A few miles north of Fresno, giant Friant Dam plugs the [San Joaquin R]iver gorge, diverting nearly all the water to more than 1 million acres of desert farmland from Chowchilla to the Tehachapi Mountains and drying out 63 miles of the river’s bed. The dam was completed in 1942. Starting in the 1950s, agricultural water diversions from the dam caused the river to atrophy, wiping out salmon that once were so plentiful they were used as hog feed. Today, lizards and jackrabbits thrive on the dry, sandy riverbeds. The river is no longer a source of fresh water to San Francisco Bay.
The restoration plan, estimated to cost up to $800 million, will take water from farmers’ fields and send it down the river to restore fish and wildlife.
So writes Glen Martin in his piece today on an historic accord that will take some of the San Joaquin River’s water and put it back in the river, the culmination of a legal and political battle that hs been waged in court since 1988, and in the hearts of people who love the river since the Friant Dam was built in 1942. The Chinook salmon is the ostensible beneficiary of the decision, but a whole chain of species will derive some greater chance of surviving in the Central Valley, the United States’ most massively engineered ecosystem.
Below the fold is something I wrote in 1999 on salmon in the San Joaquin watershed. I focused on the Merced River, in part because millions of people have stood on its banks, gaping at Half Dome and El Capitan. The first half of the article describes Lagunitas Creek in Marin County a watershed in which, despite dams and roads and development, people seem to be doing right by the salmon. The second half, which covers the Merced and the larger San Joaquin watershed, is there by way of contrast. The piece was written (for California Wild magazine) before the current settlement was even a glimmer on the horizon.
It was also written before September 2002, a month in which diversions of Klamath Riiver water — propelled by the Bush Administration’s interfering in the work of fisheries scientists so as to benefit their agricultural supporters in Modoc County — doomed tens of thousands of salmon to a gasping death. The Klamath still hasn’t recovered.
Making Room To Run
In winter, when rain returns to California and flushes out accumulated debris from dry summer streams, toothy sea monsters gather offshore. They’ve spent most of their lives terrorizing the hapless smaller inhabitants of the ocean, hungrily snapping up anything that will fit into their mouths. Now, strange, uncomfortable changes wrack their bodies. Their inflamed skin glows bright red; odd bumps grow from their heads. A new urgency comes over them. They wait for the right time to invade. Eventually, the flood of fresh water from river’s mouth trips an ancient behavioral trigger, and the salmon swim up their natal streams to spawn and die.
If you were to look for an animal to act as an emblem for the entire northern Pacific Ocean and all the land that drains into it, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more appropriate mascot than Pacific salmon. Throughout their range, from Korea and Siberia north to Alaska and then down the coast to central California, salmon link wildly divergent habitats, from alpine freshet and forested stream to valley slough and submarine canyon.
Being part of so many differing ecosystems has its price. Salmon are vulnerable to ecological disruption at any point in their journey from gravel bed to ocean and back again. Fishnets sweep them up. Pollutants poison them. They are sucked into agricultural diversion pumps. Redds, the gravel beds in which they spawn, are choked with silt freed by the chainsaw and the plow. Dams keep the fish off the redds entirely.
Present-day California is hell on salmon.
In a precious few watercourses, foremost among them Marin County’s Lagunitas Creek, salmon have held their own. In the majority of California’s rivers, however, the salmon runs are in what a doctor might call critical condition. In some major rivers, such as central California’s Merced, the runs are on life support, and a bad season could flatline them.
The state once hosted some of the biggest runs of salmon in the world. Pre-contact native Californians may have consumed as much as 15 million pounds of salmon annually – especially remarkable considering it was a sustainable harvest. The first salmon cannery in North America, presaging a century of heavy exploitation in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, was founded in West Sacramento in 1864. That cannery, with twenty others built soon after in the Bay-Delta region in the next few years, packed as much as ten million pounds of fish a year for the next few decades from the Central Valley alone.
Such heavy commercial exploitation of the fish took its toll, as did the mountains of silt dumped into California streams by hydraulic miners until federal courts ended that industry in 1884. As the twentieth century wore on, the litany of harms done California salmon grew. The rivers once overflowed their banks each year or two, flushing silt out of old redds and making new ones. Now they are channelized, locked up in levees and riprap. Logging made streams both siltier and sunnier. As water temperatures rise, salmon survival rates plummet. Toxics, from mercury out of mines to pesticides running off farmland and motor oil washing off city streets, sickened the fish and interfered with their reproduction.
