CARMEL VALLEY — Every spring Cory Hamilton and his team wade into the Carmel River armed with nets. Up to their ankles in water, they scan the surface for steelhead trout.
Some of those fish are in distress, stranded as the river dries up. The team nets them and then trucks the rescued fish to a rearing facility or to a safer section of the river.
“It feels good,” says Hamilton, who has been rescuing steelhead in the Carmel River for 22 years, “to help save something.”
Since 1989, nearly 500,000 fish have been rescued, many of them having been threatened by overpumping of the river for potable water to supply the Monterey Peninsula.
The overpumping has stopped, yet the river still dries up in places during the summer. Looming is a new presidential administration that vows to put “people over fish.”
“Environmentally, as long as the river is drying up and people are utilizing the river for water production, there will likely be a need to rescue fish,” Hamilton said.
The Steelhead Rescue and Rearing Program, part of the Monterey Peninsula Water Management District, is expecting to reach the half-million fish saved milestone shortly after the next rescue season begins this spring or summer.
The rescue team is usually made up of five people: A biologist, staff from the water management district, and seasonal workers hired specifically for the rescue season. They catch any steelhead they find, releasing them in wet sections of the river or bringing them to the Sleepy Hollow Steelhead Rearing Facility in Carmel Valley. There, up to 47,000 juvenile fish can stay until the river’s water levels rise again.
The rescue program is required by water rights due to steelhead’s threatened status under the Endangered Species Act. In 1988, the Carmel River Steelhead Association made a complaint to the State Water Resources Control Board that California American Water was overpumping the river. The board responded, in part, by implementing the rescue and rearing program.
By 1995, the water board determined that Cal Am was indeed overpumping the river and issued a cease and desist order. The water management district then determined that any level of pumping would cause environmental harm. Thus, the steelhead rescue program continued.
Additional mitigation efforts took place in 2015, when the San Clemente Dam was removed to restore natural processes to the Carmel River. Since then, floods during heavy rains have reshaped the river. The flooding led to influxes of sediment, but also helped steelhead pass through more easily, according to a NOAA study.
Now, Cal Am is within its legal pumping limit of 3,376 acre-feet per year. Overall water use by the Peninsula has decreased dramatically since the 1980s, from 18,000 acre-feet to under 10,000 today. And a smaller fraction of that water is coming from the Carmel River.
Despite efforts to diversify the Peninsula’s water sources, and reduced pumping, portions of the river still dry up in the summer. “Clearly, this river was dealt a bad hand,” said Dave Stoldt, general manager of the water management district. “There’s too many people living on it.”
The water management district is in a transitional time. To determine the future of mitigation efforts on the river, the water management district will need to monitor environmental conditions for an extended period — perhaps 10 years or more, Stoldt said. The Carmel River is one of the last habitats still cold enough for steelhead to survive. That could change as temperatures continue to rise, Stoldt said, but it’s important to protect the habitat that remains.
For now, the rescue program will continue. “It’s pretty clear that mitigation continues to be needed,” Stoldt said.
The Trump administration, in a slew of executive orders on inauguration day, issued one calling on California to put “people over fish.” The order directed several government agencies to route more water from the San Joaquin Delta to Southern California, prioritizing water access over protecting endangered delta smelt.
That order won’t affect mitigation efforts on the Carmel River, Stoldt and Hamilton said. The river is part of an isolated basin, so wouldn’t be affected by directives targeting the state’s larger water systems like the delta. Steelhead rescue is also required under local water rights due to its threatened status.
“Everything we do is driven by the fact that (steelhead is) a threatened species,” he said. While the program won’t be affected by any executive orders so far, bigger policy changes — and public opinion changes — could have more bearing on mitigation efforts.
“If this or some future administration eviscerates the Endangered Species Act,” Stoldt said, “then technically we could stop caring about the steelhead.” And if public opinion swayed in the same direction as the Trump administration, it could become difficult to justify funding conservation efforts like the rescue and rearing program, he added.
Undermining the Endangered Species Act would be a long process, Stoldt said, and the water district isn’t currently concerned about it. The Trump administration has not made any indication that the Endangered Species Act is on shaky ground. Still, January’s executive order called for an end to “radical environmentalism,” an attitude suggesting conservation isn’t a high priority.
Hamilton hopes that people continue to see the value in conserving threatened species and protecting fragile ecosystems. “If you take away environmental protection… you lose the ecological benefit of having a system that works how it’s supposed to work,” he said.
Steelhead are a key species in the Carmel River ecosystem. As a top predator, their presence is crucial to maintain balance between all of the species that call the river home. The Carmel population is also considered a mother population, Hamilton said, providing steelhead to the river’s offshoots. To boot, the fish are an indicator species. Their wellbeing reflects on the overall health of the river, as well as water quality.
When rescued juvenile steelhead are released back into the Carmel River, they begin an incredible journey. After growing for two years near their birthplace, they trek to the Pacific Ocean. The fish ride the ocean currents as far away as Japan or Alaska. When they’re ready, their keen sense of smell guides them back to the Carmel River, where they lay their eggs and the cycle begins again.
Of all the steelhead that hatch in the Carmel River, only one percent will one day return to spawn, Hamilton said. Thanks to the rescue program, Hamilton says, each fish has a chance to be one of the lucky few to make it back home.