Lagunitas Creek

Lagunitas Creek
Marin County

Since the early 1980’s Trout Unlimited has been involved with Lagunitas Creek. It is a creek that has the support of an energized community and strong volunteer power. Lagunitas Creek watershed begins on the northern slope of Mt. Tamalpais and drains 103 miles of west central Marin County about 20 miles north of San Francisco. Lagunitas Creek flows into Tomales Bay. The watershed is made up of the main stem of Lagunitas Creek and several tributaries including San Geronimo Creek. The main stem has been dammed to create four major water storage reservoirs. These reservoirs provide water to close to a quarter of a million Marin County residents. A number of smaller dams have been constructed in the watershed over the years including Roy’s Dam on San Geronimo Creek.

Lagunitas Creek was for decades a nationally famous coho salmon and steelhead fishery, approximately 5,000 coho strong, which supported both commercial and recreational use. In the latter half of the twentieth century, however the declining quality and availability of the watershed water, and above all, the loss of much of the available spawning habitat, led to a drastic decline in the numbers of returning salmonids. By the mind 1980’s there were perhaps one hundred returning adults annually; some estimates put the number of coho salmon at fewer than fifty.

Leo Cronin and Volunteer Power
Dozens of projects have been completed by TU volunteers since the early 1980’s to improve Lagunitas Creek for coho salmon. In the early 1980’s, when Leo Cronin and his fellow Trout Unlimited volunteers turned their attention to Lagunitas Creek, the creek and its salmon were struggling to survive. It was Leo’s foresight and innate understanding of how restoration should occur that called for upslope restoration before instream restoration could occur. Leo recognized that before projects could be successfully completed in a creek, those projects had to be insured from silt and sedimentation from above a creek. It was also Leo’s unerring sense of what was best for the salmon when TU built and operated, entirely through volunteer power, a temporary fish hatchery facility on San Geronimo Creek. Leo acquired a permit to capture and artificially spawn wild Lagunitas Creek coho salmon thus preserving the genetic integrity of the salmon unique to Lagunitas Creek. These are just two examples of Leo Cronin’s powerful impact on Lagunitas Creek and on coho salmon. Leo died in 1995 but his legacy remains as a reminder of the power of individuals to make enormous changes for the benefit of the natural community and thus the human.

In 1983, the TU project in Flanders Field identified and aggressively restored major sediment sources at crucial headwaters section of San Geronimo Creek. After restoring degraded habitats, wild coho salmon native to Lagunitas Creek were captured, artificially spawned, and the eggs and resulting juveniles were raised in creekside incubators until they were able to fend for themselves in the wild. Today Lagunitas Creek has an annual run of about 500 fish, or about 10 percent of all the coho salmon returning to northern California’s rivers.

Dozens of projects have been conducted to enhance the Lagunitas Creek watershed. These include construction of fish ladders, planting of trees to provide shade, fencing the creek, construction of rearing troughs, letter writing campaigns to ensure adequate releases of water and many others.

Roy’s Dam
In 1997 another significant project was initiated in Lagunitas Creek which would have far-reaching implications and garner national media attention. Roy’s Dam on San Geronimo Creek has long been recognized as a major impediment to the full restoration of the Lagunitas Creek watershed’s remaining habitat. The old agricultural dam, placed in the 1920’s to provide water to a ranch, initially blocked salmonid access to the upper reaches of San Geronimo creek, and to miles of San Geronimo tributaries flowing off the reaches of the adjacent hillsides. A fish ladder was added to Roy’s Dam, but as the dam aged and deteriorated more and more water in high autumn and winter flows went over and through the dam rather flowing over the ladder. Migrating coho were distracted from the ladder and into futile attempts to negotiate the dam itself. The widely publicized images of leaping salmon landing on the dam’s concrete apron lent urgency to Trout Unlimited’s requests that permission be granted to modify or remove the dam. In 1997 the dam was lowered considerably.

In 1998, the North Bay Chapter of TU received an Embrace-a-Stream grant for the purpose of correcting fish passage problem at Roy’s Dam. In 1998 the U.S. Secretary for the Interior Bruce Babbitt accepted TU’s invitation to come to Marin to help tear down Roy’s Dam. In 1999 removal of Roy’s Dam is finished and construction of Roy’s Pools is completed.

Devil’s Gulch
In 2001, with another Embrace-a-Stream grant and partnership with the Point Reyes National Seashore and the cooperation of Samuel P. Taylor State Park exclusionary fencing was constructed to keep cattle away from the stream corridor and riparian habitat of Devil’s Gulch, a major tributary of Lagunitas Creek.

See more on Lagunitas Creek at www.northbay-tu(dot)org/nbtu_projects.asp