Most damning of all were, well, dams. Small dams were built on California’s rivers almost as soon as the land came into American possession. Despite their small scale, the early dams lacked even rudimentary provisions for passage of fish. In the first third of the twentieth century, dam building began in earnest. About 75 dams were built from 1900 to 1929 in the Central Valley alone. The thirties marked the glory days of dam building: California’s Shasta Dam, built during this heyday of the gargantuan water project, permanently ended salmon migration into the Pit, McCloud, and Upper Sacramento rivers. One by one, other California rivers fell to the engineers. By the time public opinion turned against dam building, just barely too late to stop the New Melones Dam on the Stanislaus River in 1979, most prime salmon habitat in California had been destroyed. What salmon remain depend utterly on our indulgence, our desire to preserve them and our willingness to change our habits in order to do so.
Lagunitas Creek
Such indulgence and desire have helped to maintain the numbers of the salmon that spawn in Lagunitas Creek, on the northern slope of Mount Tamalpais. They are Oncorhynchus kisutch; coho salmon, and their neighbors love them.
Each early winter, when storms dump rain along the coast, the coho head into Tomales Bay, swim along the submerged San Andreas Fault, then enter the Lagunitas Creek estuary near Point Reyes Station. Some venture up placid Olema Creek, which more or less follows the San Andreas south from the estuary. The rest turn inland, climbing the steep slopes of Lagunitas Creek toward the redwood forests of Samuel P. Taylor State Park. Farther upstream lies the confluence of Lagunitas Creek and its major tributary, San Geronimo Creek. All told, counting minor tributaries such as Larsen Creek off San Geronimo there’s probably less than thirty miles of spawning habitat left in the Lagunitas Creek watershed. Some of the best redds, nearer the summit of Tamalpais, now lie drowned under the reservoirs of the Marin Municipal Water District. Still, says Todd Steiner, “this is some of the best coho habitat in California, excepting maybe the Klamath River. It scares me to say that, considering how many problems the coho face here, but unfortunately, it’s the truth.” Steiner, a marine biologist, is founder of the Salmon Protection Watershed Network (SPAWN), a grass-roots group in the San Geronimo Valley working to defend their coho.
At first glance, there might not seem to be much need for defense. This tiny watershed holds about a tenth of the state’s coho stock, and is among the best-protected drainages in the state. Much of the watershed is either state or federal parkland, or watershed land closed to logging and development.
But a tenth of California’s coho is not a lot of fish. Fewer than 5,000 coho salmon spawn in any given year nowadays, a hundredth the size of historic runs of the species. In 1997, coho salmon in Central California were listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Just 500 fish climb the north slope of Tamalpais in a good year, and a setback in the Lagunitas Creek drainage could devastate California’s coho population.
In early 1997, it looked as though such a setback had arrived.
Roy’s Dam has been at the west end of the San Geronimo Golf Course since before anyone in the valley can remember. About ten feet high with a small fish ladder along the north bank of the creek, the dam was built for some forgotten purpose early in the century.
Late in 1996, after a dry autumn, storms brought sudden, abundant rain to Marin County. The late rains concentrated a run that might otherwise have spread out over a few months: the creeks were crowded with coho.
The rain also took its toll on Roy’s Dam, cutting a break in the dam’s apron.
Salmon find their way upstream by following the strongest current. When the apron broke, much of the creek flowed over the break, rather than down the fish ladder. Coho followed the current up the apron, stranding themselves. Some died.
Within a few days of the discovery of the stranded coho, Steiner and other activists had collected three hundred signatures on petitions asking the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS, pronounced “nymphs") to take action to protect the coho. Coverage on four local TV stations and CNN didn’t hurt. Nor did the Central California coho’s pending “threatened” status. Within a few days, NMFS staff went to Roy’s Dam to toss stranded coho over the dam. That spring, government agencies and community members started meeting to fix the problem.
