North Idaho’s top fish manager retiring after 22 years
The bite had tapered off by noon. Most of the trout anglers at the south end of Priest Lake had reeled in and left the ice.
But Ned Horner kept moving, drilling new holes at various depths in Cavanaugh Bay, trying different jigs, experimenting with single and treble hooks as well as Smelly Jelly and cut bait.
The Idaho Fish and Game Department veteran was clearly in his element. Catching a limit of six mackinaw was the easiest fishing work he’d done all week.
Horner, who’s handled a boatload of dramatic fishing changes in his 22 years as Panhandle regional fisheries manager, will be retiring at the end of March after 28 years with the agency.
“Ned is one of the hardest working guys you’ll ever meet,” said Chip Corsi, IFG’s Panhandle Region manager. “It’s the way he approaches things.
“He’s also an avid fisherman. He doesn’t restrict his fishing to one gear type or one season. If it’s fishing, he’s interested in it. That has given him a sense of understanding and compassion for anglers of all types.”
Horner described coming to North Idaho “a fish biologist’s dream — big lakes, plus big rivers, small streams, high lakes and more than 40 lowland fishing lakes.”
The job also can be a nightmare, considering all the public meetings and the deterioration of Lake Pend Oreille’s formerly world-class kokanee and rainbow trout fisheries.
“Dealing with the problems at Pend Oreille has not been a project for the faint-hearted,” Corsi said. “It’s been very challenging, both socially and biologically. No matter what happens, nobody will be able to say he didn’t’ try to fix it.”
Despite the odds stacked against native and established fisheries before he arrived, Horner has helped guide North Idaho into a great fishing era that includes two of the finest native cutthroat fisheries in a world that’s generally become inhospitable to the species.
“Historically, cutthroat trout were hugely abundant in the Spokane River drainage,” said Horner, who has encyclopedic knowledge of the region’s fisheries. The spoils of mining and forestry combined with road building and easy public access virtually wiped out the cutthroat in rivers such as the Coeur d’Alene and St. Joe in a relatively short time, he said.
Under Horner’s watch, the fisheries were restored to a level that attracts worldwide attention.
“A lot of people probably don’t know that Ned had to be outspoken and swim against the current in the 1980s to bring fisheries to the attention of federal land managers,” Corsi said. “He played a big part in making the case, providing the information and getting the Panhandle National Forests to initiate stream protections and restorations.
“He took some grief for his creative management approaches even within Idaho Fish and Game. But one of the prime reasons that we have great cutthroat fishing on the Coeur d’Alene and St. Joe is because Ned was bird-dogging it when things were looking pretty bleak.”
In 1983, catch-and-release regulations were set for the upper Coeur d’Alene River above Yellow Dog Creek to help compensate for major degradations of cutthroat habitat.
The success of those regulations in producing more and bigger fish helped Horner gain the support of most anglers to overhaul cutthroat regulations in the Spokane River drainage.
“At that time, anglers could keep three fish over 13 inches long on the St. Joe River,” he said. “That regulation worked to sustain the cutthroat fishery, but few fish survived past 13 inches. Once they reached that size, they ended up in somebody’s creel.”
In 1988, catch-and-release regulations were set on the St. Joe upstream from Prospector Creek (near Avery) while anglers were allowed to keep one fish over 14 inches in the lower river.
“It wasn’t long before we started seeing the quality come back,” Horner said. “Before the regulations, less than 5 percent of the trout were over 12 inches on the St. Joe. Now, more than 40 percent are over 12 inches.”
Following surveys and public meetings completed last year, the latest stage of regulations to enhance the cutthroat fishery took effect this weekend: Fishing for cutthroat trout is now allowed year-round in the Spokane River drainage, but all cutthroats in that drainage, including all of the St. Joe and Coeur d’Alene rivers, must be released.
“No, we didn’t have an overwhelming consensus on going completely to catch and release, but a majority of anglers are for it,” he said. “That’s one of the biggest challenges in this job: Fishermen are fragmented and it’s difficult to get a strong consensus on anything.”
North Idaho’s traditional fisheries were already reeling from impacts set in motion decades before Horner’s arrival.
Northern pike, for example, were first were documented in Cave and Medicine lakes along the lower Coeur d’Alene River in 1972 after anglers apparently imported them illegally.
By the 1980s, the pike were well established in Lake Coeur d’Alene and having an impact on the lake’s native cutthroat trout.
“As northern pike colonized, they created a phenomenal fishery that was producing new records every year,” Horner said. “People were saying this was the best pike fishing short of the Northwest Territories, and they were right.”
But while pike enthusiasts wanted rules to protect the trophy northerns, biologists knew that would doom the fishery to an inevitable bust.
