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@giantbrookie wrote:
1. Depending on the area (and I’m not at all familiar with NC lakes) spawning potential (even excluding that for brookies and other chars) has proven to be better than thought in many lakes. Many lakes that folks 20 years ago thought did not support significant spawning have turned out to be self sustaining (the lakes in the CA NPs provide a good guide here). Thus, the percentage of lakes that fit the criteria of being manageable by stocking only may be well less than half the available lakes in some regions. Of course if the stocked fish are sterile, this is not an issue, provided one is starting with fishless lakes.
The key is to use sterile fish. Or fish that have some issue that them poorly adapted for spawning in high lakes. I think the long term plan here in WA is to go to all sterile fish. In the mean time we are using Mount Whitney RB as our rainbow stock. It is a hatchery stock we got from CA in the early sixties and we haven’t been able to document a case yet where they are successfully spawning in high lakes. Where ever we have spawning RB they appear to have come from Kamloops stocks. The MWRB doesn’t seem to be a very long lived fish so we’d like to replace it, but we need a sterile stock before we can consider that. For CT we are using Twin Lakes CT which is a westslope CT that is extremely well adapted to high lakes and prone to overpopulating if it can see a piece of gravel on the hillside. They are only stocked where they have a track record of not reproducing. Westslope cutts are native to the east side of the Cascades so a strain of coastal CT called Tokul Creek cutthroat are used on the west side. They will spawn if gravel is available so, again, are limited to lakes with a history of successful CT stocking. EB are only used if they are sterile. We’re using Cottonwood Lakes goldens. Eggs are obtained from CA every year. Goldens have only established spawning populations in two lakes in the state so haven’t been a major problem.
Once we are using sterile fish the next step will be to eliminate or control naturally reproducing populations.
@giantbrookie wrote:
2. As a veteran high lake angler I target “premium” (big fish, low density) lakes and would benefit from a program that manages exclusively low density fisheries, but I believe the vast majority of folks who like fishing simply want to catch something. The average angler usually ends up getting frustrated at home run type lakes. If the majority of lakes in a given region are managed as low density lakes, isn’t this a rather elitist approach in terms of serving a very small percentage of high lake anglers–ie the very experienced ones such as those of us here? Perhaps this question stems from my lack of understanding of the big picture of what lakes will be left alone as self sustaining (if any) versus those that are proposed to be managed by stocking.
This is a fabulous question. You would probably enjoy reading this WDFW paper. It goes into great detail discussing how management decisions are made on high lakes here in WA and I think most of the concepts should apply to CA. This very point is raised. This has been an easy decision in past years because you could manage all stocked waters for blue ribbon fish and have plenty of stunted waters for quantity. But now we understand that stunted lakes are a bad situation ecologically and the question of quantity vs quality will have to be addressed on a lake by lake basis as we eliminate those stunted populations.
The NCNP has updated their EIS page. As of this writing the changes appear to be partially in place and the link to the actual EIS isn’t up yet. But they have posted the schedule for the public meetings. I’ll post that at the top of a new thread so it doesn’t get buried in the thread.
@smckean wrote:
BTW, the title of this thread is misleading.
I presume the OP’er is referring to the North Cascades Nat’l Park EIS on fish stocking that was just released by the Park Service. Note that there is ANOTHER document written several months ago by the Wa Dept of Fish & Wildlife (WDFW) entitled “North Cascades National Park High Lakes Fishery Management” (it can be found on the TB’er website) which is very close to a true management plan that the subject of this thread suggests. The EIS is NOT a management plan altho there are many components in it that could be used in a management plan.
DO NOT CONFUSE THESE 2 DOCUMENTS.
The EIS is also the proposed management plan and it titled “North Cascades National Park Service Complex Draft Mountain Lakes Fishery Management Plan/Environmental Impact Statement.” and from the first page “Upon conclusion of the plan/EIS and decision-making process, one of the four alternatives would become the ‘Mountain Lakes Fishery Management Plan’ and guide future actions for a period of 15 years.”
smckean raises a good point and one that is very interesting in the history of fish stocking in the NCNP. During the seventies and eighties when the park was trying hard to eliminate fish stocking their idea was to allow reproducing fish to remain to provide a high lakes fishery. Trail Blazers, Hi-Lakers and the then Dept of Game responded very negatively to this. Now our position has been vindicated by the Liss and Larson research. The park had it exactly backwards and what should continue, for maximum biological integrity, is low density stocking while the high density spawning fish should be removed or reduced.