In 1998, a team of dam deconstructers — Interior Secretary Bruce Babbit among them — lowered the dam by two feet. (Some had advocated removing the dam altogether, but local fisheries biologist Willis Evans determined that the dam had trapped enough silt to choke downstream redds if it was released.) At present, the fish ladder is fixed and a large pile of boulders blocks access to the old apron. By this time next year the dam will be utterly remade. Rather than a smooth apron of concrete, coho will encounter a series of carefully built rocky pools designed for optimal fish passage. Thus, San Geronimo Creek will host a dam that promotes upstream spawning. “Instead of Roy’s Dam, we’ll have Roy’s Pools” beams Steiner.
The reinvention of Roy’s Dam doesn’t mean Lagunitas coho will enter the next millennium free from threat. Residential development has changed the hydrology of the watershed. Instead of soaking into the soil, rainwater runs off roofs and driveways and into storm drains. When the rains stop, the subsoil has less stored water to discharge into the creek. Salmon fry may spend several months in their natal streams before heading for the ocean. With less groundwater to recharge the area’s creeks, they dry up before the fry can reach Tomales Bay. This past spring, SPAWN members rescued more than 1200 stranded fry from isolated pools on San Geronimo Creek, and another 200 or so from above the construction site at Roy’s Dam. SPAWN has appealed to the Marin Municipal Water District to release treated water from its sewage treatment plant at the creek’s headwaters in Woodacre to help the fry make it downhill on their own.
There seem to be few valley residents who aren’t salmon sympathizers. A local school is restoring a tributary of San Geronimo that runs through its campus. Grade school kids make “wishing poles” — bent willow wands festooned with yarn — and install them along the creeks to “summon the salmon” back into the watershed. Though it’s only a few short weeks since SPAWN printed its “I Brake For Coho” bumperstickers, they seem to be ubiquitous throughout the valley. It’s not surprising that the Lagunitas Creek watershed, despite the problems facing its coho, is often touted as close to a best-case scenario for salmon restoration, from its relatively healthy watershed to the interest and involvement of the locals. And SPAWN isn’t working alone, says Steiner. There are lots of people working on aspects of the coho issue here, from the National Park Service to a couple of one- or two-person projects. It’s a diverse and cooperative network.
“Still,” Steiner continues, “we have the best acronym.”
Merced River
One hundred twenty miles from Roy’s Dam, tucked nearly underneath the east slope of the Diablo Range at Hills Ferry, in sight of Mount Hamilton, the Merced River and the San Joaquin converge as they flow toward the Golden Gate. Though millions of people a year stand on the banks of the Merced as it flows through Yosemite Valley, there’s not much about the river’s culmination that seems to merit notice. A copse of box elder and willow and grapevine hides the water from view. Elsewhere lies evidence of the land’s current job description: furrowed fields, flat as ironed corduroy on a kitchen table.
Down into the riparian tangle, though, past the styrofoam cups and discarded alternators, the motor oil bottles and dry star thistle and rusty barbed wire hiding treacherously at ankle height, a trace of the land’s older nature remains. The water flows viscid and green, full of summer algae. Boils surface in the Merced, while the San Joaquin is flat and silent above the confluence. Despite the trash and the exhaust from the fast traffic along River Road, the place is not without beauty. A pair of black-crowned night herons stretches on a willow limb. Box elder bugs bear their elegant red racing stripes under the star thistle and into my shoes. Datura meteloides, the Central Valley’s signature jimsonweed, blooms a pale poisonous white at roadside.
This is the southernmost limit of the present range of Oncorhynchus tshawytscha, the chinook or king salmon.
Chinook differ from their close coho cousins in two main respects. First, where coho prefer spawning in the short steep streams to be found along the coast, chinook tend to spawn at the heads of long rivers such as the Sacramento. Prior to the Shasta Dam, chinook spawned well into the Modoc Plateau. If coho are, as some have said, the sports cars of the salmon world, chinook are the long-haul truckers.
Which hints at the other major difference between coho and chinook. Chinook are big, about twice the weight of an average coho. Merced chinook commonly exceed twenty pounds.
Above the Merced, the San Joaquin is a death trap for salmon. A fifty-mile stretch near Los Banos was bone dry until this year, when environmental activists forced additional releases from Friant Dam. Even with water in the river, it’s easy to lose your way in the neighboring tangle of stagnant sloughs and irrigation ditches. Thus, before the chinook arrive each year, the state Department of Fish and Game (DF&G) places electric fences across the San Joaquin just upstream from the Merced to ensure the chinook pick the right route.
