he low, concrete Sandia Creek Bridge over the Santa Margarita River isn’t exactly guilty of murder. But it has the same effect on endangered Southern California steelhead living downstream as a mobster garroting a disloyal colleague with piano wire. That’s why people such as Mary Larson have spent the last 22 years buried in newspapers and microfiche archives, compiling evidence, like cold case detectives, to prove steelhead once flourished in places like the Santa Margarita. Confirm that, and the government will put money on the table to restore the river. With the help of Larson and others like her, CalTrout—a conservation nonprofit dedicated to protecting California’s watersheds—secured $18 million to erect a new, 20-foot-high steel bridge that clears a path for steelhead. Goodbye, low fish-blocking bridge. Hello, free-flowing Santa Margarita. Once Sandia Creek Bridge is eliminated, the Santa Margarita will become the first Southern California river freed of any human-made barrier from its headwaters to the Pacific Ocean. And steelhead will no longer be choked off from an extra 12 miles of pristine breeding grounds. Larson first started working for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife in 1988. In 2001, she moved into steelhead restoration work. For her, that might mean scouring hand-scrawled records from the first missions that colonized California, searching for the word “trucha” (the Spanish word for trout), or cataloging an old fishing scrapbook full of Andy Griffith–like men proudly bearing their steelhead catch near a creek she studied along the Malibu Coast. T
“It’s a lot of work just trying to figure out where the fish were,” Larson says. “Some streams … were people’s secret fishing holes that they didn’t tell anyone about.” From a distance, the bend in the Santa Margarita which the new bridge will soon span lives quietly in a canyon bed protected by a privately managed preserve. On the winding drive there from Fallbrook, squatty coastal sage scrub fades into tall leaning oaks trellising the road, casting magical, dappled light across the water. Nobody has reported seeing a steelhead here in recent memory. The fish’s federally endangered designation carries such weight that casting a pole is prohibited in the whole Santa Margarita and any other rivers that might be home to a steelhead. But these special fish were recently detected another way. A geneticist by training, Sandy Jacobson tells me that new scientific technology sniffed out steelhead below Sandia Creek Bridge. Digital methods can pinpoint and amplify a small amount of steelhead DNA from a single water sample. It’s one thing to find scrapbooks hinting steelhead thrived in these waters decades ago; quite another to locate their genetic material floating somewhere below the bridge. Jacobson directs the work of CalTrout in California’s South Coast and Sierra regions. She began her career in cancer research but is also a ONCE SANDIA CREEK BRIDGE IS ELIMINATED, THE SANTA MARGARITA WILL BECOME THE FIRST SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA RIVER FREED OF ANY HUMAN-MADE BARRIER.
65 SAN DIEGO MAGAZINE
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