Germain Creek

Saturday the 17^th I needed to install a temporary gate in a fence line at the  Stump Farm so a neighbor could move their house. After this was done, I thought I would go and check out Germaine Creek.

Germaine Creek is named after a man named Germaine, I think his first name was Herman, who homesteaded the land nearby. I don’t know a lot about Herman Germaine (I’m not even sure if Germaine is the proper spelling of his name) other than my dad talking about watching him cradle oats on his place. I discovered an old deed with his name on it while cleaning out our old house several months after publishing this post and discovered that his name was Ernest Germain, I have changed this to the correct spelling for the rest of this post. 

The Germain Place was subdivided in the mid-1980’s and some houses were built on it. I think the folks who live there now have another name for the creek. I don’t even know if they are aware that there are fish in it. It is pretty small and the lower end of it dries up in the summer. Often when this is the case people assume that fish wouldn’t live there. Neither of these subjects has ever come up in conversation with the folks that now live on the Germain Place and I never volunteered any information because I didn’t want to seem like a pompous know-it-all.

In the late 1990’s the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife made a concerted effort to identify a lot of smaller streams like Germain Creek that had fish in them but which were assumed not to have fish. I think Trout Unlimited and some other organizations may have helped out as well. I assume Germain Creek was included in these surveys. The fact that there are fish in Germain Creek was common knowledge to all the kids I grew up with in the area but nobody ever asked us.  

Germain Creek is the first place I ever went swimming and it is where I caught my first fish, somewhere around the age of 3 or 4. My dad and uncles and their friends as well as me and my friends grew up fishing this creek. It was within easy distance for a kid who couldn’t drive a car. I don’t know if my uncles and dad discovered the fish in Germain Creek while exploring their back yard as kids are wont to do, or whether they found out from their Indian friends.

We always considered Germain Creek a kids creek because it was small, just the right size for young kids. Though you can still hurt yourself by slipping on rocks, there is relatively little danger of drowning so younger kids could fish it unsupervised. Also because it was so small, there weren’t a lot of fish in it so it was just about right for a kid to catch a few fish, enough for a meal for them, and hone their fishing skills without depleting the stock. Over the course of my stream survey days, I have surveyed several streams this small or smaller that have had fish in them. Inevitably, there are not a lot of fish and they are usually quite small, in some cases the biggest were only 4 to 6 inches long. Any fish 9 or 10 inches long in streams like this are very big for the habitat available.

When I first fished Germain Creek it was forested with second growth timber. The land it flowed through was owned by Georgia Pacific at the time. In the mid to late 1970’s it was logged again. This was in the days before riparian set asides so there was no leave strip of timber along the creek. After logging, the slash in the logging unit was burned.

This affected the fishing for about a year but, after that, me and my friends continued to do quite well in the stream. We probably fished it twice a year and caught four or five fish apiece. This was sustained for several years until we quit fishing it because we got old enough that we could fish bigger streams. We also picked a lot of wild blackberries in that logging unit and I got the second deer of my life there (I actually missed a nice one there the year before. This would have been my first deer. I got my first one not too far away later that year).

This little creek has been abused quite a bit in the last 80 years or so. My dad took some cedar blocks out of there when he was younger by trying to splash dam them out. Splash dams are supposed to be very destructive to streams. At the time my dad was trying to get the cedar out, this wasn’t known or well known. He and I spent hours over the years rescuing fish from pools in the lower part of the creek that were drying up. By this and other words and actions, dad always tried to do right by the fish in this creek. So I don’t think he would have done it if he thought it would have hurt the fish. At any rate, I guess the splash dams weren’t that effective so maybe they didn’t do that much damage. Germain Creek also blew out (experienced large floods that moved a lot of sediment) a number of times in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.

Throughout all of this, Germain Creek has managed to maintain a population of fish. I have caught rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss), coastal cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarki clarki) and what looked like hybrids of these two species before, during and after all of the above mentioned disturbances in the 1970’s and 80’s. I have also seen juvenile coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch) in the lower part of the creek. And we would catch a Pacific giant salamander (Dicamptodon tenebrosus) from time to time as well.

So it would appear this stream is fairly resilient and can tolerate a fair amount of disturbance. The logging and slash burning was not exactly the same as a forest fire but was probably very similar. This creek is too small to stop or even slow down a big fire so all of the timber up to its banks would probably burn in the natural course of things in during a fire. That being said, I don’t think the creek would do so well if it was constantly hammered and this type of thing happened over and over again over short periods of time. It has been recovering over the past 30 years.

Saturday I went to check on things. I wasn’t concerned with really catching anything, like I said, this is a kid’s creek and can’t handle heavy fishing pressure. I just wanted to see if there were still some fish in the creek. I used an artificial fly with a barbless hook. I managed to see quite a few fish as they came after the fly. Most were small. I managed to flip one cutthroat about 7 inches long out of the creek and promptly threw it back in.

I spent the rest of the day doing a garbage dump run, shopping for groceries and doing laundry, with a short stop in Concrete to check out Cascade Days, and packing for an overnight trip on Sunday. 

First things first. The gate project. My neighbor and I removed several layers of hog wire and six strands of barbed wire from the posts.

Next we removed the posts. I was lucky in this in that the posts were rotted out and need to be replaced anyway so this project won't end up creating a lot of extra work for me. 

We installed some portable stock panels in the gap to create a makeshift gate. We just tied the end panels to posts rather than using any sort of heavy duty attachment. This is good for a temporary fix but not for the long term. Total time invested: about 2 hours. 

The lower part of Germain Creek now dry during the summer season.

Upper part of Germain Creek. This part of the creek is watered year round. It dries up several hundred feet below this point. We always caught fish starting a little below here. 

Another view of the upper part of Germain Creek. 

Coastal cutthroat (Oncorhynchus clarki clarki) about 7 inches long. Some of the fish in here might be cutthroat/rainbow hybrids. Sometimes it is hard to tell what you are looking at. Looking at the hyoid teeth on a fish's tongue is a better way to determine species but this is fatal to the fish. Genetic sampling is probably the most foolproof method but this is expensive and not very practical for field identification.