The name doesn’t seem to fit this quiet place set above a gentle swerve in Butte Creek, just an old span of bridge, some rusted-out mining equipment manufactured before this state was officially a state, and a seldom-used house.
But the harsh reality becomes apparent quickly, a smell on a hot, thin wind.
It is the stench from piles of rotting Chinook salmon carcasses on the creek banks and from the upside-down bodies of others snagged, already dead, on the creek’s pale rocks.
For centuries, spring-run Chinook salmon, among California’s most iconic fish, would rest for weeks in these historically cold waters after their brutal upstream journey. Then they would lay eggs and, finally, perish to complete one of nature’s most improbable life cycles.
No longer. What once was a place where life began is now one of untimely death.
The creek is simply too warm, an astounding 10 degrees warmer than average in some parts of these spawning grounds. It is the result of the creek’s low flow, which speeds up the spread of disease as the water stagnates, and of the Central Valley’s high heat in the depths of drought.
Of the estimated 16,000 spring-run Chinook that made the journey from the Golden Gate Bridge to this curve in a creek and others like it across the Central Valley, about 14,500 have died, nearly all of them before spawning. More will succumb in the next few weeks, and a year of spring-run Chinook reproduction will be lost in the valley’s hot, low-flow waterways. The conditions are threatening the winter migration, or “run,” just as severely. And while it is still too early to measure the drought’s effect on a pair of fall migrations, experts are worried it could be just as disastrous.
“This year has been huge in terms of pre-spawn mortalities,” said Colin Purdy, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife’s environmental programs manager for fisheries based in the city of Chico. “This fall we’ll just hope to see enough juveniles get out to sustain the population, and we need enough adults to survive to help us avoid a failed class.”
[Severe heat and drought the hallmarks of a changing west]
The drought is enveloping much of the American West, where many places recorded their hottest July in history last month. The parched-brown landscape has become more normal than aberration in California, where the increasingly rapid shifts from cool to hot, wet to dry, are driving historically huge wildfires, deadly mudslides and new demands on water supplies.
Along with thirsty crops, dried-out wells and mounting economic loss across the state’s agricultural heartland, the drought’s second desiccating year is also punishing California’s rich wildlife, from migratory birds to bears and elk looking for a drink.
In a state that has historically been brutal to its mascots, from the extinct California grizzly bear that graces the state flag to the ever-on-the-brink condor, the Chinook is now threatened as never before by disruptive human engineering and the dangerously evolving climate.
“The salmon are basically like a canary in the coal mine, giving you some idea of what’s going on in the freshwater system,” said John McManus, who runs the Golden State Salmon Association, an advocacy group. “As go the salmon, so too go many other species.”
Thousands of Chinooks leave the frigid Pacific in December to begin a roughly 325-mile swim upstream to waters that, for millennia, have been cooled by the melting snow and ice of the Sierra snowpack. This year the snowpack was roughly half its annual average.
The journey takes the fish — most nearly three feet long at this point — to the marshy and sometimes misleading canals of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River delta. Then they hit the rushing Sacramento River and its many tributaries in a ritual migration that shows that many salmon return to the exact same spots to spawn as their ancestors.
The problem, exacerbated severely by drought, is that the salmon would travel farther, much farther, but no longer can.
The Shasta Dam, completed in 1945, cut off the salmon from the snowmelt-cooled lakes and rivers farther north. Those included the now out-of-reach McCloud River, flowing a steady chill for nearly 80 miles through Shasta-Trinity National Forest.
Other vast federal and state water projects also have severed salmon from their home habitats. Nearly every river or creek system in the state’s Central Valley is dammed or diverted in some way, part of the engineering system that improbably allows 40 million people to live in the state, most of them in near-desert conditions.
In the valley, the government has spent tens of millions of dollars to build around these obstacles for wild-run salmon, including fish ladders and traps that lift the fish by elevator up and over dams. The state Department of Fish and Wildlife moved nearly 18 million salmon from protected Chinook hatcheries, which are essentially supporting the salmon industry here now, between April and July to remove them from rapidly warming river water. Some were released in creeks, others trucked to the sea — their survivability uncertain given the early release.
A long-term recovery plan now under discussion is “reintroducing” the winter-run Chinook to stretches of river above the Shasta Dam — an expensive and little-leeway operation given the salmon’s already endangered population.
“Our modeling projects that [the Sacramento River] is going to get too warm, and that a very large proportion of our juveniles this year just will not make it,” Jason Roberts, a state Department of Fish and Wildlife environmental program manager for inland fisheries, said of this year’s estimates.
Out on the river, Roberts points out places where, free of the current, Chinook carcasses collect, their decomposing bodies making the river murky in places and a census more difficult to undertake as a result.
Most of the dead fish on the Sacramento River had spawned. But a state Fish and Wildlife checkup on the winter-run Chinook last month showed a far higher than usual pre-spawn death rate.