The Merced’s first twenty or so river miles are a series of lazy meanders through fine alluvial soil, much of it privately owned farmland. Cressey, a hamlet near Livingston and the Route 99 bridge, marks the start of spawning habitat. There riverbed silt gives way to gravel, and to pools gouged out of the ground by local gravel miners. Unfortunately for chinook fry, the pools harbor predatory fish with a taste for young salmon.
All the way from the confluence, the river has been sheltered by only a thin screen of willow and box elder, some of the trees draped heavily with grapevines. Past those riparian groves, mere remnants of the original riparian Valley vegetation, stand rows of almonds, walnuts, corn fields and an increasing number of grapevines. The river stands out like a child’s scribble on a spreadsheet. But a few miles west of Snelling, the surrounding countryside changes character. The river is suddenly flanked with piles of rounded cobbles, ranging in size from tennis balls to soccer balls, the silent remnants of the last century’s destructive hydraulic mining industry. The floods of debris that brought this much rock down to the valley floor must have been devastating, an environmental disaster of the first order. Now, though, they serve as an impediment to the plow. The riverside band of willow and swamp maple widens to a mile or more, and valley oak joins the mix.
The locals call this area a “backyard Montana.” It’s hyperbole, but it’s understandable. Just past Snelling, the landscape begins slowly to tilt up toward the east and the Sierra Nevada foothills. The river is broad and dimpled as it runs over the cobbles, there are broad, lens-shaped islands in midstream that bear decades-old trees, and even in the off-season it’s easy to picture red slabs of fish thrashing their way upstream toward historic spawning grounds, and then frustration. Just as the river ramps appealingly uphill, these imagined fish run into the base of the Crocker Huffman Dam, and can go no further.
Even if they could, they’d just meet a similar dam at Merced Falls, a larger one at the foot of Lake McSwain, and then the keystone of the Merced’s waterworks: the massive New Exchequer Dam. Behind New Exchequer, Lake McClure drowns almost three dozen miles of former salmon habitat.
Cut off from their best spawning grounds, salmon in the Merced – and throughout the rest of the San Joaquin Valley – are in trouble. The historic spring run of chinook is extinct: the short stretches of spawning habitat left on the valley floor are far too warm for spawning in spring. The Merced’s fall run might be extinct as well were it not for the state Department of Fish and Game’s hatchery at Snelling. Hatcheries have been roundly – and rightly – condemned for muddying wild fish gene pools, introducing diseases and altering salmon behavioral patterns. Still, without this hatchery, there would likely be no chinook at all in the Merced. The run is none too large even with this augmentation. Only about 1,400 chinook spawn in the Merced in a typical year. In 1990, none did. The Merced run is the smallest in the San Joaquin watershed, but runs on the neighboring Stanislaus and Tuolumne aren’t in much better shape. Still, this past September, NMFS decided to hold off on designating Central Valley’s fall chinook run as endangered, in part due to opposition from Fish and Game. Commercial fishermen also opposed the listing: the fall run chinook is the last commercially-viable salmon fishery on the West Coast.
“The big picture for salmon in the Merced centers around plumbing,” says Ron Stork, Associate Conservation Director with Friends of the River and a former Merced resident. “The Merced Irrigation District has the right to divert 60 percent of the average annual flow of the river, and they do that pretty effectively.” With so much of the normal flow diverted to agricultural and urban use, any young fish that aren’t trapped in shrinking pools may find the water too warm for comfort. And with periodic floods now constrained behind the dams, what spawning habitat remains is degrading. “The dams in the San Joaquin Valley are designed to swallow entire floods,” says Stork. “They don’t release any of the habitat-forming flows from big floodplain discharges. The management of rivers in the San Joaquin valley is based on the assumption that the rivers will stay within these tiny banks, with no over-bank flows onto the historic floodways.”
