The following article appeared initially in the premiere issue of Wild Steelhead and Atlantic Salmon Magazine, Spring 1994. Although almost a decade old, this article still provides valuable insights into the plight of Vancouver Island Steelhead.

PARADISE LOST
by Dr. Craig Orr

On an auspicious January day, a 20-year-old English expatriate cast into British Columbia's Nimpkish River, on the northeast coast of Vancouver Island, and hooked his first steelhead. The year was 1928. The angler was Roderick L. Haig-Brown.

The thrill Haig-Brown experienced sharply contrasted with his family's disappointment when Haig-Brown was dismissed from a prestigious English school of which his own grandfather had once been headmaster. Sent to toil in America, Haig-Brown helped cut down the virgin forests of the Pacific Northwest. When he had had enough, and had decided to make his mark as a writer, he looked north to the Nimpkish and the other still pristine rivers of Vancouver Island. He never looked back.

When Roderick Haig-Brown died on the banks of the Campbell River in the autumn of 1976, he left a legacy of some of the finest angling prose ever penned. He had also elevated the steelhead to its deserved stature as one of the world's finest gamefish-the equal, he persuaded, to the revered Atlantic salmon of his birthplace.

Haig-Brown was among the first to learn that the sea-going rainbow of his new Pacific home would take flies-even dry flies. This, years before most anglers thought the fish would look at anything but a deep-drifted cluster of salmon eggs.

That he discovered this on his own speaks volumes of the angler, and volumes also about the remarkable resource he was fortunate to have experienced. The Vancouver Island that the young, eager Haig-Brown explored with his split cane rods and soaked gut leaders was a paradise. That our generation of steelhead anglers has been robbed of such rich inheritance is painful and haunting. And the story behind this diminished legacy must be told.

Imagine the fishing once enjoyed by Haig-Brown and other pioneer Vancouver Island anglers. Imagine the paradise of clear-running rivers, more than 200 of them filled with steelhead-steelhead that had never scraped a fin on the concrete of a hatchery. Imagine, too, the brooding forests traversed by those rivers. Haig-Brown caught his first steelhead barely into this century, before the Great Depression, decades before modern fly lines were available, and the same year the first bridge was built across Haig-Brown's beloved backyard Campbell River.

Imagine the scores of sea-run cutthroat trout that slashed at Haig-Brown's streamers, Steelhead Bees and Bivisibles. He commonly took "10 to 12 nice cutthroat" in a single day, incidental to steelhead, with many "up to four pounds."

To help prime the imagination-and indignation over what's been so rapidly squandered-it's worth pondering some of the changes that have occurred to Roderick Haig-Brown's Vancouver Island in the scant 60 years since he and his wife Ann purchased 20 acres on the banks of the Campbell River in 1934.

top

Of Fish and Forests

Rainforests gained a toehold on Vancouver Island nearly 12,000 years ago. As the last glacier retreated northward, cedars, hemlocks, firs and spruces began liberating soil and nutrients from the rocks, while taming the wild rivers. Lush conifer crowns and extensive roots damped the kinetic energy of persistent winter rains, helping to control runoff. Trees also bolstered summer river flows, and provided shade to help cool and oxygenate water.

Salmon and steelhead soon swarmed in 90 stable and diverse watersheds, each larger than 12,000 acres. For 10,000 years those fish adapted to the conditions specific to their own natal rivers. Some 25 to 30 Island rivers, most with natural obstructions such as bedrock chutes and falls, had "summer" steelhead, that is, runs that entered freshwater from April through October but which did not spawn until the following spring. Those and more than 150 other rivers also sported winter- and spring-spawning steelhead, the exact timing of each migration fine-tuned over centuries by flow regimes and other environmental and physical factors.

