Is there one place in particular on the river that puts you at ease?
Any boat launch on the lower Deschutes. There is something that happens when I push off from a boat ramp in my drift boat, especially with a friend and a load of camp gear and food. It’s a sense of relief. All of the planning, arranging, packing and other preparations are finally over. It’s time to simplify and just eat, drink, sleep and fish. No phone, no computer. Can life be any better than that? The sense of peace and freedom I feel when I leave the boat ramp behind makes me feel more at home with myself. I always feel like I’m most at home when I’m in the Deschutes Canyon. That puts me at ease.
When did you realize that there were things happening on the lower river that needed to be more closely monitored?
Summer of 2011. I was on an early August multi-day float trip fishing for steelhead. At night, there were no caddis swarming the lantern. None. Where there had been thousands on any other August night (for decades in my experience), there were none. Zero. That was just wrong. I called my friend, retired lower Deschutes River fisheries biologist Steve Pribyl, when I got home from that trip. He’d seen the same thing and added that he’d not been seeing swallows or nighthawks, both insectivores. On my next float trip I took I realized the bat population was way down too. To me, those were markings of a broken ecosystem
.Nearly two years later my friend Larry Marxer and I did a float trip to place Hobo Temp temperature loggers in the river to do data recording. We stopped for lunch in the shade of some alders on a steelhead run I’d fished for years. We were looking out at the water and I realized I was looking at something I’d never seen before. The river bottom from bank to bank was covered with golden-brown algae. I told Larry at the time that I felt like I was in a science fiction movie, “The Alien Algae That Ate My River.”
That was about the time things started to get really bad. Suddenly it wasn’t just one type of caddis disappearing, but several types of mayflies too. It was then that we were seeing changes in stonefly populations as well.