In the summer of 1997, Jeff Miller went for a long walk along Alameda Creek. He started where the 40-mile stream meets the San Francisco Bay, sandwiched between the San Mateo and Dumbarton bridges. From there, he followed the water inland. For the first twelve miles, Miller marched along a stream hemmed into a flood control channel, and cut around downtown Fremont backyards. Over two days, he traced the creek through old quarry lakes, through quiet community parks, and finally out of the city and into the hills.
There, the creek began to twist into largely undeveloped expanses of oak woodland as it cut across the Diablo Range. Miller followed public trails where they existed, and found his own paths where they didn’t. As he climbed with the water, the stream thinned and quickened. Gravel peppered its bottom. Trees shaded and cooled the water.
This was the dream, if you were a steelhead trout, thought Miller. A dedicated environmental activist, he had been pondering how to protect steelhead in the Bay. The Central California Coast steelhead (Oncorhynchus mykiss iridius) population had just been listed as a threatened species under the federal Endangered Species Act. Steelhead trout, as well as other salmonids like Chinook salmon, had populations in freefall across their range in Central California, especially because adults couldn’t find places like this anymore: refuges to lay their eggs in where young trout could hatch and grow into juveniles, which could migrate into the ocean as their ancestors had done for thousands of years.
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But no trout or salmon could reach that dream. The last time anyone saw steelhead trout in upstream Alameda Creek, it was 1967 and the Vietnam War was on. Since then, the creek had been clogged with obstacles to fish. As he walked, Miller had marked the barriers on a map: rubber dams, a concrete pipeline, a bridge, a culvert. In total, he found 18, built by a range of public agencies and private organizations to shape water flow, support bridges, and more. Each structure broke the flow of the stream, and represented a near-insurmountable obstacle to trout.
Twenty-eight years later, Miller—now a conservation advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity—has grown a snow-white beard. Over the course of his career, he has participated in lawsuits, protests, and hundreds of board meetings, alongside hundreds of other people. More than $100 million dollars have been spent across state funding, federal grants, and agency money. Almost every barrier to fish migration in Alameda Creek has been removed. This week, the last barrier that can feasibly be removed in our lifetimes—a concrete structure over a PG&E gas pipeline—will begin coming down. By 2026, Alameda Creek will flow free.
This final barrier removal opens up some twenty miles of creek—a new survival path for steelhead in the Bay. But what is just as remarkable is the three-decade process that got us to this point has reshaped not only the creek but our public agencies, and their approach to fish and watershed stewardship.
Miller had little idea what he was getting into, however, when in 1997 he founded the Alameda Creek Alliance to push for a steelhead-friendly watershed. He had experience with years of campaigning—sitting in trees to block logging, dropping banners to protect wild places. He thought this would be another campaign. “We had no idea how involved restoration was going to be, or how expensive, or how long it was going to take,” Miller says. One thing was clear from the start in Alameda Creek: he couldn’t do it alone.
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Miller was hardly the first person to fight against barriers in Alameda Creek. In the 1970s, the Alameda County Water District built a series of three tall rubber dams in a downtown Fremont community park, 12 miles up the creek. Anglers who had spent their childhoods catching steelhead along the stream rose up in arms against the dams—literally. “They used to go down there with bolo knives and cut it,” recalls Dennis Stefani, who grew up swimming in Alameda Creek. The sabotage was so persistent that Stefani says the water district set up guard huts to ward off the vandals.
As Miller gathered the Alliance twenty years later, those old anglers turned up. So did school principals, birders, nearby residents, and others who wanted to give back to the creek. At first, the group’s goal of barrier removal seemed eminently attainable. With the steelhead’s federal listing, the Alameda Creek Alliance had the law on its side, for one. It also had science on fish migrations that emphasized steelhead’s importance to the health of the entire ecosystem. And it had the people.