A true cornucopia of natural richness greeted Haig-Brown. More than 200 rivers with steelhead! Far more than any angler could experience in a blessed lifetime. A flowing tapestry of 200 rivers, each home to a race of sea-run rainbow genetically unique from all others, a distinctness borne from the diversity of the ancient forests and watersheds. Yet it was and is a fragile diversity. Many of the rivers, cold and nutrient poor, support only small populations of steelhead. The largest stocks of summer steelhead number 1,000 to 1,400 fish. Most rivers sustain fewer than 500. Many support fewer than 100-half the 200 figure the American Fisheries Society identifies as the "threshold of extinction" for any given population of salmon. Perhaps 7,000 summer fish exist in total, and four times that many winter fish. The rarest of the Pacific salmonids, millennia in the making, thinly spread over 200 streams and rivers.

top

Vancouver Island forests and fish began getting into trouble about the time that Man had all but exterminated sea otters in the 1880s. Trees then became the coveted resource, although logging stayed small scale and coastal until the turn of the century, when locomotives and the "steam donkey" extended the logger's reach inland from tidewater. Between 1903 and 1907, 15,000 timber licenses were granted, covering nine million acres of the Island. By 1917, 98 locomotives and 354 flatcars snaked along 62 logging railways. The boom was blooming, and the first casualties were the centuries-old conifers of the lush and accessible valley bottoms. No forestry guideline or fishery officer protected Island rivers. Trees were yarded across rivers. Riverbanks were stripped bare. Log jams plugged rivers. Floods scoured spawning beds.

When the valley bottom timber dwindled, matters got worse. Clearcuts and logging roads sprouted on the steep slopes. Typically, prescient, Haig-Brown wrote in The Western Angler that "the logging methods at present in use (1939) seriously threaten the future of Vancouver Island streams. The practice of clear logging leaves the banks of the streams without cover, and at the same time causes a rapid run-off of the rainfall, with resulting extremes of high and low water."

Studies on Vancouver Island's damaged Oyster River clearly show that denuded and scarred headwater slopes cannot control runoff from persistent Pacific Northwest rains. Resulting winter floods flush sand and silt into rivers, often cementing or washing away spawning gravel, and reducing growth and vitality of salmon fry and parr (see the sidebar Logging's Deadly Synergism on page 13).

Protests by Haig-Brown and others against poor logging practices failed to sway provincial governments seemingly hell bent on liquidating Vancouver Island timber. Only six of the 90 watersheds on Vancouver Island of more than 5,000 hectares (12,355 acres) remain unlogged. Three of those last six, draining into Clayquot Sound on Vancouver Island's southwest coast, were recently opened to logging.

An overdue forest audit in 1992 found that 34 of 53 Vancouver Island streams examined had been significantly damaged by shoddy logging practices. Damage was deemed moderate or major in every cut block inspected (an inspection that excluded about three quarters of the Island's steelhead-bearing streams). Debris torrents, slides and massive loads of silt were blamed on inadequate cleanup, clearcutting of steep slopes, logging too close to streams, and poor ditch and road maintenance. The littany of damage included "complete habitat loss" on portions of 11 rivers, a tributary of the Canton River "paved with gravel," and a "buried" side channel of the Nahwitti River (itself logged to its banks).

British Columbia Provincial Minister of Forests Dan Miller, formerly a mill worker, was "absolutely appalled" by the audit, and ordered guilty logging companies to "repair" damaged streams. No mention-let alone, accounting-was made of the true costs of that damage to fish. Nor could glossy cleanup reports alter the meagerness or futility of most repairs.

Despite another black eye for an industry trying to shed a "Brazil of the North" label, Miller was politely lukewarm to proposals by the Steelhead Society of British Columbia to widen streamside management zones (from 15 to 90 meters), establish forestry guidelines on private lands, and end the grapple-yard logging methods that chew up hillsides and accelerate erosion.

Despite obvious and catastrophic damage, Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans-the federal agency charged with protecting fish habitat-chose not to prosecute a single logging company cited in the audit. This even though Sierra Legal Defense Fund Chief Counsel Greg McDade calls the federal Fisheries Act "one of the most powerful laws in Canada."

