Town Fights to Control Fate of Fish-Threatened Lake

When David Takahashi looks out at the snow-covered face of Lake Davis in winter, he sees 15 years of pleasure and profit. When Patrick O’Brien takes in the same elegant vista, a sparkling white blanket laced in lodgepole pine, all he sees is peril.

Takahashi and O’Brien--merchant and bureaucrat--are in opposing camps of a heated battle over the placid lake, a fight that pits this tiny mountain town against a big state, the governed against the government.

Takahashi has spent the better part of his adulthood renting campsites, selling fishing tackle and angling here in Plumas County at one of California’s premier trout lakes. It is a 4,000-acre body of water that O’Brien says must die so it may live.

The plan is to poison Lake Davis, to kill all its fish in order to protect a species that doesn’t even live in the neighborhood--the salmon of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta 100 miles away.

The problem, in the eyes of O’Brien, a senior fishery biologist with the state Department of Fish and Game, is that the lake is now infested with northern pike. An eat-everything-in-sight kind of predator, the pike was smuggled into Davis in the early 1990s.

If the pike is not wiped out, state officials fear, it will escape from the lake, end up in the delta and sharpen its teeth on the dwindling salmon. Authorities say that there is no evidence of such spread yet.

O’Brien has yet another warning. Let the pike go and in a few more years, Davis will no longer be a trout lake.

“The catch of trout per angler hour has been cut by 40% in the past year,” he says. “If we don’t treat, they’ve got at the most two to three years left of reasonable fishing. After that, they’ll be catching all the pike they ever want to see.”

State officials are adamant that theirs is the only way, that alternatives posed by area residents just won’t work. Among the possibilities, the locals argue, is allowing anglers to actually catch the pike.

In a twist of logic that escapes Portola’s residents, the state wants the pike out, but catching them is illegal. State officials say the hardy pike are slow to die and they fear that if caught, the fish will be transported and infest other waters.

Locals like Takahashi contend that poisoning Lake Davis will foul Portola’s water supply and wipe out the region’s tourism industry--a large part of the troubled Plumas County economy.

But state officials counter that the chemical they plan to use, a piscicide called rotenone, will be gone within weeks of the application and will not hurt residents. They say that for a month after the treatment, monitoring for residual poison will be done and alternative water supplies will be made available, although none have been confirmed to date.

Plumas County Supervisor Fran Roudebush doesn’t buy it. She cites studies that show that rotenone and other chemical components that would be put into the lake are carcinogens. The state’s mitigation plans would be a small bandage for a large wound, she says.

“Fish and Game says they’ll monitor some of the wells,” she says. “That’s not good enough for the people here. Would you want to be on one of the wells that’s not being monitored?”

What has eroded here is more than just an ecosystem. When Portola thinks about Lake Davis, the logic goes something like this:

California plans to put rotenone in the drinking water because it is big and the city is tiny, because the state can do it and the city can’t stop it.

“Oh, lady, yes!” says an indignant Tony Olson, owner of Lake Davis Cabins. “You people in the big cities control us. Portola is just a little old guy.”

Patrick O’Brien is just as frustrated. A former small-town boy himself, he knows what’s happening when he travels up California 70 and gets the cold shoulder.

“If you’re not from a small town, if you’re a bureaucrat from the big city, there’s no way on this earth of ours that they’re gonna believe you,” O’Brien says.

“I have never tried so hard at anything in my life,” he says of his efforts to get Portola to understand why the lake must be treated. “I have spent hours up there talking to those people. And they just simply don’t trust you.”

If the state proceeds, 70% of Lake Davis will be drained to enable the $1.5-million treatment to go forward. Although the poison would not be administered until October, the draining would probably begin soon. The smaller the lake, the less poison is necessary and the less costly the operation.

Plumas County and the city of Portola filed suit Friday to stop the project. A letter-writing campaign has begun as well--to ask the government to stop itself.

The good people of Portola have let fly a flurry of missives to everyone from Gov. Pete Wilson to the region’s legislators. The gist of their plea: There has to be a better way to stop the northern pike.

Also known as Esox lucius, this Eastern U.S. native is a fecund, fierce, fast-growing fish, known to strike at anything that moves--mostly other fish, but also waterfowl, small rodents, and the occasional reptile.

When introduced into Nevada’s Comins Lake in the early 1970s to control the prolific Utah chub, the pike ate its way through its intended target, became a hit with local anglers and then began feeding on its own young. Fishing dropped by two-thirds, and Nevada had to eradicate the pike it had planted.

A particularly large specimen of the predatory pike is mounted on the wall of Wiggin’s Trading Post, a kind of visual aid for anglers at nearby Frenchman Lake, located due east of the endangered Davis.

