Stream Keeper : Angler Who Cast His Lot With the Trout Wins Praise for Conservation Efforts

Jim Edmondson began fly fishing in 1981 to relax from his hectic construction business in Temple City.

Like other anglers, Edmondson knew the West Fork of the San Gabriel River was a good place to learn the difficult sport. Trout had thrived in the rocky stream for hundreds of years under the dense canopy of willows and alders, vegetation that ensured a steady insect supply for the fish.

But all of that changed in April, 1982, when the best wild trout stream in the Los Angeles area was destroyed. Tons of silt were accidentally flushed into the stream when a valve being repaired at Cogswell Dam by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works jammed.

When the valve was finally shut, most of the 24,000 wild trout that lived in the six-mile-long stream in the San Gabriel Mountains north of Azusa were displaced or killed and the stream’s life-sustaining gravel beds and plants were buried under 200,000 cubic yards of silt.

As it turned out, the West Fork transformed Edmondson into a skilled fly fisherman and a sportsman more interested in conservation than what he catches.

By August, 1983, Edmondson had become the driving force behind a sizable volunteer effort responsible for the West Fork’s continuing restoration and was well on his way to becoming a leader in the fight to protect the 18,500 miles of California streams populated by naturally reproducing trout.

Known as an intense and ambitious man, the 37-year-old California native “felt there was more to life than putting in 50 hours a week” as a commercial and residential building contractor. “I’m not opposed to the economic benefits,” he said, but he wasn’t finding it as rewarding as he had hoped it would be.

Trades Business Worries

He has not given up his business, but now as an officer of three fly fishing and conservation groups, Edmondson, who has no children, finds that he has traded his business worries for the growing responsibilities of conservation that take him all over the state.

“Perhaps I’ve attacked conservation the way I attacked business,” he said. “I’m interested in results and achievements.”

Although he hasn’t run from controversy, conservationists and state wildlife officials say Edmondson has distinguished himself more as a researcher, an organizer and a diplomat.

In the West Fork, he rallied the Pasadena Casting Club, which he serves as conservation chairman, behind a three-year restoration project that depended upon hundreds of volunteers working in cooperation with county, state and federal agencies. Native weeds, grasses and about 1,100 willows and alders were transplanted and tons of gravel were hauled in to reconstruct vital West Fork spawning areas.

Officials of the county and the state Department of Fish and Game have asked Edmondson to serve on a panel to administer a $250,000 trust fund being established by the county to pay for future restoration work on the West Fork.

In the Eastern Sierra, he persuaded officials of Fish and Game and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which have often been adversaries, to work together to extend the spawning habitat of brown trout.

He and members of the casting club also have provided valuable data on the health of trout populations in the Eastern Sierra. And Edmondson said he has put two years of planning into organizing a biological census of a Southern California stream believed to be a spawning run for the ocean- going steelhead trout.

His leadership in these areas has earned him the respect of both fly fishermen and high-level state officials in Sacramento.

Has Won Respect

“He’s one of the very top people I have to deal with,” said Bob Fletcher, who as deputy Fish and Game director is the agency’s second in command. “I have the utmost respect for him and his professional approach to what many times are controversial and multifaceted issues.”

Said Jim Solomon, a Santa Monica fly fisherman: “If someone were to say what he’s done in the West Fork and in (the Eastern Sierra), people would say that’s impossible, but he’s the guy that’s done it. In conservation, you’re not going to find a better guy.”

Solomon said that Edmondson often claims he cannot fish or tie flies well. But he is good at both, Solomon said. “He is just trying to make a point. For him, it’s more important to fight for the cause of the rivers and the fish than to indulge his ego in fly fishing.”

But if the West Fork’s destruction helped Edmondson appreciate the stream’s value to fly fishing, it was another incident that crystallized his vision of the sport.

During a solo expedition up one of the narrow, fern-covered canyons that empty into the West Fork, the lanky Edmondson stumbled upon what he says is a little known refuge of the stream’s ancestral trout population.

