To the Rescue of the Southern Steelhead WESLEY MARX ore than 70 years ago, the dam on Malibu Creek severed a remarkable oceangoing fish from its shallow spawning grounds. Today that dam is being considered for demolition to protect this fish from extinction. This twist of fate stems from recent, long-overdue attention to a unique member of the Pacific salmon family, the southern steelhead, and to its primary birthplace, the coastal streams of southern California. To the casual passerby, southern California's coastal streams seem to be resting places for stray grocery carts, bald tires, and other modern junk mired in puny trickles of scum water. They are places where, as Mark Twain once observed, you are more likely to get dusty than wet. But Ed Henke, a former San Francisco 49er who grew up in Ventura, remembers that in the 1940s, when he was a boy, creeks and rivers teemed with life. "Steelhead would come up the [Ventura] river by the thousands," he recalls. "We would line the banks and catch a dozen at a time."

COPYRIGHT ED HENKE

Photo: Ben Henke with steelhead to 22" taken in July 1945 in lower Coyote Creek, a tributary to the Ventura River.

Until the late 1940s, up to 50,000 steelhead would converge on coastal rivers between the Santa Ynez in Santa Barbara County and Rio Santo Domingo in northern Baja California, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service. By the 1960s, however, Ed Henke and other anglers had a choice of retiring their steelhead rigs or traveling north. (Henke now lives in Ashland, Oregon.) Dams and water diversions had turned southern California's life-giving streams into death traps. Silt runoff from development was burying gravel spawning beds; willows that had shaded streams were replaced by concrete embankments; and water temperatures rose above levels steelhead can tolerate. Some dam permits called for fishways to enable steelhead to reach upstream spawning grounds, but to many people such requirements reflected only wishful thinking and were fiscally irresponsible. The southern steelhead was by now so rare, someone quipped it was a "stealth fish"--harder to spot than the highly secret Stealth Bomber. Extinction seemed near at hand for the southern steelhead, and yet occasional sightings persisted. Today remnant runs still exist in the Santa Ynez, Ventura, and Santa Clara systems, and in Malibu Creek, which is now the southernmost run. It now appears that what a short time ago seemed inevitable may yet be prevented. Work is under way to restore life to southern rivers and creeks, including Malibu Creek. Serious consideration has been given to the possibility of removing the silted-in Rindge Dam, built in 1925 to impound water for a ranch. The now useless 100-foot-high concrete arch dam, built without fish ladders, today belongs to the state as part of Malibu Creek State Park. Its demolition would allow five miles of critical upstream habitat to be restored for steelhead. For the rest of this article see the Winter 1996-97 issue of Coast & Ocean.