Meantime, Vancouver Island provincial fisheries biologist Craig Wightman, whose Nanaimo office commissioned the forest audit, says he is "just now seeing the effects of high-level logging on many Vancouver Island streams." Wightman cites "infilling" of riverbeds and instability of stream channels as the "big problems."

top

Of Mines and Dams

"I am afraid for the wonderland of Strathcona Park because its fate lies with a Cabinet (government) of dreary old men who have lost their capacity for wonder, if indeed they ever had any.
(Roderick Haig-Brown, Vancouver Province Newspaper, 1952)

Even though Vancouver Island rivers and fish have long suffered from the synergistic effects of poor logging practices, the coup de grace for the Campbell's wild fish was a mix of dams, overfishing, urban sprawl-with a toxic chaser of heavy metal.

Logger and entrepreneur Mike King first recognized the power potential of the Campbell River when he acquired the hydro rights in 1909. In 1926, nine years before Haig-Brown bought Herb Pidcock's property on the Campbell, British Columbia Premier Duff Patullo offered the waters of Campbell River to any company "ready to harness and use them."

Hydroelectric development of the Campbell River watershed began in earnest when the British Columbia Power Commission was formed in 1945, and work started on the design and construction of John Hart Dam, approximately five miles upstream of the mouth of the Campbell River. A second storage dam at Ladore Falls subsequently flooded Lower Campbell Lake, swallowing nearby, fish-rich McIvor and Loveland lakes.

When plans to dam Buttle Lake were announced in 1952, the public protested. Most of Buttle Lake was with-in Strathcona Park. Its flooding would inundate shoreline shallows and trout spawning areas.

Haig-Brown led the protest, recalls daughter Valerie Haig-Brown from her Alberta home. "I remember being allowed to skip school to attend the public hearings with my father," she said. "It was 1952. You have to remember that public hearings on government projects were rare back then."

Rarely successful, either. Island pulp mills in Victoria, Port Alberni, and Nanaimo wanted power, and construction of the Strathcona Dam began the following year. Damage continued in 1956 and 1957 when parts of the Heber, Salmon and Quinsam rivers were diverted to supplement Campbell River runoff. The final blow to Haig-Brown's beloved cutthroat, steelhead salmon was delivered by the opening of a mine at Buttle Lake in the early 1960's.

top

The Man and His Fish

"The true sea-run cutthroat is a very special fish and makes very special fishing. My own opinion is that, at his best, he is in every way comparable (to steelhead); and under some circumstances a discerning angler may even find him superior."
(Haig-Brown, A River Never Sleeps, 1946)

To comprehend the damage to Campbell River's Wild fish, it is helpful to appreciate what those fish meant to Haig-Brown.

Steelhead clearly held a large spot in Haig-Brown's heart. In A River Never Sleeps he says, "In May I turn to a smaller rod and go to the Island pools to find our own run of summer fish, little fish seldom over five pounds, seldom under two, but sea-run steelhead just the same and brave fish that hit the fly hard and jump freely in the broken water."

Haig-Brown pursued steelhead year-around. Yet a case can be made that it was the sea-run cutthroat that kept him happily wading the Campbell River.

Haig-Brown noted in The Western Angler (1939) a "strong movement (of cutthroat) to fresh water in August," with "a fair number of fish" reaching four pounds. "In March and April and on into May the cutthroats are there (Campbell River) because the salmon fry are coming up from the gravel and moving down; the fishing is often quick and fierce, with a big wet fly quickly cast to a slashing rise and worked back fast" (A River Never Sleeps). One July he "floated a Mackenzie River bucktail down the runs (of the Island Pool), dancing it back to me from wave top to wave top on the upstream wind," noting, "It seldom finished the ride. Big cutthroats, three-pounders, some of them nearly four pounds, came at it like fiercer creatures than any fish."

Haig-Brown also spent years stalking cutthroat in the estuary of the Campbell River, "getting very fine results on the last two hours of the ebb (tide)." Once, after fooling three cutthroat of three pounds each-in less than 10 minutes-he and his partner retired their Bivisibles because that pattern seemed "too deadly" (A River Never Sleeps).

Cutthroat clearly provided Haig-Brown with diverse, quality angling. Yet, even while he enjoyed the fine fishing, he noted that "cutthroat runs of British Columbia streams are not even nearly so good as they were at one time." He cited as example one afternoon in 1911 when "two rods-not wonderfully good rods, either-took from Big Qualicum River 125 fish" (The Western Angler).

