Very Endangered Trout

[Speaking: Adam Backlin, USGS Ecologist -- Sitting on the grand in the canyon]
We're here in Harding canyon and it's part of the Santiago fire footprint. It's significant because it's a canyon in the Santa Ana Mountains that hasn't burned for a long time and in doing so there's a lot of species that still exist here, but don't exist in other canyons in the area.  Including this native steelhead trout that's been landlocked and occupies this canyon, and none of the adjacent canyons in the area.  

[Adam walking through the canyon and sitting down speaking]
Walking up the canyon was a real different experience for me.  I'd spent some time in here before it had burned, and seeing it afterwards, it looks like a moonscape essentially. All this ash and debris is thick and it's very loose and as you walk through it billows around your feet. You can see where the trees had burned, smoldered out, underground and the roots had even burned leaving these depressions, these craters in the landscape. Just looking at all these trees that were blackened it was really quite a sight.  

Now there's no vegetation on the hillsides the sediments are just falling off the hillsides, and you can hear it falling all around you as you walk up the canyon and you see these large callus piles along the base of the slope.  Pre-fire was chaparral on the hillsides and in the riparian zone here, several species of trees, and after the fire that thick heavy chaparral has all burned and all the slopes are bear and exposed. This area is one of the few areas in the canyon that has little refugia left in it. What we think is going to happen when the rains come is that the sediments on the hillsides, up here, are going to be washed into the canyon and can potentially fill up this entire streambed eliminating the habitat for the trout.  

There's a springfed section that is maybe a quarter mile long, and consists of maybe 20 to 50 pools that is a habitat for the fish to exist in.  The trout look like rainbow trout. They're pretty small in this system. They're probably between 2 and 8 inches in length. There's probably four or five in each of these pools up through here.  The ash layer is pretty thick. I saw a couple small fish darting around here in this pool a few minutes ago.  There's a little bit of running water and on the surface, we have a lot of the ash that was in the air and as it's settling out it's just kind of hanging out on top of the surface of the water and it's creating a pretty thick film on top of the water. It's a little difficult to see in there right now. The fish are in there, as far as we know, and we'd like to take some action to save the species because our fear is that these debris flows following the rains are going to eliminate the habitat. And what we would like to see happen is that the fish are removed from the stream, temporarily placed in either a fish hatchery that they can later be placed back into the habitat or moved to adjacent drainages that are going to be less affected by the debris flows this winter.