A future for native species
Trout were once stocked in the Grand Canyon, but at a cost to endangered native species. The Park Service now hopes to undo that damage.
GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK — Ninety-three years after the fledgling National Park Service packed fertilized trout eggs onto mules and hauled the makings of a recreational fishery into the Grand Canyon, the agency is taking even greater pains to reverse the ecological damage those eggs spawned.
Crews of seasonal workers and volunteers this winter put on chest waders and traded nine-day stints up the remotest reaches of Bright Angel Creek, east of the North Kaibab Trail about 5 miles below the North Rim, zapping non-native fish out of the water using backpack electric shockers. The goal over the next few years is to remove enough of the predators to make the waters safe
for native and endangered humpback chubs, and to reintroduce chubs from another tributary of the Colorado River.
The bloody task seeks an uneasy balance among the park’s mission of preservation, anglers’ appetite for trout, and Native Americans’ distaste for killing in the heart of a geological wonder that is sacred to them.
It also highlights a contrast between 20th-century outdoor gusto and 21st-century environmental ideals.
“The National Park Service hates trout because they’re not native,” Flagstaff angler and fly-rod maker Mark Steffen said, adding a jab at the scientists who are killing his joy, “and because people love them, I suppose.”
Park officials say they’re protecting nature as directed by the Endangered Species Act and by National Park Service marching orders that from the start should have prevented trout stocking. But rangers in 1920 didn’t know what they were unleashing, Grand Canyon Fisheries Program Manager Brian Healy said.
“Humpback chub weren’t even described as a species,” he said.
Since then, the chub population has crashed, partly a victim of the 1960s damming at Glen Canyon that created Lake Powell and cooled the river. Cold water favors trout.
The state capitalized by creating a trophy fishery at Lees Ferry with transplanted rainbow trout, a prized, shimmering sport fish whose impact on downstream chubs is hotly debated.
Drought lowered Lake Powell over the past two decades and warmed the water released from the dam. Chubs previously on the brink have rebounded threefold in Canyon strongholds including the Little Colorado River. Scientists now believe their numbers exceed 12,000.
With the fabled exceptions of a few footlong chubs in1980s angler creels and one hooked by a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employee in 1994, the silvery minnows disappeared from Bright Angel Creek in the 1970s. Trout, meantime, grew thick and easy to catch.
Last month, the final crew of the winter patrolled the creek’s icy upper reaches, dipping broom-length, 400-volt wands into pools and riffles, jolting roughly one fish from its hiding place every three feet. The stunned fish rolled over and floated to the surface, where they were scooped up in nets and placed in buckets of water.
Thick brush forced the crew into waist-deep water for most of the fourhour slog. Neoprene waders provided insulation against electric shock. Some workers reported that a leaky pair can result in a stinging surprise.
Every hour or so, the group stopped to count, measure, gut and head the fish on snowy banks, readying them for an electric smoker and vacuum packing at the ranger-station bunkhouse. They did this just around a rocky bend from where their Great Depression-era forebears amped up the mule-borne trout stocking by building a hatchery at Roaring Springs.
“At that time, we weren’t thinking about conservation of native species,” fish biologist and trout removal lead Clay Nelson said during a break. Now, he said, he’s hoping his crews can protect chubs this far up the creek as well as at its mouth on the Colorado. That’s where big spawning trout spend the spring and summer. It’s also where spring floods wash young chubs down from the mouth of the Little Colorado.
“As they get down to Bright Angel Creek,” Nelson said of the chubs, “there’s basically a wall of brown trout waiting for them.”
Zuni Pueblo medicine man Octavius Seowtewa said his tribe objects to the killing but accepted 50 pounds of the meat so that at least the Canyon’s fish can support the people whose spiritual universe begins there.
“It was a big compromise,” he said, “because of the strict belief in keeping the Grand Canyon a place that should be held like any other church.”
Zuni tradition holds that the tribe emerged from an underworld at Ribbon Falls, which spills into Bright Angel Creek. If crews are to remove trout, Seowtewa said, he would prefer that they use nets that might not harm insects. But ultimately he believes the Park Service should let nature sort itself out.
“I’ve told them that that humpback chub has survived all these years without help from anybody,” he said. “Not the tribes. Not the government. Not any- body. Mother Nature has a way of taking care of itself.”
It may be impossible to fully restore the streams.
At best, the crews think they can stun and net 85 percent of brown and rainbow trout that compete with and eat a handful of other native species in the creek, which flows 13 miles and passes the Canyon’s backcountry hub at Phantom Ranch before joining the Colorado. That’s if a new fishery-management plan from the Park Service funds up to three more years of electrofishing.
Temporarily poisoning the water might be more efficient, but it’s not allowed in the national park and, if it were, might kill insects that reintroduced chubs could eat. Shocking at relatively low voltage allows native fish — suckers and tiny daces that swim the creek’s lower reaches — to revive and swim on after workers grab the belly-up trout.
“We’d like to get rid of all of (the trout),” said Nelson, who has spent 18 years working in the Canyon, mostly for the state before signing on to lead national-park crews this winter. “But realistically we’re not going to be able to with these methods.”
Early park rangers, and a few U.S. Forest Service rangers before them, hauled trout eggs into the Canyon by the tens and hundreds of thousands. A May 1932 edition of the classic National Park Service journal “Grand Canyon Nature Notes,” by Ranger Robert Williamson and clerk-stenographer Carol Tyler, listed Bright Angel Creek stockings beginning with 5,000 brook-trout fry in 1920. Twenty-six thousand rainbows followed in 1923-24, then 195,000 eggs of “Loch Leven” — a strain of brown trout that’s olive-colored with ringed spots — came in 1924 and 1930 installments. An additional 25,000 rainbow eggs followed in 1932, and several other park streams saw smaller plantings.
By 1931, they reported, rainbows and browns were growing to 20 inches, alongside “a few suckers.” Visitors stalked trout by hook and line “more and more each year,” and wanted more fish planted.
“Accordingly, I (Ranger Williamson) was assigned to this duty with others of the Ranger force, and on January 12, 1932, started to build a hatchery at Roaring Springs.”
That hatchery near the headwaters of Bright Angel Creek was by late January ready for eggs from a federal hatchery in Springville, Utah. Rangers put 17,000 of them in trays with gravel. The fry started hatching Feb. 10 and looked for food by early March, when Williamson said he gave them liver four days a week “and the rest of the time canned horse meat.”
From March 12 to 16, 1932, rangers dumped 9,000 hungry trout fry into Bright Angel Creek. Eight decades later, on a freezing February morning, technicians and volunteers from as far away as Indiana came back to pluck out the descendants of that and other plantings.
It was hard work, but a labor of love for technicians whose educational backgrounds include biology and environmental policy, such as 26-year-old Emily