Anglers await plan to restore flood-ravaged river

LYONS – Emergency repairs to the flooded St. Vrain River last year have led to a dramatic drop in trout populations, affecting fly-fishing businesses that rely on the river to guide clients and ultimately leading to a large estimated price tag for restoring the river.

The trout population in Lyons had dropped to just nine fish per mile in February, according to a combination of onsite and statistical reviews of the area, said Ken Kehmeier, senior aquatic biologist for Colorado Parks and Wildlife. That’s compared with 2,000 trout per mile in 2005 in the Lyons area and 800 fish per mile just after the flood in October 2013.

The decline comes as Lyons puts together a plan to restore the river and recover from the flooding that battered the town in September 2013. The plan, expected to be completed this month, has put the total cost of restoring the town’s stretch of river at $28 million, Lyons Town Administrator Victoria Simonsen said.

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“That’s to restore the channel, re-stabilize the banks, revegetate the banks and repopulate the fish,” she said.

The restoration is expected to take five years, Kehmeier said.

The decline in trout, along with the state of the river and ongoing recovery efforts, have led fishermen such as Randy Hicks, owner of Rocky Mountain Anglers in Boulder, to avoid fishing in Lyons.

Hicks instead has guided clients in other parts of the river as well as other streams. Rocky Mountain Anglers used to guide clients on the stretch of river in town, especially during winter when it tended to stay free of ice.

“I personally am not recommending anyone go and fish the St. Vrain” in Lyons, he said. “Fishing in the town of Lyons is probably not going to be good until they come in and do some work on the stream, rebuild the banks.”

The drop in trout came after crews excavated parts of the river bed, turning portions of it into a ditch shaped like a trapezoid. The idea was to contain the enlarged floodplain and this year’s spring runoff.

“In areas that they channelized to protect public property, infrastructure and to set everybody up so we could make it through the spring runoff, we saw precipitous drops in numbers of fish,” Kehmeier said.

The channelization in places such as the confluence of the north and south St. Vrain harmed the fish’s food sources. As a result, he said, the fish either moved downstream or died.

The $600,000 river channeling project was done through an emergency permit in what normally would have required a thorough federal review, according to officials.

“When you’re in that emergency mode, you don’t really rank the environment as No. 1,” said Sean Cronin, executive director of the St. Vrain and Left Hand Water Conservancy District. “You rank humans and their ability to get access to clean water and sewer as No. 1.”

In other places on the St. Vrain River west of Lyons, where crews did not channel the river, biologists saw only small declines in trout numbers, Kehmeier said. In Lyons, fish populations could come back if the river is restored, which would include re-establishing habitat and stocking stretches of the river with fish.

Mike Clark, a renowned bamboo fishing-rod maker in Lyons, said he thought the Parks and Wildlife survey may have underestimated the number of fish because he still catches brown and rainbow trout whenever he goes fishing in town. People such as Clark have so far raised $143,000 to help restore this treasured stretch of the St. Vrain.

Many are waiting until a St. Vrain master plan that will outline the long-term recovery of the entire watershed is developed by a coalition of government agencies.

“Mostly, the community is looking at what’s going to come out of the master planning process,” said Barbara Luneau, president of St. Vrain Anglers, a part of Trout Unlimited.