A $1.2 million federal grant announced this week will be used to design a new fish exclusion feature to keep invasive and predatory northern pike from escaping the 110-foot-wide spillway at Lake Catamount south of Steamboat Springs .
Joel Anderson, Catamount Metropolitan District manager for 30 years, said partner agencies have been discussing installing fish netting or an escapement prevention feature since 2016. The current funding will facilitate a design by the US Bureau of Reclamation in the 530-acre private lake.
Funding was awarded to the Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program which is a collaboration of local, state and federal agencies; water and electricity interest; and environmental groups working to recover endangered fish in the Upper Colorado River Basin.
“That’s good news, making some progress,” Anderson said of the grant. “Hopefully, in the next step we’ll find a design that works for everyone. We hope they come up with a design that’s relatively easy to maintain.
Colorado Parks & Wildlife staff have worked since 2007 to net and manage northern pike in Lake Catamount. CPW Aquatic Biologist Bill Atkinson said northern pike at Catamount have been a problem for years because the fish can escape across and down the 35-foot-tall spillway.
“We’ve had spills pretty regularly throughout the summer,” Anderson said of water flowing over the spillway at the pass-through reservoir in the Yampa River watershed.
Anderson said the project design could be a netting system similar to the one at Elkhead Reservoir or could be a mechanical structure such as screening over the spillway that can be removed or retracted for cleaning.
At Elkhead Reservoir, a nearly 600-foot-long net to keep gamefish inside the reservoir when the spillway is operating was installed in September 2016, according to reservoir management agency Colorado River District. That project cost about $1.2 million, per the river district’s website. If allowed to escape the Elkhead, invasive and nonnative northern pike compete with native and endangered fish in the Yampa and Green rivers.
The funding for Lake Catamount is part of an announcement by the Bureau of Reclamation of a total of $21 million in Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding for the recovery and conservation of endangered species throughout the Colorado River Basin. The funding will support multiple projects, including efforts to recover four endangered and threatened fish species native to the Upper Colorado River and San Juan River basins. Other funded projects range from $2.6 million for repairs needed at a fish hatchery in Ouray to $5.2 million to design and build a fish passage structure on the San Juan River west of Farmington, New Mexico.
Anderson said the first officially reported capture of a northern pike in Lake Catamount was in 1996.
Biologist Atkinson points out that non-native northern pike are now a problem throughout the Yampa River watershed. Sport fish were deliberately introduced in the late 1970s to Elkhead Reservoir.
Northern pike were illegally introduced into Stagecoach Reservoir in the early 1990s by individuals using “bucket biology,” Atkinson said.
CPW has no size or possession limits on invasive pike, and advises anglers to keep or give away the fish.
“Harvest is encouraged to benefit native species as well as the popular trout resources of the Yampa Basin,” Atkinson said. Metro district manager Anderson said northern pike “tastes good, if you prepare it right.”
