Guides and Guardians
Brad Staples with a client and a wild one, released unharmed.
A Trio with Nearly a Century of Guiding Experience
At 5 a.m. in early October, the first hint of the rosy pink cheek of dawn is still an hour away, but three jet sleds have already launched in the dark from the ramp at Heritage Landing, and are beached, awaiting fishing clients. Brad Staples, Forrest Foxworthy and Sam Sickles prep their boats, rods, reels, flies and lures for a day of steelhead fishing. Between these three seasoned guides lies nearly a century of experience on the lower Deschutes River.
Forrest Foxworthy hooks up a lucky client.
Foxworthy started on the river in 1987; Staples began as a whitewater raft guide in 1983 and soon graduated to guiding fishing trips. Sickles has fished the Deschutes for decades and launched a guiding career in 2008. “When I get up at 3:15 in the morning, the first thing I look at is the USGS website,” says Staples. “When the water’s super warm in June and July, we have to hit it hard early. We’ve only seen hoot owl restrictions once, but really the fish take care of themselves. They won’t bite in the afternoon heat. So I have to tell my guys, no napping, no screwing around.” In the context of his long tenure on the river, the reality that the lower Deschutes is too often too warm–not because of climate change, but because of poor management of the dam complex upstream– seems to strike Staples as absurd. “We spent 20 years planting trees on this river, why?” he says, harkening back to the 1980’s campaign to restore the river’s riparian zone. “To cool it down.”
Vanishing Refuge, Diminishing Steelhead Run
The added tension around even the possibility of restricted opportunity has added a new, stress-inducing wrinkle to an already physically demanding, economically challenging business. Hedging their bets, Foxworthy and Staples have added scenic trips to their offerings. The uptick in steelhead numbers this year has provided some relief. “It seems like they had the river a degree or two cooler coming out of Pelton–and of course we don’t know why– and we got lucky with the ambient air temperatures this summer. It wasn’t as hot. So we're ahead of the ten-year average, [on steelhead counts over Bonneville Dam] which is a good thing.
“But,” interjects Foxworthy, “let’s be clear. These are still horrible numbers.”
Summer steelhead numbers in the Columbia Basin have declined precipitously in the 21st century. So even without 14 seasons worth of dirtier, warmer water in the lower Deschutes, steelhead would be harder to find. But the operation of Portland General Electric’s Selective Water Withdrawal Tower has made a bad situation worse.
Foxworthy and Staples both note that historically, the lower Deschutes was a cold water refuge for upriver migrating salmon and steelhead. Both have watched in horror, dismay and anger as the refuge that provided relief from the warmer mainstem Columbia, and provided each of them with a decent living, has itself become warmer than the Columbia during key migration periods. Worse, the new flow regime seems to act as a repellent, rather than the Deschutes’ historic role as an attractant, for fish looking to cool off. No cold water, no cold water refuge.
The Financial Lives of Guides: Ecology = Economy
Sam Sickles and another client get one on the fly.
“The first year that the Tower turned on,” recalls Foxworthy, “It was April, and I was guiding springer trips on the Willamette. Brad calls me and says. ‘you won’t believe this, the water on the Deschutes is 66 degrees.’ I said no way, there’s gotta be something wrong with your temp sensor. The Willamette that day was 54 degrees. When I’m on the Willamette, which is a superfund river, in Mid-May, and it’s colder than the Deschutes–that should be a problem. Too many people have turned a blind eye to what’s going on here–I just want to know why.”
It’s getting harder to ignore what’s not right about the lower Deschutes. For those who watch the Deschutes closely, what this trio of guides describes is all-too familiar. Black spot disease on trout and steelhead. The dive toward extirpation of spring chinook. The warm, green, fetid water in spring. The anemic returns of “project fish” that were supposed to recolonize rivers above the Pelton-Round Butte complex. The proliferation of algae. Fewer crayfish, fewer native sucker fish. The dearth of insects, and subsequently, songbirds and other creatures that eat bugs.
Most fishing guides live in a direct relationship between economy and ecology. Cash flow often follows what the river bears in its flow. The businesses that enjoy a ripple effect from guides booking clients–hotels, gas stations, restaurants, might have enough of a diversified revenue stream to survive a bad season or two. Not all guides do.
Saving the Last 100
Sam Sickles, unlike Staples and Foxworthy, caters to fly anglers. He has mostly stayed quiet until senior guide Brad Staples prods him to share, a persuasion that he prefaces by noting that Deschutes fly-fishing guides have seen a steep decline in their business over the past decade. “The Deschutes was one of the premier fly-fishing streams in the country. Not anymore, observes Staples. “You’ve got experienced guides like Mia and Marty [Sheppard], like Sam, and they are getting out with clients who might find one fish.”
“It’s hard for me sometimes to talk about this,” says Sickles. “It makes me angry. Why are they polluting our river and how are they getting away with it? We’ve seen them give us cold water and we’ve seen it makes an immediate impact. The shame that we should be unleashing on [PGE and regulatory state agencies] is heavy. We know dirty warm water is bad for salmon and steelhead. If they can’t be trusted with our vital resource then we’re gonna have to call for dam removal. No one wants to go down that road, but if you can’t manage your dam without killing our fish, then get rid of the dam.”
Foxworthy tempers Sickles’ dam removal rationale. He sees dams as built for good reasons, but without a lot of foresight. He sees opportunity in using water stored in the cold depths of reservoirs, as was done at Pelton Round Butte for 50 years prior to 2009. “We have to make the best of it,” he says. “But don’t make the best of it by wrecking the whole lower 100 miles.”
“Guides are opinionated,” chimes in Staples. “But that last point is one we all agree on.”
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