Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Photograph by George Sakkestad

First-grader Maria Nguyen of Christopher Elementary School investigates creek life at YSI at Vasona Park.

Signs of Life

The creek that welcomed a town finally gets some tender loving care

By Suzanne Bohan

Like a convalescing friend, Los Gatos Creek is receiving an unprecedented amount of care and attention after decades of rough treatment. "Los Gatos Creek has been beaten and pummeled," former County Supervisor Rod Diridon says. "If it were human, it would be an abused child."

Los Gatos Creek begins in a gulch on Mt. Umunhum with some 40 springs forming its pristine headwaters. "Oh, yeah. It's pure," Bill Moore, properties manager for the San Jose Water Company, says about the water quality. Tributaries add to the flow as the creek descends toward Lake Elsman, which the water company manages. Elsman is the first reservoir Los Gatos Creek fills on its way to the San Francisco Bay.

Between Lake Elsman and Lexington Reservoir, it's "a very large creek," Moore says. He calls the upper watershed "pristine and fragile." In that area, it is closed to the public. Rainbow trout live in the cool water, and beaver, cougar, bobcats and wild boar have been seen in the area.

Los Gatos Creek has played a key role in the historical life of Los Gatos. The first settlers, a Spanish family arriving in 1839, were scouting for a homestead in the area when they heard mountain lions roaring and fighting. While frightened, they also recognized it was a good omen, for it meant water couldn't be far away. They discovered the creek and built a home in what is now Vasona Lake County Park.

Fish were plentiful for the first settlers. Newspaper stories in the 1880s describe catches of 100 to 200 trout a day in Los Gatos Creek. One pioneer wrote that "speckled trout were so plentiful, they could be caught with your hands." Forbes Mill, the first business in town, relied on the creek to power its flour mill.

Bonnie LeMat, education director for the Youth Science Institute in Vasona Park, says, "The town wouldn't be here without Los Gatos Creek." Today, YSI uses the creek as an outdoor laboratory for kids.

Swimming holes, rope swings, camp-overs and fishing have drawn kids to the creek for decades. Duino Giordano, a Los Gatos police captain who grew up in town, remembers heading to the creek with his friends in the early 1950s with their fishing poles to catch blue gills. "We'd wrap 'em around a stick and cook 'em right over a fire," he recalls. He says there were "millions" of crayfish to catch as well.

Elizabeth Stewart, who grew up in town in the 1930s and 1940s, remembers a popular swimming hole near the Roberts Road bridge. She recalls that the creek was "gorgeous."

In the mid-1950s when Highway 17 was built through Los Gatos, the creek was rerouted to prevent bank erosion from threatening the highway. As a Caltrans magazine from the era describes it: "Included in this project is a relocation of Los Gatos Creek for a distance of 6,000 feet, requiring a concrete line channel."

The Los Gatos Daily Times on Aug. 31, 1954, reported that "bulldozers have virtually completed clearing and leveling the bed of Los Gatos Creek, and preparations are readied for laying the concrete culvert."

The article goes on to describe the difficulty of the project: "The creek waters will have to be diverted."

You can still see the old creek bed behind Los Gatos High School, with blackberry bushes and periwinkle now growing where the water once ran. Thick foliage and trees still grow, and from a distance, it still resembles a creek.

Today the concrete culvert would not be allowed, according to Dennis Dresti, raw water operations superintendent for the Santa Clara Valley Water District, which oversees the management of the county's creeks. "I think the whole valley would have been concrete channels," he says, "but the environmental movement stopped that."

No protest was mentioned in the local newspaper in 1954 over the loss of the natural creek in town. Don Hebard, chairman of the Los Gatos Creek Streamside Commission and a LGHS student in the 1930s, says, "I don't remember any real concern. People thought the creek was in the way of development, especially below Vasona," he says.

David Salsbery, fisheries biologist with the Santa Clara Valley Water District, says that in the 1950s, "a whole different value system" existed.

If the channel were designed today, Dresti says, "it would be designed to pass flood flows and be aesthetic and stable."

Is it conceivable that the channel could be rebuilt to support more riparian habitat, that zone of life that exists on or adjacent to creek banks? "Anything is possible," he says, "but it would be very expensive." It would take community interest to make it happen, Dresti adds.

Gabion baskets--wire cages filled with boulders--are one alternative. "These are permeable and have some potential to support plant life," says Chris Fischer, program manager with the Coyote Creek Riparian Station (CCRS) in San Jose.

Below Vasona, Los Gatos Creek feeds percolation ponds that are part of the groundwater recharge system built by the water district. North of Lark Avenue, one can also see a structure resembling a fountain, where imported water from other reservoirs is also added to Los Gatos Creek for recharge.

In the 1920s, people discovered that Santa Clara Valley was sinking because of groundwater pumping. The valley's aquifers were also in danger of being ruined by saltwater infiltration. Local reservoirs were built to provide water for an aggressive groundwater recharge program.