But the agencies, at first, just didn’t listen, in Miller’s telling. “When I first showed up to those water district meetings, they told me to take a hike,” he recalls. He saw getting the fish barriers down, at first, as just a matter of applying “political pressure”—by organizing a public outcry. “I looked at the agencies as the problem,” Miller says. People who met him in those early years agree: “I always had the feeling Jeff was the guy in the room hitting the table with his shoe,” says Tim Frahm, a fellow salmon and trout advocate who met Miller in public meetings in the early 2000s.
Still, it became clear to Miller that Alameda Creek wouldn’t change through nighttime sabotage. “We can complain,” he told his allies, “or we can make this happen.”
As the Alliance gathered support, every year members watched fish die. The rubber dams lay next to a shallow concrete slope, which flanked a bridge where trains rumbled overhead from erosion. The whole thing was totally impassable to trout (or salmon), which nevertheless returned from the ocean year after year to throw themselves against the barriers. Lucky fish got rescued from their purgatory and driven upstream by East Bay Regional Parks District staff, helped by Alliance members, in dramatic (and largely symbolic) journeys. Most died—picked off by predators as they flopped helplessly in the shallow water.
From the start, these dams represented the biggest barrier to fish passage. The problem was that they also helped capture rainwater runoff, which ran through the taps of over 200,000 Alameda residents. It took more than two decades of work to construct what Miller describes as “one of the most complex fish ladders in North America.” Today, a twisting corridor ducks around the structures, allowing trout to cross into upper Alameda Creek. Completed in 2022, it marked the latest in a series of big-dollar projects from agencies and landowners in the watershed.
None were projects at the core of the missions for the agencies that made them happen. The Alameda water district and the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission are charged with delivering water to customers; CalTrans (whose bridge rumbles over the rubber dams) manages transportation for Californians. “Their mission is not to help fish,” says Frahm. And yet many such not-really-fish-oriented organizations along Alameda Creek have invested in fish more and more over the last decades—spending millions of dollars and, in some cases, building out entire natural resource departments over the decades.
This kind of commitment seemed unlikely when Miller started a working group in 1999 for agencies to discuss Alameda Creek’s fish passage issues, though the new threatened-species listing meant agencies had to turn up. Some organizations had already made gestures towards fish conservation: Thomas Niesar, who began working at the Alameda County Water District in the late 1990s, says the Alameda water district decided to “avoid environmental impacts to protect and preserve water supply” in a 1995 planning document and began protecting steelhead as a result. (Miller says he experienced the water district in the late 1990s as “not amenable” to steelhead protection.) According to Tim Ramirez—who has managed the natural resources department at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission since 2005—attendance at the working group was “begrudging” at first. “There was a lot of sitting and staring and finger-pointing for the first few years,” he says.
Water district customers weren’t always on board, either. Niesar, now the water resources planning manager at the Alameda County Water District, remembers standing in Alameda Creek in the early 2000s, measuring streamflow, as a passer-by yelled from the bank top that he was wasting public money.
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Miller worked with the Alameda Creek Alliance to change the narrative: tabling at almost every available community event, sending out press release after press release, attending board meetings for the county water district and Public Utilities Commission, and starting a campaign where constituents sent water district board members brightly colored postcards advocating for steelhead—so many the board director had a stack “two feet tall” on her desk, Miller says. “We kind of wore them down.”
“Miller is a living example of how patience and determination can solve really big, complex problems with lots of parties involved that you might not think could collectively ever get it together,” Niesar says. Miller drew from his background in protest and organizing, but he also recognized political pressure alone couldn’t change everything. “I used to think collaboration was a dirty word,” he tells me. “[But] I wanted to get things done. And I realized the way to do it is to offer solutions.”
As media attention built, nature lovers flipped the water district’s board, and public support for steelhead grew, the tide began to turn in the early 2000s. By the turn of the century, the water district had tens of millions of dollars to spend on major fish passage projects, Niesar says, and got more state and federal grants. It removed the first rubber dam in 2009. To date, the water district has spent $80 million of its own funds on fish passage.
