By Keegan Uhl

Guest Contributor

Big Santa Anita Creek at Chantry Flat–I had heard the tales of rainbows and browns from “back in the day,” but I had never seen this idyllic stretch of incredible trout water for myself. I only took up local fly fishing a year ago, during the four-year fire closure of the area. I was eager to see it for myself last week when they reopened the area.

So, a friend and I spent a day scouting for Chantry Trout. I assume the weirs, across the stream at regular intervals, stamped with the date 1959, were built to control flooding around the 80 or so cabins in the canyon. I also know that these probably very quickly filled up with sediment, rendering them useless, much like the Brown Mountain Dam on the Arroyo Seco above JPL. 

I also guessed that these dams would act as fish barriers. So while scouting, we made sure to walk as much of the stream as we could, thinking fish could be localized in one of these runs. We covered a lot of ground, from a half-mile above Sturtevant Falls all the way down to within a half-mile of the reservoir. We hiked seven miles. I am deeply sad to report: we found no fish in the stream.

I put my waterproof video camera in pool after pool, hoping and praying to see a little movement under a rock, a fry tucked up into a crevice. Nope. Nada. Zip. Zilch. We also tried flies, of course. And with ample experience fishing the streams of the Angeles and San Bernardino mountains, I can say with certainty–if there were fish there, we would have caught ’em, or seen ’em.

We did find hundreds, thousands perhaps, of frogs (and tadpoles visible underwater)–another observation that points to the absence of a healthy population of trout. 

This was a total bummer, as the stream itself looks “incredible.” There is a surprising amount of water flow for this time of year–pool after pool of deep, cool, aerated water. Just perfect for our native rainbows. The flow was many times what we see this time of year in other creeks that manage to support fish, like the Arroyo Seco.

I had high hopes that with the recent high-water years, maybe some fish had survived the fire and repopulated, perhaps from the reservoir below, but it seems that’s not the case. Now, could there be some survivor fish in the reservoir and perhaps immediately upstream of it? Yes, it is possible, we did not make it all the way to the reservoir. But there are certainly no trout in most of the accessible water.

Perhaps we can convince the CDFW to repopulate the stream, stocking it with wild rainbows from nearby drainages (perhaps a rescue of East Fork San Gabriel fish is in order, before the rains come and destroy that stream?). Our mountain rainbows have their genetic roots in the Southern Steelhead runs of a hundred years ago, and keeping good stocks of those populations may help repopulate the endangered Steelhead if and when we are able to reconnect them to the ocean. 

Here’s hoping all that comes to pass.