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Noah’s Arks for Imperiled Salmonids

Trout and grayling are in desperate trouble in the West. But genetic and thermal refuges provide hope.  Check out this article previously published in Gray’s Sporting Journal, April 2023

To slow rapid decline of native salmonids, state and federal fisheries professionals are creating genetic and thermal refuges in cold, naturally fishless water throughout the American West. Usually, this entails removing non-natives and hybrids planted by managers and anglers in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Such refuges have been hugely successful. They include: westslope cutthroats to Cherry Creek in Montana; westslope cutts to 21 lakes of the Flathead River drainage in the Bob Marshall Wilderness of Montana; westslope cutts and Arctic grayling to Grayling Creek and the Upper Gibbon River in Yellowstone National Park; Rio Grande cutts to 100 miles of Costilla Creek in New Mexico; greenback cutts to the west branch of Clear Creek in Colorado; Lahontan cutts to multiple river basins in California and Nevada; Yellowstone cutts to Dead Indian Creek in the North Absaroka Wilderness of Montana; Yellowstone cutts to Mystery and Dime Lakes in the Teton Wilderness of Wyoming; Paiute cutts to Cottonwood Creek in California’s White Mountains; and bull trout to Idaho’s Bear Creek. Other refuges in waters thought to be once fishless are proposed and in the works.

Of the 16 subspecies of cutthroat trout two -- the yellowfin and Alvord -- are believed extinct. All 14 survivors are endangered in fact if not by federal decree. The major limiting factor by far has been hybridization with rainbow trout flung around the western waterscape like confetti before the age of ecological awareness. Global warming threatens salmonids everywhere.

There’s plenty of support for these genetic and thermal refuges from environmental and angling communities; but from both camps there’s also plenty of caterwauling, environmental-review objections, appeals, and litigation. There’s even opposition from the Native Fish Coalition whose stated mission is to “protect, preserve, and restore wild native fish populations.”

In recent geologic time most current and planned genetic and thermal refuges almost certainly supported the now-imperiled salmonids. Benthic biotas evolved with these natives, and they’re getting hammered by non-native fish with which they did not evolve.

Leading the charge against genetic and thermal salmonid refuges is Wilderness Watch. Log on to its website and you’ll see a grizzly, an icon of wilderness. But icons of wilderness like trout and grayling don’t count for Wilderness Watch and its many allies. These groups object to motorized-vehicle use in wilderness for any purpose and however brief. And they object especially to the organic piscicide rotenone, harmless to all air-breathing organisms and usually the only possible method of removing non-native fish. It’s applied to moving water at 50 parts per billion, has a half-life of hours, and is easily neutralized downstream. In modern fisheries management rotenone has never been seen to permanently affect a native aquatic ecosystem except to restore it.

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Cherry Creek Project

In 1997 Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks conceived a plan to restore westslope cutthroats to the Madison River drainage. This would entail creating a genetic and thermal refuge in 60 miles of Cherry Creek -- naturally fishless, at least from the brief perspective of European Americans. An infestation of non-native brook trout, rainbows and cutbows would be removed with rotenone and antimycin (an equally safe and even more efficient piscicide no longer available).

Local anglers waxed apoplectic about losing their non-natives and hybrids. In June 1999 Outdoor Life magazine ran a grossly inaccurate piece entitled “Playing God on Cherry Creek.” Among its copious false claims: bears would be sickened by eating “poisoned fish” and “antimycin and rotenone will exterminate the stream’s aquatic insect populations.” Then, without offering any corrections or even input from biologists, the editors invited readers to vote for or against the project. Ninety-eight percent were opposed.

A sportsmen-endorsed property-rights group called the Public Lands Access Association derailed the project for six years with threats of litigation and screeds in public media about how piscicides would poison humanity. The group’s main issue, however, was that media mogul and philanthropist Ted Turner, who owns much of the watershed, posted his land (as did all previous owners). Under Montana’s Stream Access Law anglers were and are free to wade the creek.

When threatened legislation scared the state into withholding funds, Turner footed the bill. So in January 2002 Fly Rod & Reel magazine, which I then served as conservation editor and columnist, made him our Angler of the Year. This elicited a blizzard of hate mail: I had “a political agenda,” I’d done it “for money,” I was a “moron,” a “snot nose,” a “nasty bully,” a “nature Nazi,” an acolyte of “Hanoi Jane,” an espouser of “vitriolic leftist environmentalism.” Preserving Cherry Creek’s alien and mongrel trout was the priority of most readers we heard from.

Since completion of the project in 2012 westslope cutts have steadily repopulated the Madison. This from Dr. Carter Kruse, Director of Science and Conservation for Turner Enterprises: “Six years ago we started getting calls from excited anglers who were catching cutthroats in the Madison 15 miles below Cherry Creek.”

Kruse reports that there are now more trout (all westslopes) in Cherry Creek than when it was infested with non-natives and hybrids. This may be because westslope cutts have a home-court advantage in the cold water. Even below the barrier falls in Cherry Creek 50 percent of the trout are now westslope cutts.

What’s more, because Cherry Creek is isolated its westlope cutts are disease-free, providing an important source of healthy fish to the Madison in bad whirling-disease years.

