Kyle Evans woke up Thursday morning with an important mission: to save every possible steelhead trout from southern California’s Topanga Creek. The small coastal creek, which is home to the last remaining population of wild steelhead in the Santa Monica Mountains, was completely scorched by the Palisades fire. Everything from the top of the canyon to the plants along the banks burned. And with a large weather system in the forecast, Evans and other fishery managers knew that the first big rains after the fire could trigger landslides and debris flows that would devastate Topanga’s steelhead.
“We’ve seen this happen in a couple different streams, and in the best case scenario, you lose 98 percent of the fish in that watershed. In the worst case, you lose 100 percent,” Evans, an environmental program manager for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, tells Outdoor Life. “So that really upped the time crunch on this.”
Evans was joined on Jan. 23 by around 50 others from different organizations and state agencies, and the team spent sunup to sundown in Topanga Canyon. They covered roughly 4,000 yards of some of the best remaining habitat in the creek, pulling out every steelhead trout they could find. They used backpack-style electro-shockers to shock segments of creek and temporarily immobilize the fish, and then used nets to move the fish into aerated, five-gallon buckets. From there, they ran the buckets uphill to the nearest truck, which transported them from their natal creek to a nearby fish hatchery.
In total, the team rescued 271 fish from Topanga Canyon. These were all either juvenile steelhead or resident rainbow trout (both of which are the same species, Oncorhnychus mykiss), and most of the fish were 12 inches or smaller. Evans explains that no adult steelhead have been able to make it up Topanga so far this winter due to low flows, which isn’t that surprising. In a good year, he says, they’ll see maybe one or two adult steelhead return to the creek to spawn.
Crews rescued 271 steelhead trout in total. 
Fisheries biologists used backpack-style electro-shock equipment to deliver small amounts of electrical current, which temporarily immobilizes the fish. 
Other team members waded alongside the electro-shockers to scoop up the immobilized fish with nets. 
The rescuers used aerated, five-gallon buckets to transport the fish from the creek and up the canyon to the highway above. Once there, the fish were loaded into trucks and taken to a nearby hatchery. 
In the last phase of the rescue operation, the fish were loaded into large aerated tanks in truck beds and driven to a hatchery. 
A southern California steelhead trout fingerling. Most of the fish that were rescues were juveniles and small rainbows.
Even with these dismal returns, though, Topanga Creek is considered a stronghold for Southern California steelhead trout, a unique and increasingly rare subspecies of steelhead that was listed as endangered in 2024. This says a lot about the future of these fish, and it’s why Thursday’s rescue operation was so critical.
“Our biggest concern … is losing that last population of fish,” Evans told the Los Angles Times last week as they were planning the rescue operation.
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Evans says they’ve conducted similar rescues in Southern California trout streams that have been damaged by wildfires in recent years. But most of those operations involved moving fish into a nearby creek or tributary stream where the post-fire damage wasn’t as severe.
“This was the first time we’ve ever taken southern steelhead from a creek and put them into a hatchery,” Evans says. “It would have been ideal to keep these fish on the landscape, but this was last minute, and we needed to hold them somewhere because of the [incoming] storm. And the hatchery was our best option to protect them.”
He explains that the trout were in good shape when they arrived at the facility, and they’re now being monitored by pathologists around the clock. But he’s still concerned about the long-term effects of leaving wild steelhead in a hatchery setting.
“I want to get these fish out of the hatchery … so we’ve got a Plan A and a Plan B,” Evans explains. “I would love for them to go back into their natal stream, that’s Plan A. But if Topanga Creek just keeps getting hammered, and we see continued impacts from debris flows, then we’ll be looking at other options — streams that maybe had fish in the past but are currently empty due to a previous fire, or other places that would be good candidates for these fish to recolonize … It just depends on how this winter goes.”
Evans recognizes that the destruction caused by the Palisades Fire on the region’s human inhabitants is still the biggest concern for local citizens and state agencies. He says that all the effort fisheries managers and other groups have put into saving steelhead and other fish does not take away from the resources for health and human safety.
“The state is dedicated to recovery, and this doesn’t take away from the recovery actions and all the other things we’re doing to try and repair the devastation,” Evans says. “It’s just that my role in all of this is the fish part.”