News from Big Bend Pool pt. 6

Placitas, New Mexico
March 3, 2011

Dear friends of the wild summer steelhead of Steamboat Creek,
Hello from the valley of the Rio Grande River.  I trust you are all well and in good spirits.  Maggie and I are doing quite well and recently made a walk of about fifteen miles through the high desert here.  I was tired by the time we got back to the vehicle, but Maggie was still capable of bounding away after a jackrabbit we scared up in the last mile or so.  I was impressed as I watched her sail over two-foot-high brush.  Even at the beginning of the hike I wouldn’t have been able to do that barefoot.  On the other hand, I am unsure Maggie would have been able to carry this off were she wearing my boots.
Let me also say at the outset here that the Ford Explorer the Foundation gave me has gotten me over the 1,500 miles of highway and secondary roads from central Oregon to this small town in northern New Mexico trouble free so far.  Thank you.

First of all, the 196 days Maggie and I spent at Big Bend Pool this season were successful.  No evidence of poaching was discovered when I returned the pool after being gone and I caught no one poaching.  On only one season, 2004, has there been evidence of poaching at the pool.  At that time, I returned at midday and found a large patch of fresh blood splashed on a rock located in the trail down to the pool.  Some snagging gear was laid out in the viewing area, and a big snarl of line was found in the parking area next to Steamboat Creek Road.  After analyzing these things for a while, I determined that probably no more than a single fish had been snagged and removed from the pool.  Since 2004, no steelhead have been taken from Big Bend Pool that I am aware of during the late springs, summers, and autumns that my dogs and I have been at the pool.
This season, on August 11th, 2010, my good friend, Ray Kinney, came to visit and gave me some two to four-pound tippet, with a swivel attached, that he had found at Steamboat Falls.  On another occasion, an angler I have met previously named Travis told me of visiting the pool on the 27th of December, 2009—seventeen days after I had left the pool—and seeing a black Panther Martin lure hanging from a log that for the last three years has been hanging out over midpool.
Averi Willow and her good dog, Wintu, were quite helpful protecting the steelhead on Wednesday nights during July and August when I took Maggie into Roseburg for obedience classes.  She offered to watch the site and I took her up on her offer.  Averi and Wintu were, thus, very important to both the wild summer steelhead and to Maggie and me.

The late spring of the 2010 Season was wet and cool with fifty-six inches of creek rises, more than three times the amount documented on any of the last dozen seasons at least.  This wet spring with its snowfall above three thousand feet was probably one of the main reasons for the cool spring and summer temperatures measured in Steamboat Creek.  The highest temperatures measured in Steamboat Creek during 2010 were 75° and 76° and these temperatures were confined to a three day period in the last week of July.  On those three July days the creek probably started the day in the middle to upper 60°s.  High seasonal temperatures during other hotter seasons have been measured in the low 80°s.

While late spring and summer were cooler than usual, autumn was warmer than usual.  The autumns of 2009 and 2008 were also warmer later into the season and no nighttime temperatures at or below 32° were documented until the 23rd of November in 2010.  During 2009 and 2008, no temperatures below freezing were measured until the first week of December on either season.  Before 2008, it was not uncommon to have nights below freezing, a few of them, in September and more commonly in October.
I can’t explain this, but think it probable that the increase in energy in the global atmospheric system that is clumsily called global warming is too easy an explanation for it.  I could certainly be wrong.  It seems to me that pointing a finger at real yet poorly understood patterns in dynamic and complex global environmental systems, such as El Nino events or global warming, creates more problems than otherwise.  Pointing a finger away from these dynamic systemic patterns clearly also creates problems that are probably even more troublesome.  For instance, the people with a vested interest in the status quo in this country—“The Profit Motive”—have been saying that the recent terrible winter conditions experienced by the Eastern part of this country prove that people with a concern for the consequences of global warming are being alarmist and are creating mountains from mole hills.
For the time being, I am more comfortable simply documenting what happens and waiting to see whether the autumns of the next few years continue this warming trend without jumping on any bandwagon.

Despite the cooler than average water temperatures during the hot part of this season, on the morning of September 19th, I discovered a twenty-three-inch steelhead in the pool that had apparently died of natural causes.  This fish had a very short nose which indicates that it had, relatively speaking, left the ocean quite recently, perhaps as part of the poorly understood fall run of steelhead in the North Umpqua Basin.
By this morning of September 19th, the creek had risen six inches in the previous twenty-four hours and the number of steelhead holding in the pool had dropped from about 400 to less than twenty-five fish.  These data clearly show that summer steelhead were exiting the pool and seriously on the move in the lower and middle portions of the Steamboat Creek Basin when this fish died.  During its last hours, this small deceased steelhead was probably surrounded by other steelhead that were actively migrating and this may have mortally influenced the small fish to keep moving upstream rather than to rest and to gather its resources.
Only three other steelhead are known to have died of natural causes over the last twelve seasons, one in each of the following seasons:  2004, 2005, 2006.  I wasn’t paying attention to nose length in 2004, but in 2005 and 2006 both fish were quite bright silver and also had very short noses.  This again clearly shows that both of these fish were also relatively fresh from the ocean and may have attempted to migrate too far too fast.

No pool steelhead were taken by otters this season.  Evidence for a total of twenty-one steelhead being killed by otters has been documented during my time at the pool.

I am pleased to be able report that no hatchery steelhead were documented in Big Bend Pool during 2010.  The least that can be said about the interaction of hatchery and wild Pacific salmon is that hatchery fish have been shown again and again to have negative consequences for wild fish numbers.  Seeing no hatchery steelhead in the pool therefore means that these negative influences have been mitigated to greater degree than has been true when hatchery steelhead have been documented in the pool.  In the past when there have been hatchery steelhead in Big Bend Pool, they seem to average about 1% of the wild steelhead present.