In 2022 Kruse and his team boosted the biodiversity of Cherry Creek and added forage for westslope cutts by introducing Rocky Mountain sculpins, native below the falls and, at one time, probably native to the upper creek. And they plan to introduce (more likely re-introduce) the imperiled western pearlshell mussel, which depends on cutthroat trout to carry and distribute its temporarily parasitic larvae.

Today Cherry Creek is an egg source for westslope-cutt restoration in Yellowstone National Park.

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South Fork Flathead Project

In the most ambitious native-fish recovery ever attempted, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks essentially eliminated the hybrid swarm that had been dribbling rainbow-trout genes into the Flathead system -- the biggest remaining westslope-cutt stronghold anywhere. Fifteen lakes believed to have been once fishless were treated with rotenone from 2007 to 2017. But so shrill was the opposition that in six others the agency agreed to swamp rainbow genes with massive stockings of pure westslopes.

In 2002 my Audubon magazine column about the planned project and other trout-management issues fetched a voluminous letter to the editor from Wilderness Watch’s director George Nickas who’s still in office: “Williams derides hatchery raised fish,” he wrote in part, “but fails to tell Audubon readers that the fish planned for stocking the Bob Marshall are, well, hatchery-born and bred cutthroat trout … Mixing genotypes [sic] is precisely what the State of Montana proposes to do as it takes its generic hatchery cutthroats and dumps them by the thousands (they call it genetic ‘swamping’) into the Bob Marshall’s Flathead drainage.”

My response: “The problem in the drainage, as Mr. Nickas well knows, is that mongrel trout in high-elevation ponds are leaking alien genes down into pure westslope populations… Considering the gross genetic pollution now underway, it is hypocritical and disingenuous to express concern that the proposed stockings will somehow harm the native gene pool while, in the same breath, arguing that the mongrels should not be removed.”

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Buffalo Creek Project

Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, the U.S. Forest Service, and the National Park Service hope to create a genetic and thermal refuge for Yellowstone cutthroats in a lake and 47 miles of Buffalo Creek thought to have been once fishless but currently the main source of non-native rainbow-trout genes to the Lamar River system.

“When it comes to rainbow-trout mitigation, the Buffalo Creek project is the biggest and most needed we have,” says Dr. Todd Koel, who leads the park's native fish conservation program. “In spring the big migratory cutthroats move from the lower Lamar Valley up into the headwaters in the remote backcountry to spawn. Then in summer and winter they return to the lower river. Hybrids and rainbows do the opposite; they’re mostly concentrated downstream in the Lamar Canyon and lower river. So for now we have this separation. But if we were to let everything go, we’d lose the entire Lamar system and end up with what’s happened in many other large river systems around here -- just big hybrid swarms.”

A 2013 must-kill regulation for Lamar-system rainbows and hybrids and electro-fishing by Koel’s team elicited outrage from some anglers. But the park stood firm. Unlike other state and federal resource agencies the National Park Service can’t be cowed by public protest because it’s legally bound to protect and restore native ecosystems. In 1916 Congress passed the service’s “Organic Act,” requiring the new agency to “conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and wildlife” of all units “leave[ing] them unimpaired.”

Most of Buffalo Creek flows through the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness in the Custer Gallatin National Forest. So Wilderness Watch, Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Conservation Congress, Friends of the Bitterroot, Gallatin Yellowstone Wilderness Alliance, Swan View Coalition, and Yellowstone to Uintas Connection are in full cry. They’re filing environmental-review objections, threatening litigation, claiming that “poison has no place in the wilderness” and that any motorized use “violates” the Wilderness Act.

But the act explicitly provides for motorized use to move equipment, rotenone included, into wilderness for the purpose of protecting and restoring wilderness assets such as native fish. Federal permits are routinely granted.

“The narrative [by opponents] is rife with falsehoods,” declares Montana’s Yellowstone cutthroat biologist Carol Endicott, citing among other claims that “hundreds of gallons of rotenone” will be used to treat Buffalo Creek. “All rotenone-based piscicides currently available have a concentration of five percent rotenone,” she says. “So the amount of actual rotenone for two treatments of 47 stream miles and Hidden Lake is 4.2 gallons. [The opposition] is accusing us of trying for a recreational fishery, as if that would be bad. Buffalo Creek, currently teeming with rainbows and hybrids, is barely fished as it is. Our crews have been up there a lot and have never seen an angler. You have to hike ten miles through grizzly country to reach it, and it’s not a day trip.”

Allying itself with Wilderness Watch and other opponents of this and other genetic and thermal refuges is the Native Fish Coalition. Throughout the spring of 2022 I pled with CEO Bob Mallard to talk with Koel and Endicott before publishing a FAQ which now reads: “We…do not support introducing [trout] to previously troutless, or fishless waters.” He declined. Had he complied, he’d have learned that the Buffalo Creek project is part of an MOU with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other agencies to keep Yellowstone cutts off the Endangered Species List and that the creek almost certainly sustained Yellowstone cutts in recent geologic time.

