Mules help deliver fish to remote waters

COFFEE CREEK, Calif. - Charlie Steele wrestled coolers filled with tiny squirming fish onto his mule, lashing the load down with a rope hitch his family developed during 150 years of running pack trains into the Trinity Alps Wilderness.

Steele and others ferrying trout to remote mountain lakes were carrying on a tradition dating to the 1920s, when Trinity County residents first started saddling up their pack horses and mules each summer to stock isolated lakes.

Roads were poor or nonexistent through the Klamath Mountains of northwest California early in the last century. That hasn't changed.

The area is so remote, the state Department of Fish and Game has been using airplanes to drop fish into the larger lakes since the 1950s.

However, the quality of fishing had seriously declined by the early 1990s, particularly in smaller lakes and streams the airplanes couldn't reach.

Local members of the Backcountry Horsemen of California talked the state into letting them take up where their parents and grandparents left off. In 1993, they again began the annual trek into the mountains northwest of Redding.

"You can't imagine what a thrill it was the first time we went in," said Mary Hamilton, whose family offered fishing trips from 1909 until its resort was flooded by Clair Engle Lake in 1959. "Those lakes hadn't been stocked since the '50s, and to see those fish swim out. . . . You'd eat lunch, then go see how your fish were doing."

Earlier residents lashed oval, slot-lidded "fish cans" to mules and horses to carry in the fish. At night, the cans - similar to old-fashioned milk cans - were laid on their sides in swift-running streams so the water rushed in and kept the fish alive.

Today, plastic picnic coolers are lined with 10 pounds of ice. Two to 3 pounds of 1/3-inch fingerlings - 400 to 600 tiny rainbow and eastern brook trout - are ladled into plastic bags with 5 gallons of cold water. Oxygen is pumped into the bag and the top sealed.

The ice and oxygen keep the fish healthy as the coolers are fitted into large leather-and-canvas saddle-bags for the sloshing trip up steep mountain pathways. Despite the heat and stress, generally only a fraction of the fingerlings die before they can be delivered.

"If we lose just a few fish, we think that's a lot," said Redding resident Alan Hill, board chairman of the national Backcountry Horsemen of America, who hosts the event each year on his ranch near Trinity Center.

"There's a lot of tradition and history and friendships here. Families have been doing this for years and years."

Each mule carries two coolers, or at least 800 wriggling fingerlings. Using 27 pack animals over two days this month, about 30,000 fish were delivered to 14 lakes - with mixed results.

One group of mules and riders wound their way seven miles through thick stands of redwoods, cedars, Ponderosa pine and Douglas fir, across marshy meadows spread beneath sawtooth ridges, to the rocky shore of Union Lake. The shallow lake was heated to bathwater temperature by the hot sun, however, and at least four dozen of the ice-cooled fish soon sank to the bottom and died.

"Come on, chil'ren," Jim Griffith of Palo Cedro called to the fingerlings. He and others tried stirring the water and gently tossing stunned fish deeper into the lake to revive them.

"You can never find water this warm when you're backpacking," Griffith groused. "Then it's right off the snow."

As he and the others settled down for lunch, an osprey - also called a fish eagle - flew across the lake with a shrill cry and settled in a bare-topped pine tree.

Things went better the second day, when not a single fish was lost at Eleanor Lake. After a steep, scrambling climb up a high ridge overlooking snowcapped Mount Shasta, however, the group inadvertently missed restocking heavily fished Shimmy Lake. Hill said he thinks the group mistakenly stopped about a half-mile short and left its load of fish in a tiny unnamed rock-rimmed lake instead.

This year's mortality rate may have been unusually high in part because the fish were stressed during their trip from the hatchery, said Bernie Aguilar, the Department of Fish and Game's district fisheries biologist for Trinity County.

The cost to taxpayers is minimal because the horsemen are volunteers and the fish would be grown anyway, he said.

"It's good for them, it's good for us," said Aguilar, an honorary member of the horsemen. He regularly quizzes backwoods anglers on their success at the stocked lakes and streams and monitors marked fish.

"You can catch 14-, 15-inch trout on a flyrod. This is a tremendous difference to what was there before," said John Ellery, a veterinarian from Anderson who helped pack in the fish. "If they can catch three or four fish and have them for dinner, that's a big deal. Whether you're 8 years old or 80, that's pretty neat. We went through a 10- or 15-year period where you couldn't do that."

Fish are among the easiest cargoes packed into the Trinity Alps.

Steele's great-great-great-grandfather began hauling in supplies for gold miners in 1849, including 16-foot-long pipes that stuck out in front and behind each mule. His great-grandfather once packed in an upright piano slung between two mules. Cast-iron stoves and heavy mining equipment were moved the same way.

His mother, Ethel, 83, still rides her mule and helps out on the annual fish run, despite her knarled hands and surgery on both hips and a knee.

"I have a little trouble getting on, but after I'm on, I'm fine," she said. She started her own pack train at age 11; her son, Charlie, said he shod his first horse at age 9 and led his first pack trip at 12.

Like others who lived in the remote area early in the last century, her family first started packing in mining equipment, then switched to hunting and fishing trips after World War II. Her late husband, Nathan A. Steele, had a contract to stock about 25 lakes in the 1950s, just before the state switched to dropping the fish in from airplanes.

Henry Carter, a miner born on a Coffee Creek homestead ranch in 1874, helped start the annual fish pack-trips with his brother, Jess, in 1924.

Working with friends at the Mount Shasta Fish Hatchery, he and Jess basically swiped the first batch of 16,000 fish from shipments intended for other lakes because they hadn't ordered them a year in advance as required, Carter told a nephew in a 1969 interview.

Carter, who died in 1973 at 99, recalled blasting a mule trail around one rocky point a few years later, so he could stock the distant Caribou Lakes.

Such lakes often lack adequate food and spawning areas to support a self-sustaining fish population and can freeze solid or cut off oxygen in a harsh winter, Aguilar said.

In addition, many of the larger breeding-size fish are caught before they can reproduce, meaning the lakes must be periodically re-stocked.

Hill's father, Clair, was a 14-year-old Boy Scout in the mid-20s when he was recruited by his scoutmaster, Jess Carter, to drive the fish truck from Redding to Coffee Creek. Then, as now, the fish still come from the Mount Shasta Hatchery, though in the early days they were sent by train to Redding.

Hill himself was just 12 when he helped pack in fish along the McCloud and Pit rivers in the early 1950s. He spent the summer helping care for the horses that his father's civil engineering firm used to survey land for a Pacific Gas & Electric hydroelectricity project along the McCloud and Pit rivers.

"No roads in that country," Hill recalled. "Only horseback."