Haig-Brown blamed these declines on a "bag limit of fifteen fish per day," a minimum "size limit of eight inches (that) is too low; and the drain of year-round fishing in tidal waters." Van Egan, a now retired biology teacher and Haig-Brown's long-time fishing partner, also recalls a dramatic decline in Campbell River cutthroat, after salmon roe was again legalized in the mid-1950s.

Egan, past Chairman of the Campbell River Environmental Council and author of Tyee (1988), a history of Campbell River's famous chinook fisher, also suspects a more insidious agent in the demise of the Campbell's wild sea-run cutthroat: heavy metal pollution from the Buttle Lake mine.

Egan remembers seeing so many cutthroat in the upper estuary of the Campbell, "they were slashing from one bank to another. All of a sudden, in one year in the mid-seventies, they were gone."

When federal fisheries biologists published A Review of the Potential Influence of Heavy Metals on Salmonid Fishes in The Campbell River, Vancouver Island, B.C. in 1982, they noted a "consistent rise in zinc levels from .007 mg/L in 1971 to about 0.048 mg/L at the end of 1980," and recommended "immediate reduction of zinc and copper concentrations in the Campbell."

"Haig-Brown warned about such problems (heavy-metal Pollution) when he fought against the Buttle Lake mine," recalls Egan.

Fisheries biologist Wightman suggests that "other factors also may have contributed to the decline of cutthroat, including urbanization of tributary streams and competition with larger, hatchery-reared coho salmon."

At the same time that cutthroat vanished, says Egan, "wild steelhead were crashing." He painfully recalls "four years in the mid to late seventies when counts of steelhead went from 30 to 13 to nine and, finally, one fish. The true Campbell River winter-run steelhead is extinct."

Chinook declines paralleled those of steelhead. Barely 1,000 spawners returned to the Campbell River by 1980, 3,000 fewer than the previous 10-year average.

Egan again suspects heavy metals contributed to those declines, but he is also critical of hydro development: "The dams cut off spawning arears and prevented the recruitment of spawning gravel."

Nor were other rivers spared the Campbell's problems. Toxins leaching from an defunct copper mine exterminated steelhead in the nearby Tsolum River. A gene pool thousands of years in the making, wiped out in 20. (Though a mine executive cites the presence of stray pink salmon as a "sign of recovery.") One river south, a different problem yields the same result. The damned Puntledge River had two wild summer steelhead return in 1991 - both were male. On the southwest Island, summer steelhead dwindled below extinction thresholds in dozens of Barkley Sound rivers, first logged, then barricaded by hundreds of gillnets set for enhanced sockeye salmon. Whole sections of the San Juan River clogged with silt from unregulated logging on private land. Similar stories emerged from the Nitinat and Caycuse. The Gordon River, A Class One steelhead river, not included in the forest audit, even rated a visit in 1992 by the deputy-minister of forests, after its banks were stripped and its gravel bed used as a logging road. This, while governments and forest companies tout the end of the "bad old days" of logging.

While not exonerating dams, logging or pollution, biologist Wightman also points out that there was an Island-wide crash of steelhead in the late 1970s, likely related to "poor marine survival, poaching and general overfishing. Remember, bag limits back then were 40 steelhead a year."

Further confounding the issue and contributing to the decline of salmonids was the massive increase in the catching power of the Johnstone Strait commercial seine net fleet. Boats operating in the narrow Georgia Strait approach waters north of Campbell River took huge quantities of chinook and coho salmon. Provincial Ministry of Environment biologists estimated that the non-selective nets also incidentally killed some 4,000 to 5,000 summer steelhead as recently as 1978.

Since 1975, most Campbell River steelhead and chinook have been hatched and reared in plastic trays and concrete swimways. Some 20,000 winter-run steelhead smolts, offspring of Quinsam River parents, are released each year into the watershed. A further 25,000 juvenile summer-runs are borrowed from the more northerly, and as yet, less damaged, Tsitka River. The hatchery has also raised chinook runs to about 5,000, but the fact remains, when Haig-Brown died in 1976 on the banks of the river he loved, there was a second, unwritten epitaph for wild cutthroat, chinook and steelhead.

top

On Estuaries

"I knew little or nothing of tides and even less of the fearful things men do to river mouths in the process of civilization."
(Haig-Brown, Fisherman's Fall, 1964)

If the 20th century devoured Vancouver Island trees, it pecked piranha-like at the coastal estuaries that nurtured Haig-Brown's beloved cutthroat and juvenile salmon.

