Rebuilding Watershed Health

Steelhead trout are the canary in the coal mine of Southern California creeks. They are the harbingers of watershed health. Where you find them, the water is clean and cool, the trees along the bank are healthy, and nature and neighborhood have struck a workable truce. Where you don’t, something has gone terribly wrong. Getting them back is the work of South Coast Habitat Restoration.

The small Santa Barbara County nonprofit was founded in 2007 by Mauricio Gomez, and its story runs parallel to the fish it serves. Gomez studied aquatic biology at UCSB intending to become a marine biologist, then found the ocean did not agree with him. “I quickly learned that I didn’t have the best sea legs,” he says, so he came back to land and built a career on the creeks. It is the same route a steelhead travels. “Steelhead are born in the creeks, they go to the ocean, and then they come back to the creeks to complete their life cycle,” he says.

South Coast’s mission is to conserve, protect, and restore the native habitats of the Santa Barbara and Ventura region, with steelhead recovery at the center. Much of the work is physical: removing the old dams, undersized bridges, and concrete crossings that landowners built across creeks decades ago, the structures that keep fish from reaching their spawning grounds. In their place, engineers design crossings/bridges that work for everyone, a proper bridge the landowner can drive over and clear water the fish can travel under. The approach is watershed-wide. None of it happens alone; the work runs on collaboration with private landowners, government agencies, and fellow conservation groups.

Doing What the Government Could Not

This year South Coast completed their largest ever project, at Wheeler Gorge in the Los Padres National Forest above Ojai. The $6 million effort took out four barriers in a single construction season, replacing two with clear-span bridges and removing two others to restore the stream channel. Native plants went in at all four sites, roughly a thousand of them grown by a partner nonprofit, the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy. The result was over 13 miles of creek, previously sealed off for decades, now reopened to steelhead heading upstream to spawn.

Equally impressive is the fact that the federal government, in the body of the U.S. Forest Service, which had wanted to do the project but did not have the resources, turned to South Coast to accomplish the job. Which it did – on time and under budget. 

The proof came recently, when Gomez stood in the reopened creek and saw something he had not seen there in more than a decade. “I saw a fish. It was a small one, but it was upstream of our work,” he says. A harbinger of a healthy ecosystem in the creek and rippling out far beyond.