What drove the Park Service to discontinue stocking in national parks was the Leopold Report in 1973. Trail Blazers were particularly upset because we had specifically asked about fish stocking during the hearings prior to creation of the park and had been assured stocking would continue. That’s one of the primary reasons we are where we are today with the NCNP. Like the national parks in CA fish stocking was ended in Mt Rainier and Olympic National Parks in the early seventies and we have no recourse there. You can read more on the historical case for fish stocking in the NCNP and the Trail Blazers’ initial response during the EIS scoping process here.
Vandalism from 4-footed critters is something I’ve experienced. My Explorer got mauled in Idaho. Here are some photos.
I just got my copy today and I haven’t had a chance to open it yet. We have 90 days to comment on this and it is extremely important everyone get comments in. This process may well have implications that reach well beyond the park and I strongly urge anyone with any interest in high lake fishing to get involved.
I’ll have more to say when I’ve had a chance to read it. So far, they don’t have it available on the web. Here’s the link to the North Cascades National Park page. There is a ton of background information available there.
I haven’t been there in the last year, but in normal years it would probably be too early in June. This is such a low snow year, though, that June might not be bad. The route in can be much more brushy and difficult in the spring when the water in the creek is high.
I climbed it in ’76, but hadn’t fished any of the lakes in the blast zone when the mountain erupted. From what I’ve been able to gather, fishing wasn’t too much different then it is now. For the decade or so after the blast fishing in many of the lakes that had been overpopulated with naturally reproducing fish was improved with the influx of nutrients and reduced populations, but most of those lakes have returned to their pre-blast overpopulated status.
It is a popular a destination as you can find. Normally that means fishing should be lousy, but I’m guessing the vast majority of the people that visit the lake don’t fish. I’ve never fished it, so I don’t know how it is, but it ought to be worth a try.
Hi giantbrookie, it is great to have you posting on the site. There are a lot of issues we have in common with California high lakes, and some that differ (we don’t have any mountain yellow legged frogs) so I hope you’ll stick around and join in the discussions.
I do have to note here that to get these large fish pics represent one heck of a lot of lake visits. What you’ll probably enjoy most about a trip up in these parts is how different the mountains are from the ones down in your area.
The WDFW is still getting eggs from California. I think it is reasonable speculation that we won’t get any eggs this year (nor may CA) because of the record snows, but the state’s current plan is to continue to get goldens from CA.
Because we have not been able to obtain eggs from CA in some years, we are proposing that the WDFW set up a broodstock lake to help ensure more consistant fry availability but no brood program has been put in place at this time.
The new owners of SMC, Moolock, and Nadeau is the state DNR.
Figure on two years to start to get anything resembling something worth catching. At one extreme, where the lake is very productive, the fry planted were reasonably large, and they were planted very early in the season you might get catchable fish by the fall. At the other extreme, if an unproductive lake was stocked late in the season the fry might not get much, if any, growth before the lake becomes ice covered and it might take 3 or more years to start to get catchable fish.
Overall, I’ve been really lucky. We got broken into at the Suiattle trailhead when I was a kid. That was back in the seventies some time. The only time I’ve been broken into since then was by a bear.
I drove up to the Dingford Creek TH one morning and found three vehicles with one tire slashed each and all had been broken into. One had broken glass on their open glove compartment so leaving it open didn’t help.
Every so often the thefts get really bad, then they catch the culprits and things slow down a bit until someone else starts working the trailheads.
Some people do refer to westslope cutthroat as Montana black spots so it gets very confusing. But the fish that were stocked locally as Montana black spots were Yellowstone cutthroat. They stopped stocking them when the supply from Yellowstone lake was cut off. These days varieties of cutthroat native to the drainage in which they are being stocked is the norm. So coastal cutts are being stocked on the west side and westslope cutts on the east side. Around Yellowstone you’ll find Yellowstone cutts in the high lakes, and so on with other varieties and other areas.
