Paddling Upstream to Save Trout

Michael Hazzard spends most of his weekends on fishing expeditions, but his search doesn’t require a pole. His reward came this month, when he peered into a clear pool on rugged San Mateo Creek and caught what he believes was a rare glimpse of steelhead trout.

“We saw one large adult, 12 to 14 inches long,” said Hazzard, an environmentalist and one of a small group dedicated to saving the steelhead, “and four or five smaller ones between 6 and 8 inches.”

For Hazzard and others like him, roaming the banks of San Mateo Creek south of San Clemente to stake out steelhead habitat is critical to protecting the fish, whose dwindling numbers have placed them on the verge of extinction in Southern California.

“I don’t know how many miles I have walked back and forth,” Hazzard said, “but to finally find them and to know that you are looking at a species thought to be extinct is amazing.”

Considered a dream catch by anglers in Northern California and the Pacific Northwest, where steelhead thrive, the fish are universally revered because of their beauty, the powerful fight they put up when hooked, and their sublime taste on the dinner plate.

Hazzard is fairly certain he spotted steelhead, but he can’t prove it. Experts believe fewer than 200 steelhead remain from a population that once ran thick in coastal streams from Santa Barbara County to northern Baja California.

The fish are expected to get a lifeline later this year when the National Marine Fisheries Service extends a federal protection zone to include San Mateo Creek. To date, under the Endangered Species Act, steelhead have been protected from Central California to as far south as Malibu Creek in Los Angeles County.

The biggest threat steelhead face is habitat degradation, but fishing is also a concern. Under state Fish and Game regulations, fishing is prohibited in streams adult steelhead are known to frequent.

Decimated by Flood Control

That status would be extended to San Mateo Creek--though its remote location, beginning in the Cleveland National Forest, naturally limits the number of people who fish it--after it receives federal protection.

More important, such protection could lead to the creation of a plan to resuscitate the species. Steelhead have been decimated by dams and flood-control projects that block access to spawning grounds and by nonnative aquatic animals that crowd out--or eat--young steelhead.

The rescue effort is already underway north of Malibu Creek, and its extension south will validate the efforts of a devoted corps of activists, some of whom have been fighting for decades to protect steelhead.

Despite their successes, they realize that the true mark of progress--rivers full of steelhead--is not likely to happen in their lifetimes.

Like its cousin the salmon, the steelhead is an anadromous fish, meaning it is hatched and reared in fresh water but spends much of its adult life in the ocean. When the silver-blue fish return to start a journey of up to 1,500 miles inland, anglers jockey for position on Pacific Northwest river banks to catch them.

Southern steelhead have never been as plentiful as those in the north, but are considered a heartier strain. They’ve had to be to survive in a drought-prone environment.

Unlike salmon and northern steelhead, which typically return to the spawning grounds where they hatched, the southern steelhead have adapted to take advantage of fresh water where they find it.

The opportunistic fish can grow to well over 2 feet long and is also strong--able to jump 12 feet into the air to scale waterfalls. But 20th century development has taken its toll. Streams blocked by dams, choked with silt from erosion and polluted by urban runoff have cut off most spawning routes.

“You have to admire their tenacity in persisting through everything we have done to them,” said Dennis McEwan, a fisheries biologist with the state Department of Fish and Game.

Jim Edmondson has spent 17 years working to save the fish. As conservation director of California Trout, a nonprofit environmentalist group, he has seen Southern California steelhead in the wild just three times.

He vividly recalls his last sighting, in March 2000 while hiking up a creek that flows out at Leo Carrillo State Beach, which straddles Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

“You spot the tail,” Edmondson said, “then you see the rest of the body and you say, ‘My God.’ As opposed to seeing 7-, 8- or 9-inch fish to seeing one that’s 2 feet long, it’s kind of like seeing a Rolls-Royce on the freeway.”

The fish is nothing if not elusive, as fishermen like Frank Selby can attest.

A licensed guide who owns a fly fishing shop in Costa Mesa, Selby recalled one spring in the mid-1960s, when he spent the better part of a day angling for a wily 2-foot steelhead on Aliso Creek just above South Coast Highway in Laguna Beach.

