Bean's Blog

November 4, 2008

Endangered Small Streams

The fly landed like eider down settling on a pane of glass. It drifted no more than a couple of inches when it disappeared in a gentle take that indicated the trout was completely fooled. When the line came taut, the fish bolted upstream to deeper water, but was soon laying in the net, while I slipped the hook out of its upper lip and let it go.
Everybody has their favorite kind of fishing. For many years, mine has been prowling the shoreline of various bass lakes and ponds, searching for bass and panfish. That rather narrow scope widened about a quarter century ago when I started casting flies for striped bass. This was also done in lakes, but warmwater fishing still. Since then I’ve branched out to other non-trout species, and I think there’s a lot to be said and done in fly-fishing without trout.
Since I write a lot about the subject of catching various warmwater species – including my monthly column in California Fly Fisher – many people probably assume that’s all I fish for. Not true. I do fish for trout regularly, and when trout fishing, small streams are my preference.
By small, I mean those waters that are not the kind you float in a canoe, pontoon, or drift boat.
I like those freestone streams that cascade down canyons, with only small stretches of flat water – many that are found in Southern California.
There’s just something alive and fresh about flowing water that you don’t get in a pond or lake. The movement stimulates your senses with sound and color. Streams are beautiful places even when you aren’t fishing. Just watching the dance of water down and around the rocks and shapes of a stream lightens my heart. And, of course, there are trout to consider.
Trout in small streams are generally opportunists. They have to make a living in an environment that is sterile by the standards of a spring creek. These mountain streams I love are barren compared to a meandering meadow stream. The trout that live in these tumbling waters seldom pass up an opportunity to seize food when it comes by. That doesn’t mean, however, that they are easy to fish for. While a trout might investigate anything that comes its way, and non-selectivity is a trademark of small mountain streams, you can still get skunked.
If selectivity is not an issue, presentation certainly is. Trout in small streams are easily spooked, and blundering about gets you little. For my style of guerrilla stream fishing, I like a short fly rod over a long one. There are several reasons. First, the small confines of these slender trickles of canyon water are such that waving a long stick only gets you in trouble. There are a thousand things waiting to catch your rot tip as you move about the stream. I spend as much time crawling or stooping to clear overhead cover as I do fishing, and a long rod just gets in the way.
Secondly, there aren’t many places on small streams where you can use the casting distance you can achieve with a long rod. About the only thing a long rod does well on a small stream is dapping a dry fly delicately on the water one pool up from where you stand. If you don’t mind the bother of working with a long rod on a small stream , then by all means fish one.
For myself, a rod of perhaps seven feet is the upper limit, and I would rather fish a six foot rod than a seven. Much shorter than that, however, and the action suffers. I also like the action of the old fiberglass fly rods of a generation ago. Perhaps because I spent most of my younger years fishing them, the slightly softer action of a fiberglass rod suits my casting style.
I used to hesitate about writing the following, then I decided to spill one of my small stream trade secrets at the risk of offending some who dislike stream-side alteration. One of my favorite small stream fly-fishing tools is a compact pair of pruning shears. I happily trim my way into casting locations that would otherwise be off limits. I clip offending branches that hang just where the fly, or the back cast, needs to go. I also trim trail edges, and keep certain holes in the stream-side brush open so I can get in there to cast. There have been times, especially on those streams affected by both fire and subsequent flood, that I wished I’d packed in a chain saw for the task. A couple of miles of climbing over downed trees and brush jammed into the remaining upright trees along a stream course will make a logging advocate of you.
Don’t think for a moment that small stream fishing is all about dry flies. I certainly like to fish dry when it is appropriate, but there’s a lot of fishing you’ll miss if you stick to the surface, even in really small streams. Nymphing or wet fly fishing on a little stream is as effective, or more so, than dry fly fishing just as it is on larger waters. On the Santa Ana River, for example, which is a stream you can almost jump across in places, there are some holes and runs that come up to your waist, and a slightly weighted nymph drifted through these spots is likely to produce the biggest fish of the day.
Much of this fishing is hiking. On many streams in Southern California, the farther away you get from spots you can reach with a vehicle, the better the fishing is. By that I don’t just mean the catch rate – which certainly goes up away from access points – but also the quality of the experience. I don’t hike as far – or cover ground as fast – as I used to. Age is beginning to tell, and I take it a lot easier and cover less stream in an hour – and in doing so, I have learned a fundamental lesson about small streams. If you take your time and fish them carefully, you needn’t hurry. Rushing off to the next pool after the second cast is not necessary. Chances are good that you’ll get a strike on your first or second cast, but if you take the time to think about where you want the fly to go and then fish it carefully, you’ll catch a great many more fish on small waters. I’ve probably bypassed or spooked more fish than I’ve ever caught on a little stream.
Much of my favorite fishing comes in the little creeks and streams close to my Southern California home. Others are spread out across the West. I’ve fished in a half dozen states in the Southwest, and all are similar, and each is different. One weekend may find me on a tiny trickle barely two feet across, tossing a fly to brilliantly colored native trout in Utah, and the next trudging the bank of a meadow stream in the Sierra. In these kinds of small streams, a six incher is almost surely a mature fish, and a eight or nine-inch fish is a wall-hanger.
