Riffles: The Mighty McCloud

The McCloud River. Photo by Val Atkinson

Tough As They Come

It’s hard to love a river that refuses to love you back, but that’s how it goes with me and the McCloud. Although I’m on friendly terms with Hat Creek and get along fine with the Stanislaus, the McCloud has thumbed its nose at me every time. It’s a terrible situation, one that fills me with regret for not improving my game. I feel like angling’s Don Quixote, forever tilting at windmills.

I’ve tried to figure out what’s wrong. It could be that the landscape distracts me with its beauty. The Cascades and Mt. Shasta loom large, and the lower river is a gem, flowing over volcanic rock through an isolated canyon timbered with pines and firs. Or maybe I worry too much about a black bear attacking me, or a rattler sinking its fangs into my ankle. Or maybe the trout just have it in for me. If so I don’t care. I’m not ready to quit yet.

The McCloud occupies a unique place in angling history. It was the site of a grand failed experiment intended to enhance the nation’s fisheries. The river derives its name from Alexander McLeod, a fur trapper with the Hudson Bay Company, who discovered the river in 1829—‘discovered,’ that is, if you don’t count the Winnimem Wintu resident there for centuries. McLeod was surprised to find healthy numbers of winter-run Chinook salmon so far from the ocean. That stood in stark contrast to the dwindling stock of Atlantic salmon in eastern streams, their habitat damaged as the cities grew.

In 1871, the newly established U.S. Fish Commission decided to tackle the problem of scarcity. The members chose to build a hatchery in Northern California, where the eggs of Pacific salmon could be collected, fertilized, and transported back east. The deputy in charge was Livingston Stone, a noted fish culturist and Harvard grad ordained as a Unitarian minister. 

Stone left for the coast in August 1872, buying a second-class day ticket on the recently completed Transatlantic Railroad. That’s all he could afford on his stingy $750 budget, but the ticket was still pricey at $80, the equal of $1800 today. The train departed from Omaha, the line’s eastern terminus, and the trip took less than four days, allowing Stone to avoid “the Dangers of the Sea” as the ads put it.

His first choice for the hatchery was the Sacramento, but he learned that logging and mining had killed off significant runs in the American, Feather, and Yuba Rivers. While casting about for an alternative, Stone heard that some railroad crewman had spotted Native Americans spearing winter-run Chinook on the McCloud. He grabbed a stagecoach at Red Bluff, and when he reached the river, he saw the Wintu hanging their salmon on the bushes to cure. He didn’t know, of course, that winter-run Chinook are sacred to the tribe. 

The site looked perfect. A cold feeder creek kept the temperature between 53-57 degrees, an ideal range. Stone tried to hire the Wintu to help with the building, but the language barrier was “too great,” or so the historians claim, although it’s also possible the Wintu were angry with the white men for meddling on their ancestral land.

McCloud hatchery. Photo compliments of Shasta County Historical Society

The hatchery was quite small, only 10 by 14 feet, with a few holding tanks and some hatching troughs outside kept under tents to ward off predators. Stone’s workers clubbed the Chinook they caught or trapped, stripped the roe and milt, packed the fertilized eggs in pine boxes with moss and ice, and delivered them in horse-drawn wagons to a rail depot, where Wells Fargo agents put them on an Omaha train for distribution. 

The McCloud hatchery produced thirty thousand eggs that first year; the count rose to 14 million by 1878. The eggs were planted in 36 states, even landlocked ones like Kansas and Iowa. The scheme was wildly optimistic since the experts weren’t sure that Pacific and Atlantic would or could interbreed. The Chinook salmon—if they survived long enough to spawn—were supposed to find their way to the Mississippi and then to the Gulf of Mexico, doubling back in two or three years to their natal stream. Good luck, as the saying goes. Most salmon died or disappeared.

Yet the experiment wasn’t a complete failure. Stone recognized the bounty of California’s fishery and had advanced his skills as a culturist. The Fish Commission had spent a lot of money and still hoped to recoup on its investment, so Stone was asked to build a new McCloud hatchery, this time for rainbow trout. The trout were caught on setlines with baited hooks sunk near the river bottom. Salmon eggs worked best, and Stone had plenty to spare. They weren’t clubbed like the Chinook, instead returned to the river or a holding pond.

The experiment proved successful. The trout not only survived—they thrived. Hardier than brookies, the rainbows grew faster and were easier to propagate, quickly reaching a decent size. Soon hatcheries were stocking 4×6 inch planters instead of eggs and creating put-and-take fisheries. Virtually every rainbow in the U.S. and elsewhere is related, however distantly, to the Oncorrhyncus mykiss of the McCloud.

I still recall my first visit to the river, a template for all that followed. I’d been warned about the wild trout section of the Lower McCloud. Very difficult, my friends had told me, but I was young and foolish and felt up to the challenge. Anglers relied on Forest Service maps in those days, not Google or gps, and the road from McCloud Reservoir to Ah-Di-Na campground looked harmless on paper. That was an illusion. I’d never driven over such a terrible road, at times no more than rocks of uneven size. My spine vibrated the entire trip.

Hours later, or so it seemed, I reached the campground. It was autumn, so the campers were few. The river was a silty green and not very wide, although too deep to wade across. I didn’t see anything hatching. I set off downstream, climbing over deadfall and the odd boulder, bushwhacking through the alders and cottonwoods. This was rugged country, and my progress was slow until it stopped altogether when I slipped on a pinecone and lost my footing.

Down I went, cracking my shinbone on a hunk of limestone. I howled, I bled. It’s broken, I thought, but I’d only raised an ugly bruise the color of an eggplant. I began to limp, newly aware of how alone I was, and how vulnerable. I feared I’d become one of those lost souls you read  about, rescued after days in the wilderness after surviving on roots and berries. My anxiety spiked as the light faded. Every rustle of the underbrush signalled a black bear on the move, a hungry beast about to make a meal of me. Though I did catch a few small rainbows during a brief Caddis hatch, I wouldn’t dare call it a victory.  

“You might guess I’d never want to lay eyes on the McCloud again, but fly fishers have an incredible ability to erase or ignore their past failures and start over.”

I’m no more cowardly than the next angler, or only a little, but I was disgusted with myself in the morning and made the mistake of trying harder, limping even faster to cover more territory and acquiring a new set of scratches and bruises. The result was the same—a few small rainbows—and I did no better on my last day. To add insult to injury, I’d have to drive over that hideous road again with no trophy to show for my efforts. That didn’t seem right or fair.

But fishing isn’t about right or fair, anymore than the law is about justice. You might guess I’d never want to lay eyes on the McCloud again, but fly fishers have an incredible ability to erase or ignore their past failures and start over. I made three more trips over the years and always left San Francisco in a spirit of blind optimism, certain this time I’d net the trout of my dreams.

I did catch some fat rainbows, though never a worthy brown, but it pains me to admit that they shrunk in size compared to the bruisers I saw dudes displaying in those videos that fill other anglers with spite. Is it childish to want to push those guys into the water? Probably. But maybe I’ll star in my own video someday when I make a triumphant last trip to the McCloud, where I cast perfectly and suffer no injuries and can say at last the river loves me in return. 

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