The fish was waiting for the water level to rise so it could swim upstream to spawn. Selby patiently cast his fly, and let the current do the rest of the work.

“I bet you I drifted a WollyWorm in front of this one 70 times,” Selby recalled. “It was worth it. I regret to say that he did not go on upstream.”

These memories are now bittersweet for Selby, who said he stopped fishing for steelhead in Southern California in 1971, after realizing how rare they had become.

“I think if we left them alone,” Selby said, “we would have had a lot more down here.”

Experts who believed steelhead had vanished from San Mateo Creek long ago were proved wrong in February 1999, when Toby Shackelford, a 21-year-old Saddleback College student, caught--and released--one in a small pool north of Interstate 5. Skeptical wildlife biologists later found more trout on the creek and confirmed they were steelhead.

That finding was critical, prompting current efforts to extend the species’ protection.

Until then, authorities who had first listed the steelhead as endangered in 1997 had cited “the best available information” for declaring that Malibu Creek was the southernmost range of the species.

Since then, efforts to protect steelhead habitat have picked up momentum, leading to the formation of the Southern California Steelhead Recovery Coalition.

Three coalition members--the Santa Barbara-based Environmental Defense Center, the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity and California Trout--have sued the National Marine Fisheries Service, claiming that the federal government isn’t going far enough to protect the fish. The suit asks that protection be extended to the Mexican border and that all native rainbow trout, of which steelhead are a sea-run variety, also be protected.

The legal action could be the first of many. Opponents of a toll road planned for southern Orange County--one proposed route crosses San Mateo Creek near its mouth--have also adopted the steelhead as a weapon to fight the road, which they say would do irreparable harm to the environment. Toll road officials say that the road can be built and maintained without harming the habitat of the steelhead or the several other endangered species that live in its path.

Edmondson believes there is reason to be optimistic about the steelhead’s fate in Southern California. Most of the southern steelhead’s historic spawning grounds in the Los Padres, Angeles, Cleveland and San Bernardino national forests remain healthy and among the most productive wild trout-bearing streams in the state.

The key is reestablishing routes to the habitat, said Edmondson, and San Mateo is considered a likely testing ground.

One of Southern California’s last free-flowing streams, it starts about 20 miles inland in the Cleveland National Forest and runs through federally protected wilderness areas before entering the Camp Pendleton Marine base seven miles from the sea.

It offers a viable path to spawning grounds, at least during seasons of especially heavy rain: The route opens up when storm runoff breaches the natural sand berm where the creek flows into the ocean at the famed surfing beach at Trestles.

To thrive, steelhead require pristine conditions all along the path, which is why, Edmondson said, protecting the fish’s habitat should matter even to people who wouldn’t think of picking up a fishing pole.

‘The Canary in the Coal Mine’

“It is the canary in the coal mine,” Edmondson said. “It’s the only species that provides such an opportunity to judge the health of our river systems.”

Restoration efforts along San Mateo received a financial boost last year when voters passed a bond measure that included $800,000 for the area. The state Coastal Conservancy is working on a plan on how best to spend the money.

Habitat restoration at San Mateo is likely to focus on eliminating nonnative--or exotic--aquatic animals such as largemouth bass, green sunfish, bullhead catfish and bullfrogs. They compete with the trout for food, and in some cases eat steelhead or their offspring.

Currently, the Forest Service is working in the upper San Mateo watershed to remove tadpoles and bullfrogs that can grow up to 1 foot long and sport voracious appetites.

“They get so big, they’ll almost eat anything,” said Kirsten Winter, a Cleveland National Forest biologist.

Progress will be slow. But Edmondson hopes that in 10 years a core population of more than 1,000 steelhead will be established in Southern California.

“A thousand fish doesn’t mean a fishable population,” Edmondson said, “but when we only have 200 adults total in all of Southern California, we’re really just teetering on the brink of extinction.”

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Steelhead Trout Decline

Development along Southern California’s coastline has limited inland access to spawning grounds, contributing to the dramatic decline of the steelhead trout. San Mateo Creek is considered a promising spot for the fish’s resurgence.

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Sources: www.caltrout.org/steelhead; NOAA; Washington state Dept. of Natural Resources