Welcome to the Bighill Creek Project

Growing up as a boy and fishing the Bighill Creek holds a lot of memories for me personally. There is always the chance that you may live near a trout stream or still water habitat where you can fish as a youth, but having a destination within bike riding distance is a must for guys like me. Fishing and being around water combined is an attraction that some humans have within themselves, it is part of their being.

The Bighill Creek was always a reliable place to wet a worm or cast a small spinner, if you could cast fairly accurately and avoid the snags. The trout fishing was always good, because the province stocked the creek on a regular basis, mainly with rainbow trout. Later on, in the mid 1960’s the stocking program was stopped. This left only the most adept trout species to survive on their own.

The key to the success of this little trout stream is the protection that the landowners upstream did, to keep the creek healthy enough to support a trout population. Reduced grazing along the creek was the main reason for this conservation effort and it has worked well enough to sustain trout, when there was enough water flowing down the stream. It was a dry spell that first threatened the creek in the 1980’s, when flow was down to a trickle.

However, starting in the new millennium the amount of flow had increased enough that the trout fishery was on the rebound, so a few local fly fishers got together and conducted a angling survey in 1998 and once this happened, the word started to spread about the good trout that creek was allowing us fly fishers to briefly hold and maybe take a photo of, before the trout were safely released back into the creek. This is the way of the fly fisher!

My early conservation efforts included a tour with provincial fisheries biologist Al Sosiak in the 1980’s, to show him a tributary that once supported spawning brown and brook trout on the Bighill Creek. There was no reproduction at that time, but I want to report that it had once occurred and the spot which I showed him was where the trout would spawn every fall. The idea of the meeting was to try and do something to revive the trout fishery in the creek.

When the better flows returned to the Bighill Creek around about the year 2000 or close to it, the trout started to repopulate the creek and spawning soon followed. The small feeder spring creek that I showed Al needed some trout too, but it was located a long way upstream, so we needed to help the trout in their migrations back up into the headwaters area. Our beaver notching program did this very nicely.

In the late summer, we local volunteers which were mainly trout fishers, opened small notches in the beaver dams, to allow the trout to move further upstream. The beavers would eventually rebuild or repair the breaches in their dams, but in the meantime, the trout could pass up the system to where they had historically spawned. As a matter of fact, the old trout hatchery built in the park on the Bighill Creek around the turn of the 20th century, was a brook trout hatchery.

Now, the trout are back in the creek and spawning in some key habitats and feeder springs that keep the creek water temperatures cold in the summer and warmer in the winter time. These small feeder tributaries are also nursery habitats for trout that have hatched elsewhere and need a safe haven to spend the first months and years of their lives, before they re-enter the Bighill Creek.

On the lower reach where there are some deficiencies in stream habitat for trout, a riparian planting program is establishing good in-stream and overhead cover habitats for resident trout. The planting of native willows and deciduous trees is the goal and so far, many thousands of new willow plants and some deciduous trees have started their new beginning on the creek. The natural riparian grasses and sedge are the only remnant of cover habitats for trout, in some places. However, these grasses and sedge do provide some great habitat for trout.

The reduction of the loading of soil, clay and silt into the stream channel has greatly been reduced, thanks to the extensive stream bank stabilization planting, carried out as part of the Bow Valley Riparian Recovery and Enhancement Program. The plantings first started during the Millennium Creek Restoration project, in 2007, and on Bighill Creek in 2009. The planting was started prior to the BVRR&E Program.

Now, the habitat along the lower reach of the Bighill Creek is getting better and better as more and more plantings enhance the growing riparian zone along the stream. The town of Cochrane has decided to wisely let the riparian zone buffer more park land that was previously mowed by a grass cutting machine, and now is left to recover into a natural state. This will really improve the overall appearance of the creek thru the park areas along the lower reach of the BH Creek, here in the town.

Presently, brown trout and brook trout spawn in the Bighill Creek, with a growing presence of rainbow trout, which may also eventually spawn in the creek, if we can protect the stream’s water supply and quality. This only comes with good land management upstream, and so far, so good!

Unfortunately, in 2017, a new fishing regulation happened on the Bighill Creek. The daily catch limit for those that harvest trout, went up; from 1 trout under 35cm to a daily harvest of 2 trout, which by the way is incredibly poor fisheries management for our modern times! This was a terrible blow to those that had spent so much time and money protecting the creek and trying to get the trout population healthy again. But this is just how bad our fisheries are managed in this province!

Despite this lack of help and enthusiasm from our beloved regional biologists, the fishery can still be protected, but educating the people about the importance of protecting this vital Eco-system that supports life for not just us humans, but all of the wildlife that we love to see along the stream. Can you imagine opening the season on any deer that frequent stream valleys in cities and towns? Hey, we are living in a densely populated area and we need special regulations in place to protect what little bit of nature that we still have left in our communities!

