The Good Fight: Restoring the “LT”

The project began to take shape near the beginning of the now four-year drought, and following the time-honored tradition of anglers planning anything, it involved beer. The planning committee was spontaneous and probably not much different from thousands of small groups of fisherfolk who for at least the past four centuries have devoted a conversation to bemoaning constraints in the productivity of a beloved trout fishery. But in one respect, this group was much different — its members translated their suds-fueled sentiment into actual on-the-ground action. The group of anglers was composed of leaders of the nascent Truckee River chapter of Trout Unlimited — the Tahoe Trout Bums. The venue was the Blue Coyote Bar and Grill. And the object of their affection was the Little Truckee River.

The Little Truckee, or “LT,” is the largest tributary to the Truckee River downstream of Lake Tahoe and has been one of the finest and most technical wild trout streams in the American West for the past three decades. The LT, which flows through the Tahoe National Forest, supports a durable population of wild trout and is productive spawning water for both resident trout and the lake denizens that come up out of Boca Reservoir. Trout in the fabled 20-inch class are not uncommon here, 30-inch fish are caught almost every year, and the dry-fly fishing can be phenomenal.

But in recent years, locals began to view the 3.5 miles of river between Boca and Stampede Reservoirs that essentially define the LT as being too limited in habitat and too predictable for trout fishing, due to a variety of factors, including its dam-influenced hydrology and lack of habitat complexity. The Truckee River TU leaders, with a smattering of science know-how and many years of collective angling experience between them, decided they could apply TU’s operational slogan, “We make fishing better by protecting and restoring the best habitat for trout and salmon,” to the LT.

So they did.

Dave Lass was one of the founding fathers of the Truckee River TU chapter in 2009. Lass, now director of all of TU’s work on public lands and waters in California, launched an office in Truckee in 2007 and was committed to making a difference on the ground as well as in the policy arena, where many of the opportunities to protect and restore cold-water fisheries on public lands play out.

Lass says, “The pace and scale of watershed restoration work has increased exponentially in the past decade. However, forest health and meadow restoration projects dominate this arena. You don’t often see projects in California whose primary purpose is to improve or restore habitat for inland trout. You see these kinds of projects in states like Montana, Oregon, Idaho, and Colorado. Having fished throughout the West, I saw the immediate benefits of these projects for angling. I wanted to bring these kinds of efforts to the Sierra Nevada. When we formed the TU Truckee River Chapter in 2009, I listened to what local guides had to say, and improving trout habitat in the Little Truckee was the obvious candidate for such a project.”

Years of anecdotal evidence led the chapter to believe that trout numbers were low in many places along the Little Truckee River. But the notion of improving aquatic habitat in the LT did not originate with the Tahoe Trout Bums — it came from a team of biologists from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife in the late 1990s and became better defined through the Truckee River Watershed Council’s Projects and Assessments Committee project list. Still, Truckee River TU was the first entity to run with the concept.

John Jewett, president of the TU Truckee River chapter, says, “We wanted to enhance the Little Truckee River fishery for both adult and juvenile trout by adding natural elements that would have been replaced had Stampede Dam not been built.”

No major tributaries enter the LT through the project reach, and due to Stampede Dam upstream, this reach lacks natural transport of large woody debris, small-diameter substrates, and large boulders that provide essential habitat for native and wild trout, dace, sculpins, whitefish, and shiners. Field surveys conducted by the Tahoe National Forest confirmed that populations of multiple species of wildlife, including willow flycatchers, mule deer, and native fishes present in adjacent habitats were notably small or not present at all throughout the project area due to degraded habitat. Moreover, creel surveys collected in the project reach were very low compared with upstream habitats, where past restoration occurred in the early 1980s.

Thus, the project had four specific goals: improve habitat for adult and juvenile wild trout in 3.5 miles of the Little Truckee River; disperse recreational use and ultimately improve the angling experience; create opportunities for public investment in watershed restoration through volunteerism; and sustain the region’s angling-related economy.

Projects at this scale are complicated and take an army to pull off. To get the Little Truckee River Habitat Improvement Project off the ground, three things had to be done. One was to get buy-ins from the multiple resource agencies and other interests who would need to be strong partners in the initiative. Another was to raise the money required to pay for all phases of the project, including planning, design, construction, monitoring, and outreach. And the third was to rally the sport-fishing community in Northern California and Nevada to support it.

TU worked in partnership with biologists from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and the U.S. Forest Service in 2011 and 2012 to complete biological monitoring and physical habitat identification in the proposed project reach of the Little Truckee, ultimately confirming the findings of habitat and creel surveys while providing robust data on the assemblage of native fishes and densities of benthic macroinvertebrates.

The chapter secured funding through the Forest Service’s Placer/Nevada County Resources Advisory Council (RAC) in 2011 to complete initial planning for the project, which produced the Advanced Restoration Design. They followed that with another grant from the RAC to complete the environmental analysis required under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) — required for “significant” projects or actions on all federal public lands. Trout Unlimited donated in-kind services to complete all planning and permitting for the project and secured grants from the National Forest Foundation, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, the Forest Service, and others to underwrite the majority of the project construction and monitoring costs.

From a grant proposal submitted by Truckee River TU to fund the construction phase of the project: “The final, implementation phase was developed progressively through a rigorous review and engagement process involving a broad range of stakeholders. Restoration designs were developed to limit disturbance and facilitate natural modes of recovery where possible, and to deliver a range of benefits that will improve overall meadow function, improve water quality and temperatures, reduce peak flows and augment base flows, and significantly enhance riparian and aquatic habitat.”

