Thursday October 10, 2024
Sierra Club —
Brian LeNeve doesn’t have much patience for people who are late. As he and a crew of five volunteers gathered in a small dirt parking lot at Garland Regional Park in the Carmel River Valley of central California, the 81-year-old seemed distracted by his watch, checking it between conversations. “We give people a 10-minute grace period before we leave,” he explained. Any longer than that, “we’re taking time away from the fish.”
LeNeve is the former president and current treasurer, conservation chair, and board member of the Carmel River Steelhead Association (CRSA), based in Monterey, California. The organization has one simple mission: Save the federally threatened South Central California Coast population of steelhead trout.
Genetically the same species as the rainbow trout, steelhead are characterized by one key difference: Unlike their freshwater counterparts, these fish spend most of their adult life in the ocean, only returning to the river where they were born to spawn. “It’s amazing to think that these fish that swim as far as Alaska come back to people’s backyards in central California,” said Eric Palkovacs, a fisheries ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.