a bicycle pump.

“We built up credibility with the Fish and Game people since we approached them (in 1979). . . . It’s almost criminal to have a fishable stream and not have fish in ‘em. We proved that the program works,” said Owens, 52. He wants to see the program expand with the help of the U.S. Forest Service.

“I’m surprised there’s never been a marriage between the Forest Service and Fish and Game. . . . We’ve got to be like Huckleberry Finn and show ‘em how fun it is to paint that fence, you know?” he said. “We’ve reached a point in time when it can be expanded.”

Owens may yet get his wish.

Forest Ranger Terry Ellis agrees fish planting is “an important program, and we want to make it work in other areas of the forest. That’s why we got involved this year. . . . We talked with Owens candidly, and he kind of nudged us into doing it on a broader scale.” Ellis said he didn’t know why the Forest Service had never joined in before.

Trout are the ideal fish for the canyon because they are the only indigenous fish that are also good game fish, Ellis said. A new federal policy implemented this year mandates that no wildlife--plants or animals--can be introduced to a non-native environment, to avoid upsetting the balance of the ecosystem, he said.

The state Department of Fish and Game has been planting a variety of fish for about 100 years; for 50 of those years, it used angler groups for much of the planting, said Jim Adams, Fillmore’s hatchery manager. The hatchery, which services Los Angeles, Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties, has given out 10,000 to 20,000 trout fingerlings a year in the past, he said.

But this year, to conform to the new federal policy, the department is working through a time-consuming task of reassessing streams to see which are indigenous to what fish, Adams said. The hatchery will allocate only about 500 trout fingerlings this year, he said, with most already given to the first group of volunteers from the San Gabriel Valley.

Although the fingerlings business has slowed down, Fish and Game is still distributing full size trout at its usual level of 1 million, Adams said, to more accessible water throughout the Los Angeles area.

But Owens, who said he has never gone fishing in all the years he has supplied the area with trout, would rather see them flourish in the canyons than end up on hooks.

“I just like to see ‘em,” he said. “When you walk across the stream and you see a fish dart--it’s just something that needs to be.”