No spring chinook, either parr, smolts, or adult fish were documented in Big Bend Pool or in the Steamboat Creek Basin around this pool this season.

During 2010, the steelhead moved to and from the pool more than on previous seasons that I am aware of and the cooler temperatures both made it possible for these fish to migrate and to find a greater number of alternative places to hold earlier than usual.  The high count of wild steelhead in Big Bend Pool was 487 fish on September 11th, 2010.  While this is not as large as the seasonal high count on some other seasons (600 to 700 steelhead), the increased exit and entry of steelhead suggests that perhaps an additional 200 or more steelhead were present in the Steamboat Creek Basin and effectively uncountable.  Once the steelhead begin actively to leave and enter and re-enter the pool, for the most part, it is impossible to determine which fish are truly new to the pool.
It is worth reflecting on the fact that the summer steelhead that use Big Bend Pool as a temporary refuge during the warmer waters of summer and the lower waters of late summer and fall are usually made up of 99% wild fish.  Wild steelhead are known to be stronger and more resilient than are hatchery fish and thus are less susceptible to the negative consequences of environmental change.  I am regularly asked if I have seen the numbers of steelhead in the pool change during the now twelve seasons I have been present.
My answer is no and I follow up this answer by explaining that Big Bend Pool steelhead are, as I have stated, primarily wild fish.  I point out further that during hot summers, with thermal barriers in place lower in the basin, the high count of steelhead in Big Bend Pool is normally later in the season—usually some time early in October or later—and that this count is a higher number than is true for cooler summers.  During cool summers, the high count of steelhead in Big Bend Pool is earlier—often in August—and it is virtually always a lower number than is true during the hotter seasons.
In addition to the influences of warmer or cooler summers on the wild summer steelhead holding patterns, one, high-water events clearly cause summer steelhead to shift around in their natal basins;  two, changing ocean conditions also influence wild summer steelhead numbers; and, three, highly fluctuating numbers of hatchery fish in the oceans and elsewhere have negative consequences for wild fish numbers.   Bearing these things in mind, you can see that a comparison of the high counts of summer steelhead in Big Bend Pool for the last twelve seasons is an overly simple index of the health of the wild summer steelhead that call Steamboat Creek home.

The ladder at Steamboat Falls was blocked yet again this season.  This was the fifth consecutive blockage since I began to pay attention to this situation in 2006.  A small number of steelhead were first seen jumping at the falls on the 31st of May.  Larger numbers of summer steelhead were jumping at this falls on the 21st and 22nd of June and this latter jumping probably continued until the ladder was cleared by the ODFW on either the 30th of June or the 1st of July.  When I asked an ODFW employee which of these two days the ladder had been cleared, he said that he had been told not to talk to me by his supervisor.
For what it is worth, based on a few letters received from the local ODFW, they appear to want to assert that this ladder was not blocked during 2010.  A visit to the ladder that I made on May 16th clearly and quite unambiguously showed that no current of water was exiting the base of the ladder at that time.  If the water at the bottom of the ladder is still, unstirred by any current, the ladder is blocked and, if water can’t get through the ladder, a steelhead surely will not be able to do so.

The North Umpqua Foundation contracted with an engineering firm to analyze the ladder at Steamboat Falls and to come up with some alternative proposals for fixing this chronic blockage problem.  As I understand it, the engineer’s report led to meetings of various interested parties and agencies and one of these proposals was chosen to fix the ladder.  This fix was set to happen during the 2011 season, however, it was discovered that the failure of a culvert under the road into the Steamboat Falls Campground has compromised that road’s ability to handle heavy equipment.  The last I heard, the Forest Service is planning to replace this culvert in 2011 and this has, for the time being, pushed back the timing of the ladder fix.  I assume that, because of this culvert, the ladder-repair work will occur in 2012.

Even though Maggie and I left the pool on November 27th, spending only 196 days at the pool, the marginal notations I make in my notebook about the number of people who visit—when summed—yield a total of 1,589 human visitors to the pool this season, the second largest total during my time at the pool.  This is a surprisingly large number given how short season was, about two weeks shorter than average for the seasons I have spent at the pool and also given how wet the season was.  When I divide the total number of visitors by the days Maggie and I spent at the pool, I get a result of 8.1 visitors per day.  This is the same number of visitors per day as the busiest season heretofore, 2006, and the 2010 season was nineteen days shorter.  This relatively high number of visitors for the season, I think, is probably due to PBS regularly rerunning the Oregon Field Guide feature about Big Bend Pool.  I continue to have people tell me that they were visiting because they had just seen the pool on TV.

On September 26th of 2010, I had a visit that caused me some concern and, while I may be wrong about these galoots, I think they represent the sort of people that make a protective human presence at the pool a good thing.  I include the notes I made on this encounter.
Today two guys visited on motorbikes during a time when there were several other visitors present.  The taller and the unsmiling one of the two, looked at me after looking over the two hundred or so steelhead holding at the lower end of the pool and asked something like:  “Are they trying to start a run on this river?”
“Who?”
“The ODFW?”
“No . . . These are wild fish.  They have been returning here for hundreds of years on their own.”
A short time later, the other guy, a person who smiled a lot, asked:  “Where can you fish that’s close to here.”
“The whole of the creek—this is Steamboat Creek—is closed to angling and has been since 1932.”  I think I was by this time pointing at the water in front of me.

When Maggie and I left the pool on November 27th, Jim Van Loan, Jim H., and Ed K. helped me with this process.
Thank you all again for your many kindnesses and your support.
Take care, go well.

Lee Spencer