What this translated to in real life, over three weeks in August and September of 2015, was a Herculean effort involving bulldozers, haul trucks, and excavators to transport and install the trees, boulders, willows, and gravels required to give the Little Truckee a makeover. These structures now provide multifaceted habitats and allow trout to move more readily throughout the reach when low water and elevated temperatures become a problem for them.

One hundred and thirteen large trees were placed in the channel — primarily Jeffery and lodgepole pines — some of which were donated from Squaw Valley Ski Resort. Trees up to 40 inches in diameter and 50 feet long with root wads were installed at strategic locations to improve channel complexity, encourage deeper localized scouring and pool formation, and create cover for fish. Though scouring will occur downstream of large wood structures, over time, the structures will also create sediment traps, slowing velocity and increasing volume in the channel, resulting in channel-bed elevation and channel-floodplain reconnection.

The new boulders are mostly three to four feet in diameter and were acquired from sites near the project reach to enhance hydraulic complexity, promote pool generation, increase spawning potential, provide cover, and increase access to the floodplain. And yes, they are already attracting large fish.

Natural reproduction of native fishes in tailwater systems is always a major limiting factor to population size, due to the limited availability of appropriately sized gravels. So the Truckee River TU partnered with the CDFW, the USFS, and Teichert Aggregates to organize four separate gravel enhancement projects in 2014 and 2015, using local volunteers as the labor force to create spawning habitat at the upper end of the reach. These substrates will migrate downstream over time, enhancing spawning habitat throughout the project area. Excavators complemented this work by adding over 50 cubic yards of spawning gravels to create more than two dozen new spawning beds.

In addition, the project created four new backwater habitats for rearing juvenile trout and planted over 75 adult willows along the banks to reduce erosion and increase shade along the channel.

Within a few days of installing the trees and boulders, trout were observed occupying the new habitat these structures created. Truckee River TU’s Facebook page lit up with photos and comments cheering the results, and two videos commissioned by Lass, shot from a drone, highlighted the before-and-after character of the project reach. You can see them on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5T1i934Ncc&feature=youtu.be.

“It was really gratifying to see the results we expected happen so quickly,” says Brian Slusser, owner of Four Season Guide Service and now a Truckee River TU board member. “Juvenile trout are using the new backwaters, and adult fish are hunkered down in the deeper pools adjacent to the root wads of the trees.”

And the fishing? Still world class. In a few years, expect more and bigger fish in many more spots on the LT. All wild, of course.

Lass notes that the new, more complex habitat will continue to change as the river goes through its annual hydrological cycle, with higher pulse flows in the late spring, assuming a decent snowpack. If the Little Truckee experiences average spring flows, the new structures will scour deeper pools and deposit this material on bars downstream that will serve as new spawning habitat and create new stream banks. TU will conduct a telemetry study in 2016 to track movement of fish in the system and help evaluate how often and when trout and other species are using this new habitat.

“This postrestoration monitoring work will not only help us evaluate the efficacy of our restoration tactics, it will also provide critical flow, temperature, and temporal data that will enhance recommendations to support better dam releases in the near future, thus tackling the last major limiting factor in the Little Truckee system,” says Lass. “All of this work creates a very bright future for one of California’s most beloved trout streams.”

The American naturalist Henry David Thoreau famously said, “Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing it is not fish they are after.” But of course, even when there are more spiritual rewards for a good day on the water, most of us don’t mind catching a few fish, too. Whatever their motives, the Tahoe Trout Bums have been dedicated to improving the environment for fish throughout the Truckee River watershed, and the results have been immediate, as well as promising even more a year or two down the line and for future generations of anglers to enjoy.

Matt Heron, owner-operator of Matt Heron Fly Fishing, a guide service in the Truckee area, is one of the original Tahoe Trout Bums — “young, passionate anglers who wanted to ‘give a little back’ to the waters” of the Truckee area, according to http://www.tahoetroutbum.org. Heron has traveled and fished in many places around the world, but says the LT is “a true gem” as a trout fishery. He says, “My livelihood depends on good trout waters, but taking care of the fishing resource is vitally important, even if you don’t guide full time for a living. Every angler should take it upon himself or herself to give to a stream as much or more than you take from it.”

The Tahoe Trout Bums couldn’t have known that night in the Blue Coyote, as beer boosted their bravado, that this commitment to giving back to the Little Truckee River would mean hundreds of hours of multiple tasks before their vision would be realized. Meeting with potential funders, writing grant proposals, working out planning and construction requirements with various agencies, hiring and coordinating with multiple consulting firms to accomplish planning and preproject monitoring objectives, organizing volunteer crews into bucket brigades to hand-deliver supplemental gravels to the streambed — there was a lot to do.

But the considerable investment of time and resources began paying off in drawing friends to the river, even before the Little Truckee River Habitat Improvement Project wrapped up in September 2015 and trout moved into the new habitat. Lass says, “Maybe it was a good thing we didn’t understand at first how much it would take to complete the project. But the more we got into it, the more people wanted to support it — even people who had never fished the river. That helped us keep momentum.”

The Little Truckee River Habitat Improvement Project is yet more proof that habitat restoration can really work for trout. It’s also proof that even trout bums can take a good idea from concept to reality in a fairly short period of time — whether or not it’s only fish they are after.