After evaluating the research, Horner recommended maintaining liberal seasons and limits on pike to let anglers keep their densities low and reduce their impact on cutthroats.
“This management plan has worked pretty well,” he said. “We introduced (sterile) tiger muskies to help provide another trophy fishery in lakes that could handle them, but we’re also maintaining a chance to catch trophy pike. A new state record (39 pounds, 13 ounces) was caught just last year in Lake Coeur d’Alene.”
2003 was the last year rainbow trout — another non-native species to most North Idaho waters —were stocked in Panhandle streams.
“I couldn’t justify it,” Horner said. “It wasn’t economical and it encouraged hybridization with native cutthroats.”
But Horner continues to look for new alternatives for stocking hatchery rainbows in ponds where anglers can catch fish for the table.
His initiative to check out a “For Sale” sign along the Coeur d’Alene River resulted in the state acquiring 21 acres of moose habitat that will never be converted to trailer parks, and Steamboat Pond, which is now open to the public and stocked with rainbows.
Similar “catch-out ponds” have been developed throughout the region, including Bull Moose Lake on the east side of Priest Lake with the cooperation of Huckleberry Bay developers, and Coeur d’Alene drainage ponds managed with Hecla Mining Co.
Indeed, companies with big machinery have as much potential to benefit fisheries as they do to decimate them, Horner said.
A pipeline project on the Moyie River had incidents of massive erosion until Horner talked the company into hiring an expert to engineer fish-friendly construction and habitat up- and down-stream from each of the eight places the pipeline crossed the river.
The federal project to rebuild the St. Joe River Road got a bad start with blasting sessions that blocked as much as two-thirds of the river with rock. Once again, Horner negotiated an arrangement with a consultant who helped the contractor redirect 285 big boulders to create more habitat through a 13-mile stretch.
The most dramatic example of confronting major development occurred in the 1990s, during the reconstruction of Interstate 90.
“We were able to get culverts replaced and a fish ladder that allowed cutthroats to go up Cedar creek and Fourth of July Canyon to spawn in the headwaters,” he said. “But the big challenge was the project to construct the interchange at Blue Creek. One big slump of 60,000 cubic yards covered 20 percent of the kokanee spawning beds in the lake.”
While Horner was challenging Department of Transportation officials about their plans, another 100,000 cubic-yard slump washed a D-9 Cat into the lake and did more damage — all for a road to nowhere.
“We had a lot of heated discussions with DOT. Eventually they admitted damage to kokanee spawning and mitigated with fractured rock gravel.”
Horner donned diving gear himself to help survey the shoreline and put out buoys to make sure the monumental but one-shot opportunity involving barges and mind-boggling quantities of rock was done correctly.
The result: “We coated 2 miles of shoreline with primo gravel for great spawning habitat,” he said. “That was a prime example of turning lemons into lemonade.”
So far, however, Horner has not been able to sweeten the dire decline of Lake Pend Oreille fisheries, stemming from the introduction of lake trout by the U.S. Fish Commission in 1925 and the 1967 introduction of mysis shrimp to boost trophy rainbow trout.
“By the time biologists started identifying the competition for zooplankton between the shrimp and kokanee in the ‘70s, it was too late,” he said.
By 1999, kokanee, a favorite target for both anglers and trophy trout, reached their lowest numbers since they were introduced to the big lake in 1933. With no end to the decline in sight, kokanee fishing was closed at Pend Oreille in 2000 and trophy anglers were asked to abandon their conservation ethics and start killing the big rainbows they caught.
“There was no way a small number of kokanee could recover if there were a large number of predators after them,” Horner said.
Currently, the state is trying an expensive project that involves, among other things, paying anglers $15 a fish for killing rainbows and lake trout in Pend Oreille and hiring commercial fishermen to target lake trout with nets.
“Some fishermen would rather let the lake go to a mackinaw fishery and be done with it,” Horner said. “But that would surely result in yet another system dominated by lake trout when we know the lake is much more appealing to a much larger number of anglers if it provides fishing for kokanee, bull trout and trophy rainbow.”
If the odds don’t seem overwhelming enough, walleye also are finding their way into the lake and smallmouth bass are burgeoning in the region.
“For now, it’s still worth trying to save the fisheries in Pend Oreille,” he said. “We owe the lake that much.”
Even after he retires on April 1, Horner will be moving on as a part-time consultant for Avista at Lake Pend Oreille, but he says he’s also looking to more personal research with his fishing rod.
The agency hasn’t announced who will fill his official boots and wade into the Pend Oreille ordeal and the other issues sure to arise in the ever-changing scene of North Idaho fisheries.