A walk into Solstice Canyon, off Corral Canyon near the Beaurivage restaurant on Pacific Coast Highway, may reveal deer, quail and bobcats to hikers along the stream that runs throughout the canyon.
But missing is the southern steelhead trout, which was declared endangered more than three years ago by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS). Efforts are underway to restore southern steelhead to Solstice Canyon, and although the project may signal clear water today, it soon may come to connote turbulent times as property rights advocates foresee potentially serious threats to landowners.
While the species was spotted there in the early 1970s, biologists say it hasn’t been since the 1940s that the fish actually had a healthy, sustaining population.
Solstice is the first of a number of Malibu area creeks where multi-million-dollar political and environmental decisions are being made by federal, state, and local agencies. While these are on-the-record decisions ostensibly made to preserve the newly endangered fish, they also are decisions that may have a variety of much further-reaching effects over roads, bridges, land-use, housing and lifestyles.
In a series of stories, The Malibu Times will examine efforts to bring back the Southern California steelhead and how this could affect the lives of Malibu flora and fauna, as well as the people who also have come to be a part of the canyon habitat for more than 100 years.
Solstice Canyon is among the many Malibu creeks that were historic homes of the southern steelhead, a species unique in Southern California and southward. It has been a long time since anyone actually has seen a steelhead in the Solstice area pools that trickle into the sea, but some previous residents, such as Ron Rindge, still remember seeing steelhead as they played in the streams and shallow ponds years ago.
Truly, Solstice Canyon is among many of Malibu’s delightful glens and glades. So who could argue with an attempt to restore these special fish to their native breeding grounds?
“There is an intrinsic value to have this species here,” said Ray Sauvajot, chief of Planning, Science and Resource Management with the U.S. National Park Service. “The presence of steelhead tells us that our ecosystem is in good shape and humans depend on this ecosystem.”
Property rights advocates, however, are among those who point out that although the initial impact may seem minimal, these efforts are a harbinger to future, more severe restrictions.
For example, the California Department of Parks and Recreation already is spearheading a project to examine how steelhead can be introduced further upstream along Malibu Creek. Under discussion is the potential removal of the 100-by 80-foot Rindge Dam, erected in 1929 two miles into Malibu Creek, an endeavor that could cost more than $40 million.
Also, in previous years, after the 1993 fires and the destruction of the bridge on PCH over Malibu Creek, rebuilding efforts were stymied because of the endangered tidewater goby. The governor had to sign emergency waivers and decrees to enable the reconstruction of the bridge.
And because steelhead have been sighted in other local streams, hundreds of homes in or near the streams’ watershed areas could be subjected to Environmental Protection Act regulations. Malibu Creek is the single largest watershed within the Santa Monica Mountain range with thousands of residences nearby. Yet, Environmental Protection Act regulations say that once an animal is declared endangered, virtually nothing can be done to disturb the animal or its critical habitat.
Because action has only begun to occur in Malibu, enforcement situations have not yet developed. But in Oregon and Washington State, property rights organizations are well familiar with consequences.
Tim Harris, counsel for Pacific Legal Foundation in Bellevue, Washington, explains that since the coho salmon was declared endangered, restrictions have been placed on local residents including prohibitions of lighting over a bridge that could disturb salmon and spawning.
“But the terms ‘disturbing’ or ‘harming’ could apply to a number of things,” Harris continued. “The building of a structure near the watershed, driving across a river, playing in a creek, fertilizing lawns, using gopher poison, termiting a house, washing a car, . . .”
NMFS officials say they are not planning to be in the business of serving as “carwash police;” however, the agency has been flexing its muscles in Oregon and Washington to protect coho and chinook salmon.
Last September, the Wall Street Journal told how NMFS veto power halted $6 billion in construction work on I-405 following the expenditure of $6 million in plans to come up with four different proposals that would accommodate an expected 250 percent increase in traffic over the next 20 years. NMFS rejected all the plans.
In a North Macadam urban renewal district, the City of Portland had planned to bring jobs and housing into a 130-acre parcel along the Willamette River. However, when NMFS ordered 200 foot buffers along the river instead of the 100-foot setbacks anticipated by the city, developers said the stricter regulations would make the project only “marginally feasible.”
And in Clackamas County, construction of a bridge over Clackamas Town Center was halted because of concern that a portion of the bridge construction, which went into Mount Scott Creek (a tributary of the Willamette where endangered Willamette River steelhead live), might cause rushing water to churn up sediments that would choke protected runs of the fish.
Although biologists from a variety of federal, wildlife, and environmental organizations point out that some small populations of southern steelhead can still be found in Malibu Creek and other local streambeds, Sauvajot says that the southern steelhead has essentially disappeared from almost all of its historic range from Point Conception to Baja California.
“It would take a lot to get the fish to the point where it was not considered endangered anymore,” says Sauvajot. “There are only a handful of streams that could realistically function to provide habitat for this species.”
Yet, most biologists and environmentalists agree that Solstice creek is an ideal place to start bringing back the fish. For one thing, Solstice would require little more than a few minor environmental assessments before steps could be taken to restore the fish.
Sauvajot is confident these environmental reports would not hold up the eventual project.
Secondly, most of the land surrounding Solstice is part of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, which is governed by the National Park Service. With few immediate neighbors to the stream, there would be little initial reaction from residents worried about how their lifestyles, activities, property maintenance or expansion decisions might harm the fish.
And estimates to restore the relatively pristine stream to a condition that would foster steelhead are relatively low at approximately $300,000. The work would be conducted in collaboration with Caltrans on behalf of the City of Malibu, with permitting from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and would involve refurbishing a metal culvert channeling stream water under Pacific Coast Highway, building two bridges over roads currently crossing the streambed, and removing several stone obstacles within the stream itself.
Today’s steelhead trout, which is commonly found from the Monterey area northward through Alaska, is a migratory form of the rainbow trout, hatching in a stream or river, then swimming to the ocean, where it lives, feeds, and grows, then returns back to its original river to spawn. But unlike Pacific salmon, some steelhead may make a return to their spawning grounds several times in a lifetime. The fish gets its name from the cold, steel-blue coloring of its back the first time it enters a river to spawn.
Some biologists, such as researcher Jennifer Neilson, believe Malibu’s southern steelhead species is especially interesting because it was a biological forerunner to those that populate the Pacific Northwest.
Efforts to protect endangered fish can occur in any stream where the fish might be expected to be present, and already local environmentalists and biologists say that steelhead are not limited to Solstice and Malibu Creek.
They have been seen in Ventura’s Santa Clara River and the Arroyo Sequit. And Margo Murman, executive director of the California state Resource Conservation District’s Division 9, explains that when a fish is restored in one creek, the species often turn up in other streams as well.
“A steelhead project would be promising because they have done some migration southward already,” she said. “They’re already in Topanga Creek. It’s a natural phenomenon.”
Next: A look at efforts underway to restore steelhead to Malibu Creek.