The first bites added up to 32 percent of the marsh habitat on the east coast of Vancouver Island-by the turn of the century-when early settlers diked upper marshes for farming. Agriculture was present at the Campbell River estuary in 1938, disappeared by 1965, and was followed by a log dump and log dry-sorting site (1938), dredging and sawmill expansion (1958), marinas (1975) and log storage sites (1981).

"Since I moved to Campbell River in 1956," says Egan, "I've noticed the coastline gradually filling in, straightening out. Just recently, the Discovery Harbour Marina ate up another 441/2 acres."

Happily, Egan also witnessed a marsh development program and dryland log storage in the 1980s, which partly countered estuary loss. Egan also helped the Steelhead Society of British Columbia's Campbell River Branch, the municipality, and the Department of Fisheries in an $80,000 project to rebuild the Willow Creek estuary, to the south.

top

Paradise Regained?

"Conservation is fair and honest dealing with the future, usually at some cost to the immediate present."
(Haig-Brown, Measure of the Year,1950)

"The last ten years or so have established the point that hatcheries can produce steelhead trout. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing remains highly debatable. What is clear is that there has been an orgy of hatchery production, especially in the State of Washington, at a time when nobody had a very good idea of what the results might be."
(Haig-Brown, The Fly Fisher Magazine, 1975)

The Habitat, production and diversity of Vancouver Island Salmon and steelhead have been subordinated to Homosapiens' insatiable appetite for resources, mainly, trees. Recent tightening of fisher-forestry guidelines (1987), and cuts in still unsustainable harvest rates, may reduce rates of damage, yet the costs of past logging remain high-and unpaid in full. Biologist Wightman's warning that we are "only now seeing the effects of high-level logging on steelhead" is sobering-such effects are likely to persist for decades.

Moreover, the past and pat response to the damage caused by logging, dams, over-fishing, and pollution-besides ignoring the problem-has been to erect hatcheries to "supplement" wild fish. The federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans-the same agency that declined to prosecute a single forest company for logging damage-has spent $500 million on West Coast salmon enhancement prog4rams in the past 15 years.

A large part of that half-billion dollars has gone into capital costs of hatcheries. Many of those hatcheries produce coho salmon, in theory, to "restore" wild coho in Georgia Straight waters (eastern Vancouver Island), whose population have been sliced in half in the last 15 years. In reality, those hatcheries mask declines of wild coho while diverting habitat restoration funds. More hatchery coho also means more coho fishermen (sport and commercial), placing further strain on remaining wild stocks (indistinguishable from hatchery-rear brethren).

Fortunately, as more and more people grasp the immense value of wild fish, the orgy of "concrete palaces" seems to be abating. Fortunately, too, the steelhead that inhabit the 200 plus rivers on Vancouver Island remain the most diverse and wild of their kind (in contrast to steelhead populations in nearby Washington State rivers, homogenized and tamed by 50 years of hatchery programs). Nearly 90 percent of the estimated 260,000 adult steelhead of British Columbia are of wild or natural origin, a percentage which could increase, given the strong focus on wild stock management by provincial fisheries biologists (including Island-wide catch-and-release regulations for all wild steelhead).

Those biologists, and groups such as the Steelhead Society, continue to champion numerous programs which enhance survival and productivity of wild steelhead, cutthroat, and salmon: stream fertilization projects, a $5 million smolt deflector at hydro generators on the Puntledge River, and many habitat research, protection and restoration initiatives. Sea-run cutthroat have even returned to rebuilt Willow Creek estuary. The Steelhead Society is also advocating selective commercial fisheries, to reduce critically high by-catches of wild coho and steelhead. So far, only some aboriginal fishermen have adopted traditional, selective harvesting methods, including beach seines and in-river traps.

