CALIFORNIA'S Salmon and Steelhead:
The Struggle to Restore and Imperiled Resource
Edited by Alan Lufkin
University of California Press
American Bald Eagle Breaking Through Salmon Flesh Kleptoparasitized From An American Osprey On A Wild California River On An Outer Shore
Compiled by
Robert Roy van de Hoek
December 21, 2000
Winter Solstice
Malibu, California
EPILOGUE
by
Joel Hedgpeth
The fishery investigations that inspired this essay occurred in 1939-1940, fifty years ago. I was a junior member of the field crew assembled to work on the impact of the construction of Shasta Dam. During the long summer we were based at Baird on the McCloud River; in the winter some of us continued at Stanford University in a basement office in the museum, directly underneath Governor Stanford's locomotive No. 1. We often looked thoughtfully at the beams overhead, hoping that the next earthquake would not occur during working hours.
The report, by Harry A. Hanson, Osgood R. Smith, and Paul R. Needham, was published as Special Report No. 10 of the Bureau of Fisheries in 1940. One of its recommendations was that water be "drawn from the reservoir at a sufficient depth below the surface to provide cold water in the river below the dam for at leasat the first five or six years of operation of the dam." This was intended "to avoid the danger of warm water during the period whne the fish are being transferred" to the hatchery and other streams.... Now, in mid-1989, after fifty years and several more dams, there is to be an attempt to provide cold water by holding back water from Shasta Dam and releasing it instead via the tunnel from the Trinity Dam as part of the effort to save the now officially endangered winter run of five hundred and seven fish (in 1989). This will cost more than $4.5 million in power sales alone. Nothing is said of the potential effect on the sad remains of the Trinity River.
In 1939 we counted 16,108 fish in the winter run. That count was probably only a small remnant of what it was in the days of Livingston Stonee, but the current count - fifty years later - is 15,601 fewer fish than that 1939 number.
...... MORE OF THE EPILOGUE TO BE ADDED LATER.....