Found a Deep Pool

About a mile up the canyon’s dry, rocky wash, he came upon a deep pool, startling into flight the dark, racing shadows of adult rainbow trout.

“It was so idyllic,” he said. “It’s the Walden Pond of the West Fork, an unspoiled pool at the foot of a 50-foot waterfall. In high-water years, the trout migrate up to the pool, one of the last remaining pockets of the (San Gabriel) river’s original trout population.”

Edmondson, who will not disclose the pool’s location in order to protect the trout, said the fish had escaped the choking silt that was released into the West Fork.

“I didn’t fish,” he said. “I couldn’t bring myself to do that. These fish were the (descendants) of thousands of years of natural selection. I just hope their wild craziness will spread itself around” in the genes of the hatchery fish that have been stocked in the stream, when they are freed by the periodic floods.

The experience, he said, helped him complete his evolution from a fly fishing hobbyest to a true believer in keeping trout streams wild.

Book on Tying Flies

Edmondson said he first became interested in fly fishing when his father-in-law gave him a book on fly tying. After signing up for fly tying classes with the Pasadena Casting Club, Edmondson said that he and his wife, Ann learned about “catch-and-release” fishing. The method attempts to protect trout by immediately releasing them back into the stream after they are caught.

Edmondson discovered that “catch-and-release” is not just a method, but a philosophy of habitat management.

Edmondson now sees Walden Ponds everywhere. And he sees himself as a modern-day version of the stream keepers of past centuries who cared for trout streams owned by Europe’s landed gentry. But today, his patron is the public.

“Looking at Jim, you see a man who has embraced the West Fork, who certainly could be looked on as its stream keeper, though his responsibilities reach far beyond,” said Richard May, president of California Trout Inc., which is headquartered in San Francisco.

Edmondson, however, said he wants to go beyond anglers and address a broader public, particularly environmentalists, whom he views as natural allies to his cause.

‘Dovetailing Interests’

“I want to explain to them the importance of dovetailing their interests with ours,” he said. “When you have a natural ecosystem for trout, you’re not interrupting the food chain. That means you will have more birds, more wildlife, . . . more beauty.”

In addition to being conservation chairman, Edmondson is a board member of the 250-member Pasadena Casting Club, a board member and Southern California chief executive of California Trout, a 2,600-member statewide group dedicated to conserving wild trout streams, and board chairman of the Federation of Fly Fishers, a 50,000-member national organization.

Not surprisingly, his duties take more and more of his time. Edmondson, who builds and remodels homes and commercial structures in partnership with Dirk Dorsett, credits his partner with allowing him the time for his volunteer work.

“This last year, it’s been about full-time conservation work,” he said, including presentations to such groups as the Bishop Chamber of Commerce and conservation organizations in Santa Monica. “We want to get more people involved, build a coalition throughout the state, and you can’t do that any other way” than by talking to people.

“Fortunately enough,” he said, “I have a wife who tolerates me being gone from my business so much. Somehow we make ends meet.”

Montana’s Madison River

He also has less time for fishing, he said, though he still manages to squeeze in fly fishing trips to Montana’s Madison River and the Eastern Sierra while doing conservation work.

But most of his time is devoted to conservation efforts.

After working to restore the West Fork, he began an effort to reverse a decline in the brown trout population in the Owens River downstream from the Pleasant Valley Dam in Inyo County, a project that was completed last May.

A culvert that had been installed at too much of an angle to allow water flow except at peak times blocked the trout from a prime spawning habitat upstream. Despite five years of consultations between the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and the Fish and Game Department, the culvert had not been removed.

It took Edmondson about six months to persuade the Los Angeles utility to remove the culvert, which had been used as a bridge across the stream, at no cost and donate a 70-foot-long steel bridge.

“All the agencies were convinced it could happen, but no one stepped forward to handle it,” Edmondson said. “It took tremendous amounts of communication to get all the ducks in row.”

