Water-Flow Battle Could Leave Fishery Up a Creek

Beneath sheer canyon walls, amid thousands of buzzing insects and surrounded by blossoming cottonwoods with leaves of lemon-lime, Conrad Ricketts stood knee-deep in a shimmering pool, casting his cares away.

He was relatively close to his Venice home, but Ricketts might as well have been in another state, or alone on some rural Sierra Nevada stream. He was so close to home, and yet Ricketts never felt so far away.

“We’ve got 20 million people within two hours of all this,” he said, watching trout snatching bugs from the surface, sending circular ripples out over the pool. “And most of them don’t even know about this place.”

This place is Piru Creek, a meandering waterway linking Los Angeles County’s Pyramid Lake to Ventura County’s Lake Piru, coursing beautifully for about 14 miles through the Los Padres National Forest.

For many of those aware of its existence, Piru Creek is merely one of many places to escape the bustling and often violent world in which they live, a world that lies just over the hill down Interstate 5.

In Piru Creek they have a riparian corridor, lush with not only cottonwoods but willows and alders and oaks. They also have 12 1/2 miles on which to cast baited hooks and perhaps take home some of the 9,000 hatchery-raised trout stocked in the creek each year.

But to people like Ricketts, it is much more.

The northernmost 1 1/2 miles of Piru Creek is a catch-and-release section, teeming with wild trout that thrive in the cool, clear water and spend their days lying in wait for insects to touch down on the surface.

The fish in Piru Creek aren’t big, averaging only five to eight inches with a few pushing 15 inches, but they are plentiful.

Estimates, based on electroshock studies by the Department of Fish and Game, place the population of wild trout in the 1 1/2-mile section at about 6,000 fish per mile, meaning there are about 9,000 wary little rainbows swimming over and around granite boulders from pool to pool.

Matching wits against wild trout is every fly fisherman’s dream. And being able to do it in a pristine setting only an hour from Los Angeles makes it extra special in the eyes of people like Ricketts.

“All you’ve got to do is watch the local news for a week to realize that places like this are necessary for our mental health,” he said, whipping a caddis fly out into the swirling current and watching for takers. “The ability to come out here and walk along the stream and see, not only all the trout scurrying around, but the deer the creek brings in from the hills, is what makes you feel so far away.”

Ricketts’ fly was suddenly snatched by a five-inch trout that immediately took to the air and went skittering the length of the pool. He stripped in his line and soon had the little fish at his side. He reached down, removed the hook and watched the trout dart back into the pool.

He then turned his attention to another section of the creek, whipping his line through the air and setting his fly on the water, watching and waiting for another, perhaps bigger fish to strike.

“The little fish, they don’t know better,” he said. “But the bigger fish, they didn’t get big by being stupid.”

But try as he might, Ricketts couldn’t quite cast all of his cares away on this day.

In the back of his mind was a closed-door meeting in nearby Castaic, involving various bureaucracies discussing the future of Piru Creek.

At issue, not surprisingly, was water. But also being discussed was the endangered southwestern arroyo toad and, of course, the recreational fishery that has been established since the dam went up in the early 1970s, creating Pyramid Lake.

Water is chief among concerns for the Department of Water Resources, despite what anybody in that agency says about the toad. The DWR, through its licensing agreement with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, is mandated to maintain flows adequate to sustain a viable fishery. And doing that costs the agency money.

The DWR also must release Lake Piru water that reservoir had been collecting via natural flows through the watershed since its construction in the 1920s. The DWR gauges the water coming into Pyramid naturally and does not have a problem with this.

However, to fulfill its requirement to provide adequate flows to ensure a healthy fishery in Piru Creek--25 cubic feet per second in the summer and as low as five cubic feet per second in the fall and winter--the DWR must release State Water Project water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which supplies Pyramid via the California Aqueduct. This water is ultimately used for energy, irrigation and as drinking water for Los Angeles.

One beneficiary of these mandatory releases is the United Water Conservation District, which manages Piru.