Trading Post owner Richard Wiggin needs no reminder of the pugnacious pike, which he contends has cost him at least $1 million in business since 1991, the year the state poisoned Frenchman Lake for the same reason Davis has been targeted.

Pike “will kill just to kill,” says Wiggin, whose business is in the town of Chilcoot, near Frenchman. “They’ve got a set of teeth on ‘em like a razor.”

The Trading Post is a small country store that does everything from sell tackle to butcher the animals raised by local 4-H members.

When Frenchman, which is not a drinking water source, was treated with rotenone, Wiggin figures, he lost a third of his annual 300,000 customers.

Although his business has yet to return in full, fishing in the lake is much improved now that the trout are back and the pike are gone.

“The fishing now is some of the best it’s ever been,” Wiggin says. “It’s a complicated thing. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. . . . But I still don’t like for them to do it. I think they should look at alternate plans.”

Peggy Garner, partner in a multimillion-dollar golf and housing development that touts the region’s environmental purity, has proposed just emptying the lake.

The fish will die, but the economic impact will be shorter-term, because “when the water goes back in, at least it won’t be poisoned,” she says.

The master plan for Gold Mountain, Garner’s project, was designed by Taliesin Architects, a subsidiary of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. Southwest of the lake, the development has been subdivided, many lots have been sold, and several homes are under construction.

Dubbed “the ultimate backyard,” its brochures ask: “Why Gold Mountain?” Among the answers: “Environmentally sensitive development . . . over 30 pristine lakes within a 12-mile radius.”

Garner fumes about the state bureaucracy and frets about trying to sell an ecologically friendly development near a dead lake--even though the lake will eventually come back and the state will plant new trout as soon after the poisoning as possible.

“How will Lake Davis affect us? I think bad publicity,” she says. The state “thought they were going to come up here and we’d be a bunch of dumb hicks in the woods, unable to come up with sensible alternatives. I get so mad when I talk about it.”

Bad publicity can be a real threat to a mom-and-pop industry in a sparsely populated county short on resources but long on beauty. Tourism provides a quarter of the jobs and a third of local economy. No motel offers more than 50 rooms and all depend on word of mouth.

The annual visitors’ guide stakes out the region’s niche: “Rugged canyons, crystal clear lakes, grassy meadows, trout-filled streams, fresh pine forests, brilliant star-filled skies.”

“Those attributes are not available in too many other places, although we don’t have a copyright on them,” John Sheehan, head of the county’s economic development corporation, said at a recent hearing. “Poisoning the premier lake in this part of the county despoils that hard-won image in every way.”

To plan for what the locals consider the worst-case scenario, Sheehan told Assemblyman Bernie Richter (R-Chico) during the hearing, the state should budget $1 million a year for five years to compensate hard-hit merchants like Takahashi.

For 15 years, Takahashi has operated the Grizzly Country Store on the lake shores, catering to the needs of anglers and campers. If the lake were treated, he says, “income-wise, it would be devastating.”

“We love it here,” says Takahashi, who has put his operation up for sale. “It’s pristine. We’ve survived seven years of drought. We don’t need this. It’s time we stood up as Americans and just said no.”

Supervisor Roudebush, who has been leading the charge against the Fish and Game Department, does not believe biologist O’Brien when he says that rotenone will not threaten local health. She does not believe that government monitoring of water quality will be sufficient.

She does not believe that poisoning is the best answer. And she does not believe that her county, mired in double-digit unemployment, can easily survive the loss of business that she predicts will come once the lake is treated.

“The people that operate [at Lake Davis] now can’t afford one season down,” Roudebush says. “They’ll go belly-up.”

So what will happen if the locals win and the state loses, if the pike is not poisoned?

Whatever the outcome, O’Brien points out, “it’s irreversible.

“If you’re right,” he says of Plumas County, “there’s no impact and everything’s fine. If I’m right, it’s a disaster.”

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A Predator’s Tale

Northern pike are not known to live in any body of water in California except Lake Davis, where they were introduced illegally in the early 1990s. State officials fear that the voracious fish will one day work its way to the Sacramento Delta and finish off the dwindling salmon population.

POISONING PLAN

* Officials propose draining the lake by about 70% and applying a poison called rotenone--sold under the name Nusyn Noxfish--from boats over the surface of the reservoir. Dead fish may or may not be disposed of. Once the poison dissipates, the lake would be restocked with rainbow trout.

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Northern Pike

* Ferocious feeders, known to eat snakes, ducks and muskrats.

* In natural habitat, grow to about 20 pounds and 20-30 inches.

* Prized game fish with a reputation for putting up a fierce battle once hooked. Illegal in California, however, and thus anglers are not allowed to fish for the pike in Lake Davis.

Sources: McClane’s Field Guide to Freshwater Fishes of North America; Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Fishes; California Department of Fish and Game