But the harsh reality becomes apparent quickly, a smell on a hot, thin wind.
It is the stench from piles of rotting Chinook salmon carcasses on the creek banks and from the upside-down bodies of others snagged, already dead, on the creek’s pale rocks.
For centuries, spring-run Chinook salmon, among California’s most iconic fish, would rest for weeks in these historically cold waters after their brutal upstream journey. Then they would lay eggs and, finally, perish to complete one of nature’s most improbable life cycles.
No longer. What once was a place where life began is now one of untimely death.
The creek is simply too warm, an astounding 10 degrees warmer than average in some parts of these spawning grounds. It is the result of the creek’s low flow, which speeds up the spread of disease as the water stagnates, and of the Central Valley’s high heat in the depths of drought.
Of the estimated 16,000 spring-run Chinook that made the journey from the Golden Gate Bridge to this curve in a creek and others like it across the Central Valley, about 14,500 have died, nearly all of them before spawning. More will succumb in the next few weeks, and a year of spring-run Chinook reproduction will be lost in the valley’s hot, low-flow waterways. The conditions are threatening the winter migration, or “run,” just as severely. And while it is still too early to measure the drought’s effect on a pair of fall migrations, experts are worried it could be just as disastrous.
“This year has been huge in terms of pre-spawn mortalities,” said Colin Purdy, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife’s environmental programs manager for fisheries based in the city of Chico. “This fall we’ll just hope to see enough juveniles get out to sustain the population, and we need enough adults to survive to help us avoid a failed class.”
[Severe heat and drought the hallmarks of a changing west]
The drought is enveloping much of the American West, where many places recorded their hottest July in history last month. The parched-brown landscape has become more normal than aberration in California, where the increasingly rapid shifts from cool to hot, wet to dry, are driving historically huge wildfires, deadly mudslides and new demands on water supplies.
Along with thirsty crops, dried-out wells and mounting economic loss across the state’s agricultural heartland, the drought’s second desiccating year is also punishing California’s rich wildlife, from migratory birds to bears and elk looking for a drink.
In a state that has historically been brutal to its mascots, from the extinct California grizzly bear that graces the state flag to the ever-on-the-brink condor, the Chinook is now threatened as never before by disruptive human engineering and the dangerously evolving climate.
“The salmon are basically like a canary in the coal mine, giving you some idea of what’s going on in the freshwater system,” said John McManus, who runs the Golden State Salmon Association, an advocacy group. “As go the salmon, so too go many other species.”
The Sacramento River, wide and swift, is the world’s only habitat for winter-run salmon.Thousands of Chinooks leave the frigid Pacific in December to begin a roughly 325-mile swim upstream to waters that, for millennia, have been cooled by the melting snow and ice of the Sierra snowpack. This year the snowpack was roughly half its annual average.
The journey takes the fish — most nearly three feet long at this point — to the marshy and sometimes misleading canals of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River delta. Then they hit the rushing Sacramento River and its many tributaries in a ritual migration that shows that many salmon return to the exact same spots to spawn as their ancestors.
The problem, exacerbated severely by drought, is that the salmon would travel farther, much farther, but no longer can.
The Shasta Dam, completed in 1945, cut off the salmon from the snowmelt-cooled lakes and rivers farther north. Those included the now out-of-reach McCloud River, flowing a steady chill for nearly 80 miles through Shasta-Trinity National Forest.
Other vast federal and state water projects also have severed salmon from their home habitats. Nearly every river or creek system in the state’s Central Valley is dammed or diverted in some way, part of the engineering system that improbably allows 40 million people to live in the state, most of them in near-desert conditions.
In the valley, the government has spent tens of millions of dollars to build around these obstacles for wild-run salmon, including fish ladders and traps that lift the fish by elevator up and over dams. The state Department of Fish and Wildlife moved nearly 18 million salmon from protected Chinook hatcheries, which are essentially supporting the salmon industry here now, between April and July to remove them from rapidly warming river water. Some were released in creeks, others trucked to the sea — their survivability uncertain given the early release.
A long-term recovery plan now under discussion is “reintroducing” the winter-run Chinook to stretches of river above the Shasta Dam — an expensive and little-leeway operation given the salmon’s already endangered population.
“Our modeling projects that [the Sacramento River] is going to get too warm, and that a very large proportion of our juveniles this year just will not make it,” Jason Roberts, a state Department of Fish and Wildlife environmental program manager for inland fisheries, said of this year’s estimates.
Out on the river, Roberts points out places where, free of the current, Chinook carcasses collect, their decomposing bodies making the river murky in places and a census more difficult to undertake as a result.
Most of the dead fish on the Sacramento River had spawned. But a state Fish and Wildlife checkup on the winter-run Chinook last month showed a far higher than usual pre-spawn death rate.