Wrote a Report

Last year, Edmondson wrote a report based on a two-year study he and members of the Pasadena Casting Club conducted on the number of trout caught in the Upper Owens River above Crowley Lake in Inyo County.

The report concluded that the river was being over-harvested by anglers, especially during the winter spawning season, and that the most fertile segment of the river’s trout population was being prevented from reproducing. He recommended that the state Fish and Game Commission close the upper Owens to angling during spawning season, from Nov. 1 to May 23.

Phil Pister, head fisheries biologist for Fish and Game in Inyo and Mono counties, said Edmondson’s report has provided him with valuable information. But Pister said that before making a decision, the department will conduct another census next season to assure itself that the study did not reflect a seasonal aberration.

Edmondson’s latest project is a search for steelhead trout in a coastal Southland creek.

Each weekend, members of local fly fishing and conservation groups, trained in steelhead-spotting by Edmondson, hike down to the creek in hopes of catching a glimpse of the flashing silver fins of spawning steelhead.

Survey Ends April 1

Though the survey ends April 1, the group hopes to determine whether this small creek in the shadows of urban Los Angeles is still North America’s southernmost steelhead run. Edmondson won’t say where the stream is because he wants to reduce human interference should spawning begin.

To Pister, a 20-year-veteran biologist working in the state’s most popular trout fishing region, Edmondson and the organizations he serves represent a growing force in the environmental movement.

“We are not dealing with guys who dig up worms in their backyards, but a highly competent group of people, doctors, lawyers, professors,” he said. “ . . . They know how to play their cards, they are more politically sophisticated.”

At the forefront of this movement, Pister said, is Edmondson and California Trout, whose trademarks have been aggressive courtroom tactics and the use of an obscure state law that requires dam operators to release sufficient flows of water to ensure the survival of fish downstream.

Edmondson has raised the stream-flow war cry on behalf of the organization in San Bernardino County, where he filed a formal protest with the state Water Resources Control Board last month against a proposed dam project at Big Bear Lake.

The California Department of Safety of Dams has ordered that a new dam be built at Big Bear Lake, based on recommendations made in a 1980 Army Corps of Engineers safety study, which concluded that the Big Bear dam may not withstand a major earthquake.

Bear Creek Project

Edmondson said the $5-million project may damage the wild trout habitat of Bear Creek, a brook fed by water seeping from the present dam. He predicted that water to the creek would be cut off during construction of the new dam and thereby endanger the trout population that has survived in the creek since 1910 when the dam was built.

He said the dam’s operator, Big Bear Municipal Water District, should conduct an environmental study to determine the project’s potential impact on the creek before starting construction. Water district officials, who are preparing a formal response to Edmondson and other conservation groups, say they do not have to prepare a report because they are merely rebuilding an existing structure.

In the West Fork, the creed Edmondson espouses--that streams in which trout are allowed to naturally reproduce are ecologically more sound and provide more fish than streams that are stocked--is being followed.

Edmondson said that his and the Pasadena Casting Club’s efforts have won the stream special protections from Fish and Game.

As a result, only artificial lures and barbless hooks can be used and all trout caught in the stream must be released back into the water alive. These restrictions, known as catch-and-release regulations, are enforced by fish and game wardens and club members.

Sometimes, Edmondson said, enforcement of the new regulations has prompted anglers to jab him in the chest with a finger. “ ‘I’ve fished here for 20 years,’ they tell me. But when I have a chance to explain, people accept the idea.”

Hasn’t Won Them All

Although Edmondson has not won all of his battles, he says he has seen enough results on the West Fork to be hopeful.

“He’s been the watchdog, and that’s had a beneficial effect,” said Deputy Fish and Game Director Fletcher.

To begin with, Edmondson said, the estimated 8,000 trout that have reestablished themselves in the stream resumed their age-old spawning ritual last month.

Another victory is the stream’s continuing popularity.

“By seeing 50, 100 people up there fly fishing on a weekend, that shows that growing numbers of people are getting interested in quality angling. It’s a sign of success.”