That assumption holds as well for the habitat restoration underway on the Merced. Fish and Game staff are filling in old gravel mining pits, screening diversion ditches, and to supplementing gravel for redds. Negotiations with the Merced Irrigation District are in progress to ensure adequate instream flows below the District’s dams. The work is part of a multi-agency project to double anadromous fish numbers on every watercourse in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys, under the auspices of the Central Valley Project Improvement Act (CVPIA). (DF&G cited the project as one reason to postpone listing the fall run.) The CVPIA’s most important fish-related measure, the release of 800,000 acre-feet of “environmental water” for instream flows throughout the Central Valley, has been blocked by opposition from irrigation districts. And as the Merced Irrigation District isn’t subject to the CVPIA – the CVP has no dams on the Merced – opposition from irrigators packs a bit more punch here than on CVP rivers. Still, the work on the Merced looks promising in the short term.
But Stork has doubts about the long-range success of any restoration work, on the Merced or anywhere else in California, that ignores the floodplain. “In the 1997 floods, a natural flow finally came down the Tuolumne. All the work that Fish and Game had done on salmon habitat in the Tuolumne, assuming they’d only be getting 8,000 cubic feet per second released from the New Don Pedro reservoir, was blown away by releases that were ten times that.”
The New Exchequer dam, built to withstand hundred-year floods without spilling, has fostered complacency about floods. Along much of the Merced, rows of expensive orchard crops march right up to the river’s edge. This part of the valley is free of suburban development, but that will change when a projected addition to the University of California opens near Merced. If land use patterns elsewhere in the San Joaquin are any guide, tract-home builders won’t avoid using historic floodplains any more than almond farmers have. And as the possible losses from a flood escalate with each new tract, political tolerance of normal flood cycles will dwindle, to the detriment of the salmon. “Salmon in the San Joaquin’s river systems will always be on the edge of survival”, says Stork, “as long as these big concrete plugs deny them the habitat and the water they need.”
Wishing poles to fishing poles
Aside from within the Klamath province, where runs can sometimes approach prehistoric levels, the health of salmon runs in the rest of California resembles the Merced much more closely than Lagunitas Creek. Even in the salmon-rich Klamath, dams and logging have pushed the spring chinook run to the edge of extinction. Fisheries biologists increasingly voice fear that human economic activity will consign the salmon to extinction in California unless something changes. Attempts to restore spawning habitat on a piece by piece basis may well be overwhelmed by larger events, such as the Tuolumne floods. And the more intensely we alter the Californian landscape, the more often those massive events will occur. In a recent interview with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, NMFS spokesman Rob Jones offered a rueful prescription for a restoration project certain to help the salmon: “…[T]ake out all the dams, restore the natural flows in the streams, cease logging operations, stop farming, eliminate the fish harvest and impacts from the hatcheries … you do all that and the fish will recover. We are certain that if you remove man from the arena, the fish will come back.”
Despite such justifiable pessimism, it’s clear that humans aren’t about to abandon California anytime soon. It’s also clear that humans and salmon can get along. California was densely populated prior to the advent of the missionaries, and yet salmon thrived. It is not our mere presence that threatens the salmon, but our misuse of the landscape. As long as we blithely build housing on land regularly inundated by spring floods, scrape trees off forty-five degree slopes, and plug canyons with millions of tons of rock and concrete, the salmon will suffer.
As will we. Increasing numbers of Californians are finding that a stream without native fish is less than complete. Few wild animals inspire as deep loyalty in their human neighbors as do salmon. And that loyalty, once uncorked, is perhaps the most formidable asset the salmon possess. It scours silt from redds, impedes timber harvest in riparian zones, and even turns dams into swimming pools. Indeed, an important difference between Lagunitas Creek and the Merced River is that while Lagunitas Creek is thronged by organized groups of salmon protectors, the Merced, unlike the neighboring Tuolumne and Stanislaus rivers, has no local salmon protection groups.
A salmon protection group on the Merced would be a good thing for salmon throughout California, though its members might more likely wield fishing poles than wishing poles. The Merced, along with Lagunitas Creek, may hold much of what promise we have for healthy California salmon runs in 2020. Both runs are near the southern limit of their species, and are likely somewhat more tolerant of warm water than their cousins in relatively pristine rivers such as the Klamath. As global climate change ratchets California’s temperature higher in the next two decades, Lagunitas coho and Merced chinook could well be crucial in the effort to maintain salmon populations in northern rivers. We could find ourselves thinking, in twenty years, that tearing down New Exchequer Dam would have been a good start.