In 1998 and 1999, Bow Valley Habitat Development, with funding support from the Alberta Conservation Association and the town of Cochrane, completed a comprehensive study of the fisheries on the Bighill Creek’s lower reaches. It was during that period of time that a small feeder tributary to the BH Creek was identified as a potential restoration project to bring the stream back to near historic conditions and allow the stream to once again provide an important role as a nursery habitat for juvenile trout. As it turned out, once the project was completed, the trout started to spawn in the small stream, thus making it a very important tributary to the Bighill Creek’s trout fishery.

After the restoration of Millennium Creek, the trout populations really started to improve on the lower reach of the stream. In a pre-project assessment by Fish and Wildlife and ACA biologists, there were a total of 5 brook trout found on the lower 50 metres of Millennium Creek. A Post project assessment, conducted while the project was still under construction, actually it was completed on Sept. 28th, 2007, while the restoration project was still underway. The electro fish results for Millennium Creek on that date were as follows:

19 Brook trout

25 Brown trout

7 Mountain Whitefish

1 Rainbow trout 

A few stickleback minnows and a sucker were also captured.

Normally, you would think that one should wait until an assessment for success is carried out, rather than doing it right in the middle of the project! Any restoration project on a trout stream requires some rest before the system is functional, and most fisheries biologists that have an understanding of such things, should know.

Bottomline; the project was a major success, as a nursey habitat! The big news came in the fall of 2008, when the project had only been finished a few weeks, when the brook trout started to spawn in the creek. This was the bonus that we could not predict, having trout actually spawning in the restored stream is a gift that only a keener could appreciate to its full extent. In 2010, an additional spawning channel was constructed on the Millennium Creek and since that time, many thousands of trout have hatched on this small spring fed tributary to the BH Creek.

Now, it is Nov. 25, 21 as I write this, and to date, we have had successful spawning and incubation of trout eggs in the creek over the last 13 years. The upper spring creek, where I had taken Al Sosiak back in the mid 1980’s has been producing new generations of trout since 2013. The Ranch House Spring Creek also produced a lot of trout for the Bighill Creek, until its quick demise due to a new storm drain inflow that was constructed sometime around 1997 or there abouts. 

Bow Valley Habitat Development's Involvement

The Bighill Creek flows right thru the heart of the community of Cochrane, Alberta. It has always been known as a trout stream, and work on maintaining the trout fishery has been an ongoing goal since the first trout hatchery was built on the creek at the turn of the twentieth century. The work still goes on, but it is not always the provincial government that will take on the challenge, so other NGO's try to do their best!

Bow Valley Habitat Development has had a long term relationship with the Bighill Creek, and research work was the intial stage of trying to do some good, to help protect this wild trout fishery, despite the disappearance of the native bull trout and cutthroat trout that once inhabited the stream's waters. Presently, besides restoring a few key spawning habitats on small feeder spring creeks that are tributaries to the mainstem of the Bighill, BVHD and its partners are working on habitat improvements for the main creek and a marked improvement of water quality and stream bank stabilization sites that have been planted in the program of riparian restoration work.

The riparian planting program has provided the best results and this is what we will cover in this page and posting. The riparian planting started in earnest in 2007, with the first riparian plantings completed on the restoration project completed on the Millennium Creek, a small total of approximately 400 plants. Then in 2009, another small planting was conducted on the Bighill Creek,  followed by a planting in 2012 and 2013, these would be the first of many plantings. The Bow Valley Riparian Recovery and Enhancement Program which started in 2014 and is now in its eigth year, contributed a total of over 77,000 native plants planted on all three streams in the program and on Bighill Creek alone, the total is 18,093 native plantings.

Prior to the BVRR&E Program, BVHD and its partners planted

400 - Millennium Creek

2012 - a total of 1,550 native plants on BH Creek

2013 - a total of 2,961 native plants on BH Creek.

The Bow Valley Riparian Recovery and Enhancement Program.

2014 -- 10,524 Plants

2015 -- 14,895 Plants

2016 -- 16,425 Plants

2017 -- 9,170 Plants

2018 -- 9,700 Plants

2019 – 11,200 Plants

2020 – 3,300 Plants

2021 – 2,100 plants

2022 - 2,200 plants

Total – 79,514 native willows and deciduous trees

Bighill Creek's total in the BVRR&E Program is 18,093 and with the other totals for 2012 and 2013 makes the overall total 23,004 native plantings

2013

Bighill Creek total – 2,961 willow plants.

Nose Creek total – 3,474 willow plants.

Volunteer person hours 284

2012

A total of 1,550 willow plants were planted on Bighill Creek.

The overall total number of plantings on the Bighill Creek for BVHD is 23,004 native willows and some deciduous trees. The final reports for this program have been filed for reference and a detailed list of the partners involved and volunteer contributions are all documented, and will be published from time to time as a reminder of those worthwhile investment dollars in this riparian program.