“I cannot imagine the hubris of publishing something without speaking to the biologists leading the project,” remarks Endicott. “That is incredibly irresponsible. They’re free to make their own operational definition of ‘historically fishless,’ but their definition is at odds with our legal responsibility. It ignores the concept of metapopulation dynamics where waters open and become blocked over time. I know of beaver dams that have blocked fish movement for hundreds of years. Then they go away and fish move in. Same with waterfalls, especially those sitting in the world’s largest super volcano. Under policy required by law, historically fishless waters are within the historic range, and we can legally put fish in them if they don’t harm other species. They coevolved with everything up there. The current barriers that block fish don’t block invertebrates and amphibians. They easily fly, drift or hop past these features. No harm, only benefit.”

The Native Fish Coalition’s FAQ left me no choice but to resign as National Chair in June 2022, a painful decision because I co-founded the outfit in 2017 and was far and away its major fundraiser.

The Forest Service has to issue the permit for piscicide use on Buffalo Creek. But all the blowback placed the project on hold in 2022, and it’s not clear that it will happen even in 2023.

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North Fork Blackfoot Project

On June 2, 2021 the Forest Service issued a permit to Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks to create a genetic and thermal refuge for westslope cutts and bull trout in the Scapegoat Wilderness of the Lolo and Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forests. The plan was also part of an MOU with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other agencies -- this time to keep westslope cutts off the Endangered Species List.

A hybrid swarm was to be removed from three lakes and 67 miles of stream thought to be once fishless and that feed the North Fork of the Blackfoot River. A 50-foot waterfall would prevent future infestation. Below this barrier pure westslopes persist in some sections, so the project would conserve these natives by stemming ongoing genetic pollution.

But Wilderness Watch, Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Friends of the Wild Swan, the Flathead-Lolo-Bitterroot Citizen Task Force, and the Conservation Congress have sued. And they’re trotting out all the old fiction about rotenone.

For example, Alliance for the Wild Rockies, which had petitioned for endangered status for Yellowstone cutts (to block timber sales), saturated western media with an op-ed by its director, Michael Garrity, falsely claiming that rotenone can “get into groundwater” and poison wells. Organic material completely breaks it down inches into the soil. Garrity further claimed that potassium permanganate -- the oxidizer used to neutralize rotenone downstream of project areas -- “targets human organs including the respiratory and central nervous system, blood, kidneys, and can cause nausea, vomiting, gastrointestinal irritation and burns to the mouth and throat if ingested.”

Prescribed use of potassium permanganate, available for unregulated purchase as a food preservative, does no such thing. It’s applied to streams at 3 parts per million, degrading to 1 PPM within 30 minutes. Garrity’s source appears to have been a medical report entitled “Suicidal Ingestion of Potassium Permanganate” about a woman who tried but failed to kill herself by swallowing ten tablets of pure potassium permanganate.

I asked Lolo National Forest district ranger, Quinn Carver, to comment on the opponents’ claim that the upper North Fork of the Blackfoot and Buffalo Creek have always been fishless. His response: “To say fish were never there is a pretty arrogant statement. Did they walk the earth with woolly mammoths?”

All the pushback frightened the Forest Service into revoking the permit nine weeks after granting it. Word from my sources inside the agency is that the project is on permanent hold.

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Silver King Creek Project

America’s rarest salmonid, the federally threatened Paiute cutthroat trout, is native to only 11 miles of Silver King Creek in the Carson-Iceberg Wilderness high in the Sierra Nevadas.

From 2003 to 2013 litigants, appellants and environmental-review commentators blocked a plan by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the U.S. Forest Service, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to prevent Paiutes from being hybridized off the planet by non-native rainbow trout. Project opponents included Wilderness Watch, Californians for Alternatives to Toxics, Beyond Pesticides, Ann McCampbell of the Multiple Chemical Sensitivities Task Force of New Mexico (a group basically consisting of herself), Western Environmental Law Center, Center for Biological Diversity, Pacific Rivers Council, California Watershed Alliance, Defenders of Wildlife, Friends of Silver King Creek, and insect advocate Nancy Erman.

When local anglers groused about losing their hybrid swarm biologists and Trout Unlimited volunteers electro-fished out as many mongrels as they could, evacuating them to the hybrid-infested Carson River.

After expending hundreds of thousands of manhours and dollars, the agencies finally prevailed in court. Fortunately, they had pure Paiute stock to work with because enlightened Forest Service biologists had noticed the hybridization and in 1946 created an off-basin genetic and thermal refuge in naturally fishless Cottonwood Creek high in California’s White Mountains.

In 2017, with all rainbow genes excised from Silver King Creek and tributaries, pure Paiutes were electro-fished from Cottonwood Creek, held in the stream overnight, then placed in cans cooled by ice, packed by mules three miles to a road, loaded onto a hatchery truck, and driven to the Silver King basin. From there they were packed by mules eight miles to Silver King Creek. “We didn’t lose a fish in the process,” reports then-project leader Bill Somer.

Since 2017 the Paiute cutthroat population has steadily expanded. They’ll be taken off the threatened list in the near future.

This is the only salmonid recovery project anywhere that has restored a native to 100 percent of its natural range.