by Ray Lingle and Gary "Fish" Peterson
December 15, 2001

The Mattole watershed is ending one of the driest years on record. Thankfully, the rains have now arrived and adult salmon are moving up the Mattole. It’s been unusually dry since last winter. All of the Mattole Salmon Group’s work this past season has been affected by the drought. MSG’s 2000-2001 trapping efforts yielded only a few adult salmon due to low water. Not until late in the season was there enough water in the river for adult fish to reach our trap site in Ettersburg. By this time, most salmon had spawned in the lower reaches of the river leaving only the latest arrivals the opportunity to spawn in preferred headwaters reaches. This meant that the 5800 chinook fry we hatched at our Arcanum facility, located on the upper Mattole near Whitethorn, developed late and thus were too small to mark and release in the spring as we had intended. Because of this we had to move them to our rearing facility at Solitude on upper South Fork Bear Creek, and hold them through the summer for fall release.

Our rescue rearing project also felt the impact of dry conditions. This program diverts wild juvenile chinook that otherwise risk death from being confined in the overheating lagoon. By late May, the Mattole River was low, very warm, and threatening to close its mouth for the summer. This meant that we had to begin rescuing the down-migrating smolts sooner than we had anticipated. Once we had 3400 of these rescued chinook in ponds for the summer, we struggled continually to keep adequate water flowing to them. A heavy rain in late June helped sustain us and temporarily reopened the mouth of the river, but did not relieve the shortage. At our Solitude rearing facility, there was adequate water for rearing our artificially propagated chinook, but as of Nov.11, still not enough surplus flow to allow us to mark and release them. Before the first rains arrived at the end of Oct, the flow of the Mattole River at Petrolia had fallen to 17 cubic feet per second, matching the record low flow of September 1977. For the third year in a row, portions of the upper Mattole ran dry. Adjacent to the one-lane bridge on the county road about 3.5 miles south of Whitethorn, near the State Park’s Sinkyone Administrative site, the river was reduced to only widely scattered pools for a stretch of at least 300 yards. The pools were filled with trapped and vulnerable salmon and steelhead, who had no escape from predators or lowering water levels.

In September, spurred by the disturbingly low river level, the Mattole Salmon Group mailed a plea to all watershed residents to help us conserve water for the fish and all those dependent on the river. This was part of an ongoing effort by MSG, funded in part by the Calif Dept of Fish and Game (DFG), to reduce unnecessary and wasteful use of water and to thereby improve river flows and fish habitat.

The late arrival of the fall rains has allowed MSG to complete two DFG-funded contracts for the placement of instream log cover structures for coho habitat improvement in the upper Mattole River (10 structures) and in the headwaters of South Fork Bear Creek (13 structures). Also completed this fall was an instream monitoring project on Middle and Westlund creeks, conducted in cooperation with local residents and financed by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and the Goldman Foundation, with valuable assistance from the Trees Foundation as part of the Redwoods to Sea Stewardship Project.

Dry and difficult though it has been, year 2000 has been a successful and productive one for salmon and for restoration work in the watershed. The rescued chinook that we released in early November mark the most successful year yet in this pilot project that seeks to save wild salmon from being trapped in the overheated water of the summer lagoon. This rearing technique assists salmon that have otherwise had no direct human intervention in their life cycle, and it also ensures minimal human impact on their genetic makeup. We are hopeful that this program will be increasingly significant in the future.







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Table of Contents for Mattole Restoration Newsletter, Issue 17 - Winter/Spring 2002