Muddy waters

[Wanderer]

I was up in oak creek canyon this past week and wanted to do some trout fishing. The water was really muddy as the fire that burned up the place was now being pelted by the monsoon runoff in flagstaff. Being a novice i didn't fish but I kept wondering Can the fish survive? how bad is it for them I am sure this has happened many times over the millennium. The water was a chocolate brown color visibility tome about 1/2 inch. So do the fish survive ? Is it fishable? What happens in general?

[lucfish]

Most likely some fish will get choked out, some will get pushed downstream and some will find a pocket and survive. Those are important fish as they will have to repopulate the stream. I wouldn't fish the stream and it probably wouldn't produce much in the way of fish.

[Wildman]

That was a good question and Luc had a good answer. I am always amazed how fish survive when we have a good rain year and the creeks are blasting through at 30X normal. When the flows go down, the fish always seem to be there.

[WanderingBlues]

And in Oak Canyon's case, they do stock. Some of those pellet heads will eventually go wild.

[Ants]

Two additional concerns.

The habitat for the bugs in the water suffers.

I am not sure what happened with the downstream fish hatchery. At other times, the hatchery personnel have evacuated all the fish and trucked them to a different facility. On the Kern, when the sediment from the McNally fire threatened the water supply to the hatchery, the fish were released downstream and into the lake.

Yup. There a big changes.

Ants

[lucfish]

Ant's made a good point. No bugs and no spawning habitat. There's a local stream here that I have fished for many, many years, always produced fish, lot's of fish and about 5 or so years ago there was a tremendous amount of water that came through. I don't think it was a flash flood I can't remember but the fishing is 10% of what it was. It blew out all the gravel and there is nothing but bedrock. I imagine it will take quite a few years before some gravel makes it back there.

[acorad]

Couple years ago I hiked down to the FotK just after a thunderstorm had washed the ash from a recent fire into the Little Kern. Man, that little river was as thick as chocolate syrup. Anyway, it has seemed to recover pretty well.

Andy