In April 2000, three adult southern steelhead trout departed from the Pacific Ocean during a storm and began fighting their way up Mission Creek through downtown Santa Barbara.
The smallest of the trio was 22 inches, the largest 29 inches. No one, not wildlife officials nor area anglers who watched, said they had seen fish that large in the creek in years. The steelhead probably had been living at sea for at least a year. They were fat and ready to spawn.
In the course of their short journey, they passed the Santa Barbara Pier, several popular hotels and businesses on State Street, the city's main business artery. After swimming 1.2 miles, they stopped in a large pool, their upstream travel blocked by a concrete barrier.
Finally, as summer approached and the water warmed to intolerable temperatures for the fish, two of the three disappeared, most likely having returned to the Pacific. The third got sick. Biologists with the National Marine Fisheries Service and the California Department of Fish and Game tried relocating it to another creek farther north, but the fish soon died.
It was a sad ending to an inspiring odyssey, but it also spurred the town to reconsider the potential for its largest stream. Could a polluted urban creek cross-hatched with concrete flood-control barriers one day host annual spawning runs of a salmon-like fish?
"Those steelhead were a really big deal," said Jill Zachary, the city's creek restoration manager. "It ... elevated all these issues about Santa Barbara's creeks. It might take a couple more decades to get steelhead back in Mission Creek on a regular basis, but we think, long term, it will happen."
The fall after the three fish appeared, voters in the city overwhelmingly passed a local ballot measure to increase the hotel tax, with the proceeds -- about $2 million a year -- earmarked for restoring the city's creeks. Steelhead, much like salmon, are seen as the ultimate indicators of stream health, because the fish, though tough, need healthy waterways to survive.
Steelhead are born in freshwater streams and rivers, migrate to the sea as adults and then return to creeks to spawn when they are 3 or 4 years old. Tens of thousands of steelhead once migrated up Southern California streams each year, often swimming high into the mountains, where the best spawning grounds could be found.
