Wednesday June 18, 2025
Bay Nature —
In the summer of 1997, Jeff Miller went for a long walk along Alameda Creek. He started where the 40-mile stream meets the San Francisco Bay, sandwiched between the San Mateo and Dumbarton bridges. From there, he followed the water inland. For the first twelve miles, Miller marched along a stream hemmed into a flood control channel, and cut around downtown Fremont backyards. Over two days, he traced the creek through old quarry lakes, through quiet community parks, and finally out of the city and into the hills.
There, the creek began to twist into largely undeveloped expanses of oak woodland as it cut across the Diablo Range. Miller followed public trails where they existed, and found his own paths where they didn’t. As he climbed with the water, the stream thinned and quickened. Gravel peppered its bottom. Trees shaded and cooled the water.
This was the dream, if you were a steelhead trout, thought Miller. He was a dedicated environmental activist who had been pondering how to protect steelhead in the Bay. The Central California Coast steelhead (Oncorhynchus mykiss iridius) population had just been listed as a threatened species under the federal Endangered Species Act. Steelhead trout, as well as other salmonids like Chinook salmon, had populations in freefall across their range in Central California, especially because adults couldn’t find places like this anymore: refuges to lay their eggs in where young trout could hatch and grow into juveniles, which could migrate into the ocean as their ancestors had done for thousands of years.