As for the southwestern arroyo toad, concerns among biologists have eased in recent years as water flows--which used to fluctuate daily out of Pyramid--have become constant enough to enable the toad, which mates and spawns in sections of the creek, to adapt and even recover to a degree.

Still, the toad is on the endangered species list, its progress is being monitored and it could be a factor in negotiations for a new licensing arrangement the DWR is seeking with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

“The DWR wants to change the flows so that they make more money,” said Jim Edmondson, executive director of California Trout Inc., a state conservation organization that has been instrumental in preserving wild-trout fisheries around the state. “They’re not out to destroy a trout stream or anything like that. They merely see this as a means to make a bigger profit.”

Dan Peterson, of the DWR’s environmental assessment branch, acknowledged that money was at least as big an issue as the toad. He wouldn’t say exactly how costly releases of State Water Project water into Piru Creek is to the DWR, only that it’s “in the millions” annually.

These costs are assumed by the DWR and passed on indirectly to contractors such as the Metropolitan Water District of Los Angeles.

“We like trout too,” Peterson continued. “But it’s hard to justify the amount of water we’re releasing just for the purpose [of maintaining a fishery].”

Last week’s meeting, with invitees including everyone from U.S. Forest Service biologists to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service to the United Water Conservation District to the California Department of Fish and Game, was apparently just a start. But the DWR would like to submit a proposal for a new licensing arrangement to FERC as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, the agency is looking into such options as devising a means to recapture State Water Project water before it reaches Piru, arranging for financial reimbursement from or an arrangement with the United Water Conservation District “to help defray” costs of pumping water downstream, and stopping the flow of State Water Project water into Piru Creek altogether.

This “historic flow” approach is the most drastic of the measures, and it might have some backers, including the Forest Service, which would prefer a landscape at least resembling what it was before man and technology arrived.

This historic-flow approach, which is no State Water Project flows, would not necessarily doom the wild rainbows in Piru Creek. Wild trout are believed to have inhabited the region long before the construction of the dam, holding over in spring-fed pools in dry summer months.

But it would devastate Piru Creek as a viable recreational fishery by reducing the numbers of wild trout and eliminating the stocking of hatchery-raised rainbows.

The lush vegetation surrounding the creek’s banks would dry up and die, the egrets would have to hunt elsewhere, and the deer and coyotes that drink along the waterway would probably have to find other watering holes.

The Department of Fish and Game, which has responsibilities to fishermen, to the trout and even to the southwestern arroyo toad, will be involved in whatever discussions occur down the line.

“I can only tell you that the DWR is losing water to Piru Creek and is very concerned about it and is looking for alternatives,” said Dwayne Maxwell, senior biologist for the DFG’s inland fisheries branch.

“And for the DWR to stop the flows such as they are would mean a change in the FERC license, probably a change of such substance that it would have to come up for public review. Then FERC would have to take all of the public comments into consideration.

“We have promised the DWR that we will give them our thoughts in writing, and our position right now, I think, is that we’d have to support the existing natural resources in Piru Creek.”

This, of course, is good news to city folks who have grown accustomed to picnicking and hiking and fishing at Piru Creek. But there are no guarantees. Fish and Game has lost flow battles with state agencies before and will lose them in years to come.

For the time being, however, Piru Creek will continue to be the great escape it is.

The 200-plus members of the San Fernando Valley-based Sierra Pacific Flyfishers, which has adopted the creek, will continue to hold clean-ups and fishing outings there.

Schoolchildren involved in the Trout in the Classroom program, which is sponsored by fly-fishing clubs and involves raising trout from eggs to fry, will continue to have field trips there, where they will release their fish and learn a thing or two about the workings of nature.

Low-income families will continue to spend hot summer days relaxing in the shade of the cottonwoods, wading in pools, happily removed from the mean streets back home.

As for Ricketts, 47, a producer and location manager who spends much of his time writing and producing waterproof fly-fishing maps of his favorite rivers and creeks, he will continue to go there to cast his cares away.

“I call this the nine-hole fishery,” he said, releasing his sixth trout of the day. “You don’t have time to do 18 holes? You can come here, catch a few fish and be back in the office by early afternoon.”