As you know, I was involved with the spawning gravel restoration work California’s Stanislaus River tis past fall. The Cliff’s Notes version is we rehabilitated a mile and a half stretch of river with 118,000 tons of gravel and close to 200 boulders to provide wild Chinook a place to spawn. We got the work done just in time for the fall run to begin and eagerly awaited the return of our fish to see how the liked their new diggs.
Well, California’s Chinook runs completely tanked this year and only 408 kings were counted at the weir on the lower Stanislaus (compared to 3,500 the season before). We saw a few fish in our stretch of river and some dug redds like the one in the photo above. Overall, however, there just weren’t enough kings in the system to get any solid feedback on our designs. A total bummer!! And the future doesn’t look a whole lot better at this point…
You can see all the before and after photos from the project here: Stanislaus River Restoration
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