Tag: Bobcat Fire
We Southern California steam fly fishers are a unique lot. If you’re reading this, you must love overcoming obstacles. After all, for a modest investment in an 8 weight, a decent waterproof reel, working on a longer cast and a sinking line, there’s the Pacific Ocean right in front of you, with its siren call of corbina runs, maybe a halibut and, for sure, a perch. (Just don’t bonk any beach joggers on the head when they absentmindedly walk into your back cast. That can lead to therapy — for both of you!)
Yet, here you are wandering the San Gabriel National Monument, doing the Curtis Creek sneak behind JPL, pondering a long drive to Deep Creek or scouting Piru Creek to the west. I mean, what’s with you?
Your friends up north, think you must be a bit daffy to get excited by a hand-size catch that takes a full-size outing to snag, or stiffle a chuckle when you tell them about the three (count them, three) fish passages in various stages of planning on the LA River.
They want to chase steelhead, dammit, on the Klamath or the Trinity; or bow a spey rod lifting a massive Lahontan Cutty at Pyramid Lake, or shiver through a UFO encounter and a fighting ‘bo on the Nature Conservancy water of the McCloud.
The very fact we have a lot of water that can or might hold wild trout right here in dry, hot Southern California thrills you. You wonder if your ancient Orvis 2 wt. might work well as a Euro rod? Contemplate getting up at dark thirty, just to explore another skinny water and see if it holds trout. Wonder if that was actually a Trico on your windshield and then dream about how the stubborn finny friends who have survived, dams, drought, fire and trash, trash, trash might react to one on 7x tippet? Good lord, those little fellas could hold the genetic makeup of the endangered Southern California Steelhead!
Well, what can I say, I’m right there with you. We are both giddy optimists! I love exploring what we have here in So Cali. And, finally, at long last, tomorrow is opening day on the West Fork of the San Gabriel River. After so, so long being closed during weekdays for a Public Works rehab of the water and riparian habitat conflagrated by the Bobcat Fire, it’s back.
Oh, just don’t mention that part about the UFOs in Dunsmuir. It’s secret.
See you on the river, Jim Burns
Only the truly optimistic So Cal stream fly fisher dreams of crossing a graffiti scarred footbridge to find paradise. (Credit Jim Burns)
 | Derek Paul Flor just commented |
If there’s one waterway that encompasses the struggles of nature in this post-modern age, it’s the West Fork of the San Gabriel. While it provides a respite from our metropolis, as a place to learn and practice fly fishing, ride a bike as far up the canyon as you can, or just hang out wondering what the hatch is, you can feel the magic, a renewal that goes deeper than natural beauty, radiating from the land itself.
I used to take my now-grown son here, pulling him along on his inlines behind my old bike. I’ve had my heart soar with uplift current-riding red tail hawks, had it broken by endless amounts of trash left by the careless, had it lifted again by volunteers who worked tirelessly to save the remaining fish after the devastating Bobcat Fire. This is the place I come to mend my broken heart, a place to gather strength and hope for the future.
So on this Earth Day, I offer a video from the intrepid Steve Kuchensky shot on April 15. Steve reports water temperature was 56 degrees. The silt is gone; the mud is gone and that beautiful water flows like no other! Meanwhile, CJ Vapenik, talked with an angler who caught a trout on a dry. We love to stretch the truth on the water, but this truth is gold. A guy caught a fish on a dry while he was wading on the West Fork in 2023!
Now that makes my Earth Day complete.
See you on the water, Jim Burns
UPDATE: The bike path will remain closed to the public on weekdays through December, 2023.
ARCADIA, Calif.— One of Angeles National Forest’s roads in the Upper San Gabriel River watershed—West Fork Road or National Forest System Road No. 2N25—will be temporarily closed to all recreationists on weekdays only (except on Federal holidays) for public safety from April 1 through Dec. 1 in both 2022 and 2023. This road closure is requested by Los Angeles County Public Works for sediment removal operations.
The goal is to remove up to 2 million cubic yards of sediment that has accumulated in the Cogswell Reservoir because of the Station Fire of 2009 and the Bobcat Fire of 2020. (Sediment has accumulated because fire burns away vegetation and leaves little to hold soil and rocks in place.)
Project work includes unclogging inlets/outlets and excavating and transporting sediment from the reservoir via heavy construction equipment to the adjacent sediment placement site. This sediment removal work provides vital flood control capacity to protect downstream communities.
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