I moved back to Los Angeles a couple years ago after living in a part of New Mexico where an hour’s drive could put me on an incredible variety of wild and rugged trout waters, and I knew that I would miss having home waters that were actually close to home. I’m a writer, so I’m lucky that I can make frequent-enough trips to waters such as the forks of the Kern or the upper Owens, and I also love to fish the forks of the upper San Gabriel, just about thirty miles east of my house in Eagle Rock. There, crowds of picnickers, teenage hikers, surly gold miners, and thick alder and poison oak make searching for rainbows a social event and a special challenge.
But I quickly found that I was feeling starved for nature, so I decided to indulge my love of California’s botany and began volunteering at the Hahamongna Native Plant nursery — a project of the Arroyo Seco Foundation that propagates native plants for restoration projects and to sell to anyone looking to add native habitat to their own garden. A few days after I started, I got to talking with the managing director of the foundation, Tim Brick, and told him I was a fly fisher. He perked up and said that one of the major goals of the foundation was to restore native fish to the Arroyo Seco, the coldest and one of the longest tributaries of the Los Angeles River, a former spawning habitat for the southern steelhead, one of California’s most endangered fish.
This shocked me, though it shouldn’t have — the LA was once a fantastic steelhead river, and many Southern California fly fishers can probably recall fishing the Arroyo above the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada. “Then came the Station Fire in 2008 and the floods that followed,” Tim told me. “Before that, we knew there were fish up there, and we were trying to build habitat, remove invasives, fight for the removal of the dam at Brown Canyon, and make it into the trout stream I think it still can be. But since then, we haven’t been able to reliably document any trout up there.”
Fast-forward to last spring, and Tim and I sat down for a meeting with Justin Bubenik and Eric Callow from the 250-member Pasadena Casting Club, one of the oldest in America, which happens to have its clubhouse and oak-lined casting pool right on the banks of the Arroyo. They understood immediately, as most fly fishers would, how major a step it would be to restore trout to the stream.
For an organization dedicated to ecosystem management such as the Arroyo Seco Foundation, trout are key to showing that even this close to Los Angeles, there can be a living, healthy stream that deserves better than to be channelized and dammed. Trout also can help everyone understand how important it is to the health of the whole watershed to control invasives such as English ivy and black mustard and to remove silted-up and dangerous dams such as the one in Brown Canyon. Trout provide both a goal (to restore a native species), and an incentive (to help rebuild an ecosystem capable of being home to that native species) that promote the health of the watershed. The real dream, though it’s a long way off, is that one day, the Arroyo Seco could be a part of an LA River system that sees steelhead running back up to spawn. In the meantime, it would be pretty neat to be able to fish for wild trout in Pasadena. But we’re starting small, and we all agreed at the meeting that the first step had to be to see if there were still trout up there. Personally, I had a lot of hope. I’d gone up on an expedition with the Fisheries Resource Volunteer Corps, a group that monitors and helps protect trout streams in the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains. We checked out the East Fork of the San Gabriel, which was once a fine trout stream, but where the FRVC had had no reports of anyone catching a fish for the entire previous season after it had been degraded by illegal mining and our persistent drought.
We didn’t see a single fish, but a few months later, I went up alone and raised three furious little rainbows, only one of which I managed to land and photograph, missing the first two, because I hadn’t actually been expecting strikes. On the Arroyo, which is small water and can run at less than one cubic foot per second at times, it’s easy to imagine the trout have been extirpated by floods or drought, but Tim dug back in the records and noticed that there have been times this century where the stream had longer periods of low flow than this latest drought, and I had made several trips up to the stream where I saw abundant aquatic insect life, breeding newts, and more frogs than I could count. I made one trip with a fisheries biologist who noted the good spawning gravel, the abundant aquatic life, and several deep pools, and he said he thought there was no good reason why trout couldn’t have survived the drought and persisted somewhere along the stream.
A few weeks later, I met up with Justin, a tall young real estate lawyer who also serves as the California cochair for Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, and about fifteen other volunteers from the Pasadena Casting Club, in the parking lot of a Sprouts in La Canãda at the base of the Angeles Crest. We loaded up some carpools and set off on a hike from Switzer’s Camp in the upper Arroyo, 10 miles north into the mountains. We split up and took sections of the river, with Justin, my best buddy John, and a new angler named Eric pushing down into the trailless gorge section of the stream. It was extremely tough going and very hard to cast, but we saw some great-looking water and a thick hatch. No one saw any trout, but we left with the feeling that the project was only getting started, and plan to do more searches starting from down below near the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where the water is currently running wide and clear and cool, and where within recent memory local fly fishers could bike to the stream and cast for rainbows.
We didn’t find fish that day, but the expedition became a spur for a fish-restoration effort that has taken off in the last year. Policymakers here often talk about the “41-mile-long” Los Angeles River, but the long-term effort to rebuild a natural system along the main stem is inextricable from the work of protecting and restoring the river’s mountain tributaries. We’re now partnering with the firm Stillwater Sciences to launch a project identifying, listing, and making a plan for removing antiquated check dams, invasive species, and barriers to fish passage in pools and sections of the remote stream with likely habitat in the hope that native fish and mountain streams will come to be recognized as a central part of larger LA River restoration plans.
In the meantime, I’ve been going up and searching another tributary — Big Tujunga Creek, where I’ve heard two reports of trout being seen in recent years. Trout in Southern California’s mountain waters are very picky about high flows, and as of this writing, the flows are just getting to the point where we can to get back to searching in earnest. Even if we don’t manage to find trout, the project is already helping to build an understanding of the stream’s health and the health of the watershed as a whole, and we’re in the exciting initial stages of discussing how to bring a rainbow population back to the Arroyo Seco, even if we don’t manage to find an extant population. For me, at least, it’s provided a little window of hope at a time when we have so much cause to worry about the future of coldwater fish in California. Our work has highlighted research that shows rainbows adapting to survive in temperature ranges much higher than I’d once thought would allow, a fact of which I imagine many fly fishers in Southern California might have anecdotal experience. We’re finalizing a legal settlement with Los Angeles County to provide thousands of native riparian plants to restore areas being excavated for a massive sediment removal project behind Devil’s Gate Dam in Pasadena, an agreement that is the result of years’ worth of legal wrangling and that has helped bring activists and local policy makers, who need to manage the intense flood control and recreation pressures that have historically governed how the county manages its mountain waterways, into a shared vision of how native vegetation and the control of invasive species are inextricably linked to streambed health.
I’m aware of the challenges — as I write this, in early June, the thermometer along the Arroyo is reading 106 degrees. But my experience fishing these mountain waters, cultivating native plants, and seeing restoration projects move forward has given me a lot of hope that there’s a long-term future for salmonids in South- ern California. I’ve seen the plants we grow adapt and even thrive in some of the brutal summers we’ve had here in recent years. I’ve seen big trout feeding happily in small pools on very hot days in these mountains. I’ve come to think that the trout down here can be surprisingly adaptable and resilient, when given half the chance. I think we may well see them adapting and thriving in waters within sight of downtown LA sooner, rather than later.
We’re always looking for volunteers, especially from fly fishers who understand a bit about trout habitat and behavior. Anyone who would like to help search for trout or would be interested in learning a bit about growing native plants or removing invasives to help restore our mountain waterways should feel free to reach out to me at james@arroyoseco.org. It can be hard work and great fun to explore these waters so close to the metropolitan areas that so many California fly fishers call home, and I’ve found that the experience of working on stream restoration and growing and interacting with our native plants has made me a much better and more knowledgeable fly fisher, even when I’m off fishing big water farther north,