Still, no true island exists in today's world. The fate of Vancouver Island steelhead-an indicator species of the health and vigor of watersheds-is tied to how other steelhead rivers fare in comparison. Vancouver Island already serves as an "escape valve" for non-resident anglers seeking quality angling. Their numbers, skyrocketing in step with unprecedented and unchecked population growth of the Pacific Northwest (the province's population increases by 5,000 additional people each month), jeopardizes the very experience they seek.

More humans also means more burden on a resource already imperiled by greed, pollution, ignorance, political indifference and public apathy. The strain of more humans, and the transient nature of society, further weakens the "community" Haig-Brown felt was necessary to protect local environments-and thus the wild steelhead of his beloved Vancouver Island paradise.

top

In The Spirit of Haig-Brown

"I have known very few rivers thoroughly and intimately. The Campbell I know almost as a man should know a river. I have a fair idea of what to expect from the river, and usually, because I fish it that way, the river gives me approximately what I expect of it."
(Haig-Brown, A River Never Sleeps, 1946)

Roderick Haig-Brown's piece of paradise was a two-mile stretch of flowing river. And the Campbell River's-large and diverse runs of wild cutthroat, chinook and steelhead ensured quality fishing, each and every month. The Campbell of 1946 was little fished and unaffected by logging, hydro-electric development, heavy metal pollution, or hatcheries.

Those and other current-day problems have since spawned a more nomadic breed of steelhead angler. Randy Killoran, a resident of Campbell River for all his 24 years, is one example. Sedentary salmon guide by summer, the spirited Killoran transforms into a self-proclaimed steelheading fanatic in winter. Armed with his trusty Volkswagen van and a well-thumbed copy of Jim Harrison's The Theory & Practice of Rivers, we fished together this past spring at Killoran's current favorite river, the Gold.

"This is my first full year on the Gold," he told me, defining "full" somewhere in the enviable vicinity of 100 fishing days.

"I started out on the Campbell River when I was 15 or 16. Since then I've been on a sort of two-year migration."

Killoran left the Campbell River after two years because he "wasn't enjoying the water. Hydro changed the riverbed with seriously high flows," and kept the river "too high and fast" for his liking.

For the next two years, Killoran fished the Quinsam River, a tributary of the Campbell. He left the Quinsam after crowds seeking hatchery-produced steelhead multiplied "to the nth degree."

Killoran's next two-year stop was the Muchalat River, a tributary of the Gold. In his first year there, the Muchalat suffered a flood from headwaters logging that "rearranged" its lower reaches. In his second year, the Muchalat went "dead"-sending him back to the east side of the Island and the Salmon River. He stopped fishing the Salmon in year two because of the big flood.

"I rafted down the Salmon just after Christmas to see what the river looked like. I got a queer sensation about where I was, and then I realized that I was in a rapids that had been one of the nicest pools in the river, called Big Tree Creek Pool. The pool had been there for a couple of centuries, right? Now there were big trees and stumps everywhere. It was a horror show. I was so appalled I started fishing the Eve River [farther northwest]."

Yet the Eve soon started "filling in with gravel. It's been hacked." He added, with angry resignation, "If there's ever a river on Vancouver Island that's been butchered by logging, it's the Eve."

Now, two years later, before he's even a quarter century old, the immediate-past Chairman of the Campbell River Branch of the Steelhead Society has just finished year one on his sixth "home" river. Will his two-year cycle be broken?

"I don't know," Killoran admits tentatively, "the Gold is getting pretty crowded." Much of that crowd is from south of the Canadian border. They tell of the destruction of rivers in the United States by poor logging practices, dams, and an overdependence on hatchery-reared steelhead. Those Americans are on migrations of their own, in search of quality angling.

Killoran's travels raise troubling questions. Was Haig-Brown the last of a breed? How many sedentary and satisfied stream anglers remain on Vancouver Island? With the destructive effects of indifferent logging on stream stability and fish populations predicted to persist 80 or more years, are modern steelheaders like Killoran doomed to wander a damaged wilderness for twice the penance doled out to Moses? And what will the future call us for having tolerated so much ravaging of rivers?