The Brief

California’s fifth largest wildfire is encroaching on some of the last strongholds for imperiled salmon, with potentially devastating consequences for a species already on the brink.

The explosive Park Fire has spread into the Mill and Deer Creek watersheds in Tehama County, which are two of the three remaining creeks where wild, independent populations of spring-run Chinook, a threatened species, still spawn in the Central Valley.

If the Park Fire climbs to higher altitudes, federal and state officials said it could strike the final deathblow to the region’s spring-run salmon, which are already at risk of extinction.

“It’s really concerning. It’s really sad. Spring-run Chinook populations have taken such a hit over the past few years, and they’re just at a critically low point,” said Howard Brown, senior policy advisor with the Central Valley office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s West Coast fisheries region. “The emotional toll of seeing a fire like this hit such an important place, with (critically at-risk) populations that are suffering so bad, it just feels like the cards are stacked up deeply.”

Experts are anxiously awaiting the wildfire’s next move, hoping that it doesn’t spread farther into higher elevations. That’s where adult salmon are waiting in cool pools for water temperatures to drop and flows to rise so they can spawn, and where year-old juveniles are gaining strength before migrating to the ocean.

“We’re kind of at the mercy of the weather and wind to see if these fires creep along doing beneficial to less-severe things, or if we see a big run that really cooks the watershed,” said Matt Johnson, a senior environmental scientist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife Northern Region Anadromous Fisheries Program.

“The species is at real risk of extirpation or blinking out. We hope that doesn’t happen,” he said.

Flames are not the primary, immediate threat. The spring-fed streams are moving so fast that ash in the water will quickly wash away, according to wildlife officials. Instead, firefighting efforts could pose a direct threat to the waterways, including the use of fire retardant, which is toxic to fish, though experts say it’s a necessary tradeoff.

“The important thing right now is to just try to stop it on the head, so it doesn’t burn up these really precious watersheds,” Brown said. “The next few days will be pretty telling.”

The most severe damage could come later this year — if heavy rains wash ash, chemicals and sediment from the burn scar into the creeks. Too much sediment can smother the eggs and baby fish, or spark a microbial bloom that sucks oxygen from the water. Larger debris flows also could scour the waterways and fill in holding pools.

“It’s like liquid cement coming down the river channel,” said Steve Lindley, director of fisheries ecology at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center lab. “It just scours the river down to the bedrock, and everything in it is crushed and ground up.”

Two years ago, flash floods sent debris from Siskiyou County’s McKinney Fire into the Klamath River, where the Karuk Tribe reported a devastating fish kill.

Protected by the nation’s Endangered Species Act since 1999, Central Valley spring-run Chinook have already experienced catastrophic declines, reaching record lows last year with only 16 adults returning to spawn in Deer Creek and 34 to Mill Creek. These populations, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife warned earlier this year, “are now at high risk of extinction.”

“To see really big, hot fires like this move into what used to be their strongholds — it’s really a tough thing to witness,” Brown said. “Right now, it feels like the frontlines of climate change.”

Salmon 'are really struggling'

Spring-run Chinook salmon were once the cornerstone of California’s commercial fishery, with more than half a million fish caught in 1883 alone.

But California’s big dam era in the 20th century also sparked a massive decline of spring-run Chinook, one of the four runs of salmon named for the season when they return to freshwater to spawn. The dams cut off critical upstream spawning habitat, shifted the timing of flows and degraded downstream waterways.

Now nearly all of the Central Valley’s spring-run populations are gone. The remaining ones are largely confined to the northern Sacramento Valley, where Mill and Deer Creeks provide some of the last, high quality, high-elevation habitat for the species, as well as for threatened Central Valley steelhead.

Both are tributaries to the Sacramento River. Born in Lassen Volcanic National Park, Mill Creek flows through forests and meadows before dropping through a steep rock canyon into the Sacramento Valley, where it meets the Sacramento River. Deer Creek emerges near the summit of Butt Mountain, flowing 60 miles before it reaches the valley floor and stretches another 11 miles to join the Sacramento River near Vina.

“Deer and Mill Creeks have always represented this exceptional habitat piece for salmon,” said Johnson. “Unfortunately, despite that great habitat, the fish populations are really struggling.”

Last year, counts of returning adults were so low, scientists described it as a cohort collapse — meaning there were too few to successfully produce a new generation. The catastrophic declines prompted state and federal wildlife agencies to begin a conservation hatchery program at UC Davis.

