Posted on 05/26/2008 4:05:30 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
The salmon looked like shadows gliding silently beneath the surface of a pool between the foaming rapids of rugged Butte Creek.
Suddenly, with a splash, a big glittering fish leaped out of the water, then another and another. The spring-run chinook were jumping this past week in the remote, forested gorge outside Chico.
"This is the last best run of wild salmon in California," said Allen Harthorn, 56, the executive director of Friends of Butte Creek, who has been fighting for more than a decade to save the historic - and once sacred - spring run of chinook in this untamed tributary of the Sacramento River.
The fast-flowing creek now holds the largest population of wild spring-run chinook, or king salmon, in the Sacramento River system.
"It's the only place that gives me hope," Harthorn said from an observation deck he built on a cliff-side five years ago.
It was clear from Harthorn's deck as the morning sun peaked over the volcanic cliffs surrounding Butte Creek Canyon that, despite the almost complete collapse of the salmon fishery in California, there are still healthy salmon where there is healthy habitat.
The number of spawning fish returning from the ocean to Butte Creek increased 10 percent from 2006 to 2007, Harthorn said. ...
But the most dramatic resurgence occurred over the past 10 years, when an average of almost 10,000 salmon a year swam back up the creek, according to Harthorn, who co-founded Friends of Butte Creek in 1999 after years battling farming interests and Pacific Gas and Electric over its DeSabla-Centerville plant.
It is a minor miracle that there are any salmon at all wriggling their way up Butte Creek, given that only 14 fish returned to spawn in 1987.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
When I was a kid in the 1960s we used to fish Butte Creek all the time. I don’t remember even hearing of anyone catching a salmon there. Good black bass and catfish stream though.
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