While simultaneously dealing with the demands of growing cities, the water district finally managed to stop further sinking in 1969. Vasona and Lexington reservoirs were part of the effort.

Water recharge and flood control concerns meant changes were in store for Los Gatos Creek. Water temperature warmed; dams stopped fish migration; sedimentation increased; and spawning grounds were destroyed while a variety of alterations were engineered on the creek. Fish populations plummeted, including steelhead trout and salmon.

"Los Gatos Creek has changed dramatically from what it was historically," says Mike Rigney, associate director of CCRS, a group tasked with restoring valley streams. The major change impacting the creek, he says, is the change from orchards to housing in the area. Because rainwater began hitting asphalt and concrete instead of soil, the water wasn't being absorbed and had to be funneled into the creek via storm drains. This puts a large amount of water in the creek in a very short time, requiring greater flood and erosion control, which, says Rigney, has destroyed riparian habitat in the past.

Rigney says that in the '50s and '60s, "growth was everything." The importance of natural resources wasn't recognized. "Now," he says, "people want to fix the situation."

CCRS just wrapped up a two-year study of Los Gatos Creek, relying on volunteers to gather data on creek features like birds, fisheries, vegetation, reptiles and water quality and temperature. A summary of the data was delivered to the water district's biologists. The Community Creekwatch Program is one of several relying on community support to help study, monitor and restore local creeks.

Doug Padley, wildlife biologist with the water district, says of the district's Adopt-a-Creek program: "The district is only so many people. With 730 miles of creek in the county, we can't be everywhere."

Sue Tippets, an engineer with the district, says the Adopt-a-Creek program is important because the district doesn't have the funds to hire cleanup crews.

Tippets says the district has expanded its focus in recent years. In addition to a wildlife biologist, the district has a fisheries biologist and a water quality expert, and it's Tippets' job to issue permits to people doing projects affecting a creek in Santa Clara Valley.

In Willow Glen, a community group spearheaded a restoration project along Los Gatos Creek. In Los Gatos, Vic Collord and Jim Sugai lead volunteer efforts to keep the trail clean and restore native plants. Boy Scout Troop 539 regularly cleans out the creek trail. There is also a major government-funded restoration project along the creek near Lark Avenue, part of an effort to mitigate wetlands lost during the construction of Highway 85.

The Los Gatos Creek Trail has created thousands of new creek enthusiasts. Rod Diridon, one of the leaders in creating the trail, says of his thinking about a creek trail system: "I had a clear vision. I wanted to have rivers re-established to create a rural experience in an urban setting."

Shortly after Diridon was elected to the county Board of Supervisors in 1974, he went to work to create the Los Gatos Streamside Trail Commission. He chose Don Hebard to chair the new commission, which officially formed in 1976. Since then, Hebard, along with a cadre of others, has been working to achieve the goal of a creek trail from the Santa Cruz Mountains to the Bay.

Hebard, who attended LGHS in the 1930s, remembers when Los Gatos Creek "couldn't get no respect." He recalls that it was a place for spare tires and mattresses. All that changed, he says, with the trail.

Hebard says, "When drivers on Highway 17 could see people using the trail in Campbell, that did as much as anything to change the view of the creek." Now that it's got respect, he says, people won't let it get dirty.

The water district now manages Los Gatos Creek so that it can once again support steelhead trout, according to Salsbery, the district's fisheries biologist. By default, that will help Chinook salmon establish themselves in the creek. Both species have been spotted as far up the creek as Hamilton Avenue.

Jim Scott, lab manager for the San Jose Water Company, tests water in Lexington Reservoir and says the dissolved oxygen content--crucial for fish to "breathe"--is adequate; no pollutants have been detected.

Fischer, the program manager with the Coyote Creek Riparian Station, points to trees growing on the creek. She explains that when leaves fall into the creek, they are devoured by insects, leaving a cellulose skeleton sometimes visible at the bottom of a creek. Not all plant life growing on the creek is good, however. Pointing to a non-native Tree of Heaven, which is toxic to insects, she explains that when those leaves fall, insects can't feed on them. That and other non-native plants, which squeeze out native plants along the creek, are contributing to the reduction of biodiversity.

The concrete channel, she notes, is contributing to the warming of the water. Some fish, including steelhead and salmon, can't tolerate warm water. Shade is necessary to keep the creek cool, but sunlight is also critical because it allows the growth of algae, which in turn provide food.

Is it possible for valley creeks and rivers to once again be swimmable and fishable? "Absolutely!" says Rigney of CCRS. One aim of the federal Clean Water Act is to restore the nation's waterways to their historic beneficial uses, he explains.

Rigney says CCRS would like to restore as much natural functioning as is humanly possible. "The problem is," he says, "we're boxed into a corner."

While the technology exists to provide flood control, water recharge and riparian habitat, it's difficult to provide any major relief without major changes in infrastructure. On the other hand, he says, "it's only taken us 150 years to really screw things up." If a long enough perspective is taken, Rigney says, nothing is impossible, and everything is possible.