Other agencies took note. By then, it had been a decade, with more than 70 meetings. Now people knew each other. “Institutional relationships and personal relationships went hand in hand,” Miller says. And so the barriers—personal, bureaucratic, literal—fell, one by one.
Only one place in Alameda Creek stops a steelhead’s migration now. It lies between two quarries, about halfway up Alameda Creek. Here, the oak woodlands that line the water further down disappear; towering cranes and heaping mountains of brown dirt replace them. Power lines stretch for miles into the distance.
At the quarry’s edge, Alameda Creek broadens and slows amid thick groves of willows and cattails. Among the vegetation, a quilt of chunky concrete stones arrayed across the stream protects a PG&E gas pipeline. It is not, technically, a full barrier: during heavy winter rains, an athletic steelhead could be buoyed enough to leap the concrete. Lampreys already sucker their way over the structure. But most days, most trout and salmon would struggle to find a way past it.
Beyond these chunky concrete blocks, SFPUC has led more than a decade of projects that smooths their path through the 20 miles of streambeds that first drew Miller’s eye to Alameda Creek. For now—but not much longer—it remains out of reach.
First the concrete has to go. Getting it out requires a carefully choreographed dance between the quarry owners, PG&E, and the nonprofit salmon conservation group California Trout. PG&E will remove the concrete and shift the pipeline about 100 feet downstream. Then CalTrout and consultants will replant and smooth the stream back to its natural flow. “Being good stewards of the environment is one of our priorities as a company, making this a natural fit for PG&E,” said Jack Zigelman, vice president of PG&E for the Bay Area region, in a press release about the project.
CalTrout is a newer participant in the saga of Alameda Creek. Conversations about removing this barrier began in 2002, but a few years ago, they stalled, as the stream restoration costs mounted. A consultant gave CalTrout a call in 2023, and asked if it would jump in. It did, and “we hit the ground running,” says Claire Buchanan, a project manager with CalTrout. Over a few months, she got up to speed on two decades of history along the creek and applied for—and received—$4.3 million from the Inflation Reduction Act, via the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, for the barrier removal. (Unlike many other IRA grants, the barrier funds have not been affected by President Donald Trump’s executive orders to date.) This week, the groups are draining a section of the creek to begin the concrete removal. Because summer has begun to set in and the creek has narrowed, fish, frogs, and other native and nonnative freshwater species will be exposed. Biologists from PG&E, CalTrout, East Bay parks, SFPUC, and volunteers will gather with nets and rescue each animal, one by one. Each native animal will be moved somewhere the water runs clear, cool, and free.
By 2026, trout and salmon may make this journey without help from human hands. After almost three decades of hard labor by the humans, the fishes’ work will start. They must make their way up the stream, mate, dig their nesting redds, lay their eggs, spawn, grow to maturity, and return to the ocean—all while surviving climate change-exacerbated droughts, warming waters, illegal anglers, industrial fishing fleets, pollution, invasive competitors, out-of-control wildfires, hatchery fish, and every other modern challenge that threatens a steelhead’s life beyond dams. There are likely under 10,000 fish left in this population—less than 10% of its historical population size.
Their human supporters have faith steelhead will make it. “They’re these scrappy little survivors,” Niesar says. And Miller is confident the changes he and his partners have built—to the water, but also to the hearts and minds of those protecting it—can last. He’s thinking of stepping back from Alameda Creek, at long last, and passing on some of the work to CalTrout.
Ironically, steelhead’s return to Alameda Creek will be largely invisible, if it happens. The species mostly migrates at night and avoids people. People have only seen the fish at all till now (apart from biologists doing snorkel surveys) because steelhead amass—and die—at the dams. With the barriers gone, success will look like a seemingly empty stream. There will be no bang of victory. At most, there will be a ripple as an arched fin grazing the water’s surface, and as one piece of our long-askew ecosystem—at last—swims back into place.
Update, June 18, 2025: The spelling of Tim Frahm’s last name was corrected.