Southern California is not unique in that it has a bunch of small streams. Most desert areas in the Southwest have a multitude of small streams for every real river they possess. The wonder is that Southern California has any streams at all. If you understand how water drives the growth of the southern half of the Golden State, you are shocked to see any water running free. Even more startling on closer inspection is that many of these streams have viable populations of trout swimming in them. Just how long this will continue, given the crushing rush to develop every last inch of the land, is any body’s guess. Right now there are dozens of little streams that fly anglers can indulge their passion in. How many will your grandchildren be able to fish?
Piru Creek is a well known fishery. It has good trout fishing for miles, and is located right on the edge of metropolitan Los Angeles and the feverish growth and bustle of that ugly sprawl. It is threatened with de-watering almost on a daily basis. Ravaged by fire, and over-run with too many tourists, hikes, and other non-angling pursuits, it is a fragile water that will remain endangered unless something is done. But most people don’t really think anything will happen to it. Let’s examine the record of what has happened to other streams in Southern California.
Little Rock Creek used to be a pretty good brown trout fishery. It was summarily closed by the Angeles National Forest to protect frogs. They went so far as to proclaim this area as a non-travel area, meaning that you couldn’t even walk in to the stream. They closed a number of campgrounds as well as the road and tried to eliminate human presence in the area. They also killed and removed the trout. Their reasoning was that the frogs were falling prey to the trout. Interestingly, amphibians are in trouble the world over.
Something is killing off these creatures in all sorts of habitats around the world – including many where trout have never existed, and do not exist today. Still, as one biologist cynically remarked to me some years ago, “It’s easier to kill a bunch of trout so it looks like you are doing something than to be constantly criticized for doing nothing.”
This is exactly the reason why there are no brown trout swimming in Little Rock Creek these days, or at least if there are some remaining trout, you can’t fish for them. I guess the Forest Service is afraid you’ll step on one of the frogs. I’m tempted to get a bumper sticker made that says, “Stomp a Frog, Save a Trout,” but it wouldn’t be politically correct. I thought about having this silk-screened on a T-shirt and wearing it to fly fishing club meetings, but even my fishing friends seem more concerned with saving frogs that for their fishing.
I’ve written before about the illegal killing of brown trout in the upper Santa Ana River by biologists from the California Department of Fish and Game and the San Bernardino National Forest. In this case, the driving force is an endangered species of sucker. As I said then, I have nothing against the Santa Ana Sucker, but then I have nothing for it either. Trout I understand. Trout I like, and I would rather see trout than suckers if that was the choice that had to be made.
Other threats continue to plague our streams. In Deep Creek, one of our most beautiful California designated Wild Trout Streams, the fishery has taken a huge hit from years of low water conditions, plus repeated forest fires cause in large part by serious mis-management of our forests. A year or so ago I watched a TV program where a guy with a Doctorate in forestry noted that by comparing photographs of selected areas of the San Bernardino National Forest taken decades apart, he was able to determine that the forest was overburdened with many times more trees than it should have been.
The reason for this was the continued bad idea of putting out any and every fire, no matter how small, before it could do its essential task of thinning the forest under-story. So we have too many trees per acre in the forests. So what? Well, the “So what” is that each tree competes with its neighbors for the available food and water – especially the water. The extreme growth of the forest meant that ground water was being used at a much higher pace. Add to that the other extreme growth of the human population in and around the forests, which also placed stress on the available water, and what suffered was the streams. I have been watching Deep Creek for more than a quarter century and I can see the difference in the stream flows.
If that wasn’t enough, with too many trees from lousy Forest Service management, and too much development, we also encouraged more ground water pumping for making artificial snow for idiots on snow boards to slide down. The streams suffered. So did the life in them. My concern is the trout, but even the frogs are probably bearing the brunt of this mis-guided management – but it’s easier to blame that on the trout rather than clean up the Forest Service’s act when it come to water use.
If you look at Bear Creek, or the South Fork of the Santa Ana, or Fish Fork, or the San Joaquin, or the Whitewater, or Holcomb Creek, or Snow Creek.......... Anyhow, there’s a lot to look at, and because of fires, drought, and woeful mismanagement of resources by almost every state and federal agency, you are lucky to have any fishing at all.
What needs to happen is that local interested parties – and by that I mean local fly-fishing clubs, not big entities like Cal Trout or Trout Unlimited, or the FFF, but local clubs (remember the old saying that “all politics is local”? Well, all real conservation is local, too) need to get involved. Just the same way that groups like the local Quail Unlimited, or the local National Wild Turkey Federation, or the local California Deer Association should work on habitat and conservation, so should local fly-fishing clubs. And by that, I don’t mean the annual trip to clean up the trash on the streams, and then go fishing. No I mean a concentrated effort to clean up the trash in our management of these precious resources. Fly anglers need to get off the fence. Simply by-passing these streams to head to the Sierra or Montana won’t cut it. We need to be working with local agencies to get protection and practical management on our local streams – before they are gone.

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