[Badfish2]

It's a war of words and deeds.
The original litigants in the lawsuit that restored permanent flows in Rush Creek and saved Mono Lake are claiming California Trout, Inc., and its attorneys and staff have adopted the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power position of dooming the lower creek for decades.

Cal Trout, a fisherman's conservation group that took over the case, said it is doing what's best for the resource and demanding a science-based restoration for the Eastern Sierra Nevada watershed. They want this restoration to rely on processes as natural as possible, even if it takes decades or more.

The original cast wants active restoration to be done as quickly as possible so anglers can sample what historically was one of the finest fisheries in the entire Eastern Sierra.

Rush Creek was first dried up in 1941 when the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power built the current Grant Lake Dam. It had flows many years after that until a second Los Angeles aqueduct was built out of the Eastern Sierra in 1970. The increased capacity allowed city engineers to divert all of Rush Creek's flow to Los Angeles taps.

High water years in the early 1980s allowed for flows down Rush Creek again for a few years in a row and Dick Dahlgren, then living in Mammoth Lakes, "discovered" a thriving trout fishery in Rush Creek below Grant Lake.

What Dahlgren found in Rush Creek was a stream filled with six- to 10-inch brown trout and he was sick when he heard the LADWP planned to dry up the stream again when trout season closed the end of October that year.
Dahlgren had helped start Mammoth Fly Rodders and enlisted the help of a stubborn Irish attorney named Barrett McInerney to see if there was a way to stop the dewatering.

They filed a lawsuit based on an obscure Fish and Game Code that mandates dam operators keep flows below their dams to maintain fisheries that exist there. A judge granted a temporary restraining order and flows continued down Rush Creek. It took a decade of litigation, but Dahlgren and McInerney eventually won the lawsuit.

In the process, they picked up statewide angler support from Cal Trout, which eventually was named on the lawsuit. Cal Trout I and II, as the cases became known, restored minimum flows to Rush Creek, and all the other smaller streams in the Mono Lake Basin and mandated the LADWP do complete restoration to the fisheries.

The Mono Lake Committee jumped on the bandwagon and offered moral support to the lawsuit that did what they hadn't been able to do - save Mono Lake.

But the 1994 lawsuit decision ended up being about one thing: saving Rush Creek's reborn trout fishery and restoring it to pre-1941 conditions. That was when Dahlgren and McInerney still were involved, even though the case was under Cal Trout, and they took that to mean restore the creek now. Not decades from now.

With the grudging approval of the LADWP, which had to pay for the work, a company specializing in stream restoration and reconstruction was hired. Trehey & Associates literally rebuilt the upper part of Rush, Parker and Walker creeks from Highway 395 upstream to where all three had been diverted.

The results were spectacular, especially in Rush Creek, which today has browns up to 18 inches in this recreated stretch. Below 395, Rush Creek was one, long flat riffle that held only a few small trout.

But this is when things change. Trehey's restoration stopped. McInerney was fired. And the new Cal Trout staff took over the lawsuit and oversight of the restoration.

"After two miles of construction, work was mysteriously stopped," said Dahlgren, who today lives in Idaho. "Cal Trout changed its mind on their hard-fought restoration plan and agreed with the LADWP experts that the best way to restore the fishery was to let the stream do it naturally, a process that would take at least 400 years."

Mark Drew, Cal Trout's Eastern Sierra program manager, said the organization has been "approaching restoration on a complete ecosystem process trying to recreate, as near as possible, a natural system." This has taken 12 years of studies and research, a series of reports and now a final Synthesis Report that will guide the restoration work.

In a nutshell, it suggests massive, scouring flows during high water years and low, minimum flows in drought years, and this regime will naturally recreate the lower Rush Creek system. Drew, asked how long that will take, said frankly, "Several decades."

McInerney and Dahlgren don't deny the plan might work, in time, and the amount of time it would take is a "guesstimate."

But why wait several decades, at best, or centuries at worst?

The LADWP originally wiped out the fishery overnight.

"The only thing that creates stream habitat is massive flows of water or glaciers. Or bulldozers," McInerney said. "Bulldozers are quicker."

Since 2005, Dahlgren has been advocating what he calls his "pond scheme," a lower river restoration that revolves around the creation of 20 ponds on lower Rush Creek in between Treyhey-like stream restoration. The idea is to have big, deep-water habitat that can grow trophy trout like those that existed before 1941. Think of them as big beaver ponds, which also grow big trout.

Dahlgren pointed out the court order wasn't about creating a natural system. It was about recreating an excellent fishery that existed there before the LADWP. The pond scheme is just one idea to do that. He said Cal Trout isn't advancing any ideas and abandoning the anglers who support them.

Drew sort of reinforces that when he said, "I'm not sure Rush Creek has the capacity to be returned to pre-1941" because too many things have changed. He's talking about Rush Creek as a natural system.

That makes Dahlgren and McInerney bristle. The reality is Rush Creek hasn't been a natural system since the first little diversion dam was built on the stream in 1915. The entire Mono Basin never had native trout. No one is suggesting tearing down Grant Lake Dam or stopping LADWP diversions. Dahlgren just wants enough water to recreate a great trout fishery. That was what the judge ordered, and if Cal Trout doesn't want to push for that Dahlgren and McInerney are willing to come back on board.

McInerney said it would be a simple process for Cal Trout to give the case back to Dahlgren and the Mammoth Fly Rodders, and he'd be happy to again be the attorney pressing for an active restoration of Lower Rush Creek.