The program was in response to the “threat that this species could blink out because nothing would return in subsequent years. So the captive brood population is like a little insurance plan or bank account of genetic material,” Johnson said.

With so few returning adults, a hit to the next generation from the Park Fire could be catastrophic. Johnson said after the Dixie Fire in 2021, he saw the first rains of the season turn Mill Creek black with runoff.

“The adults returning this year are from that Dixie Fire cohort and we’re looking at preliminary very low returns,” Johnson said. Though he doesn’t have the evidence yet to back it up, the fire “could be a contributing factor.”

State wildlife officials in February warned water regulators that the fish have been in steep decline since 2015 — in part because agricultural water diversions from the lower rivers frequently drain the creeks. They urged the State Water Resources Control Board to set minimum levels of water that must flow through the creeks to protect fish.

“Historical water diversion and water use practices have long been out of balance with ecological needs on these critical watersheds,” Tina Bartlett, regional manager of the northern region, wrote to the water board. In recent years, the problem has been amplified by climate change and frequent droughts.

Water board staff are reviewing the recommendations, according to spokesperson Ailene Voisin.

Eggs and young fish could be smothered

Because of the fire, state wildlife officials cannot survey the number of adult salmon that returned this year, Johnson said. But preliminary estimates for this year remain very low — prompting alarm from scientists.

“We had a really bad year last year. We had a really bad year this year,” said Andrew Rypel, director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis. “Say we wipe out this cohort. Salmon are on a three-year lifecycle. That’s starting to look like the anatomy of an extinction.”

The wildfire is not an imminent threat to adults that are in the creeks right now, Johnson said. The creeks have abundant cool water, and as of Monday the fire was not affecting flow or temperatures.

“What this fire represents, if it were to consume the habitat in the upper watersheds, is a degradation of that habitat. It’s just another hit to the species that’s already struggling,” Johnson said.

In these fire prone landscapes, low-intensity fires can be beneficial. Some sediment in the water can help hide juveniles from predators. Downed trees in the stream can create fish habitat.

But Johnson and others are concerned about the heat and intensity of the fire. If the first rain events send mud and ash flooding into the creeks, the eggs or juveniles could be smothered by the sediment, or suffocate if oxygen levels plummet. Chemicals could degrade the water quality.

Brown said that these hot fires could reshape this wild, remote landscape. Recent studies show that the one-two punch of climate change and severe fires can change which plants return to a fire-scoured region. Denuded slopes are primed for erosion, and the loss of tree cover could allow these vital, cool stretches of river to warm in the summer.

“At this point, my greatest concern is the fire moving any further up Mill and Deer Creek. A hot fire blowup could have devastating ecological consequences for the watershed health of these streams,” he said. “The watersheds and the salmon are irreplaceable resources in the state of California and they are almost gone. This hurts.”

Alysa Liu’s comeback at this year’s Olympics — and her stunning gold medal win — has rocked the world of figure skating, making headlines due to her joy while performing and her commitment to mental health on and off the ice.

Though she primarily trained in Oakland, Liu, who’s also a psychology student at UCLA, has used a facility in Lakewood as one of her home bases away from home. The 20-year-old started training there as she came back from retirement and prepared to take the gold medal (not that that was necessarily her goal, to hear her tell it).

It’s part of a long history for the Rinks-Lakewood ICE, which has also hosted many champions and Olympians over the years, including Mariah Bell, Nathan Chen, Ashley Wagner and Adam Rippon, and counts prominent figure skaters among their staff.

“ We're not unfamiliar with Olympic ties,” said Braden Overett, the skating manager at Lakewood ICE, though he also clarified, “that does not in any way diminish the fun and the coolness [of Liu’s win].”

Lakewood ICE’s place in this year’s Olympics

Working with her coaches remotely, Liu started to drill down on perfecting her skating while also attending classes at UCLA. And though she moved on to her home base at Oakland Ice Center as the Olympic training started to ramp up, the staff who worked with her at Lakewood ICE kept cheering her on.

Overett said that he loves highlighting the Olympic connections at the rink, which may not be obvious to everyone who skates there.

“It's always fun just to connect the dots, right?” Overett said. “It's like going to a restaurant and then you find out later it's your favorite actor's restaurant.”

Ashleigh Ellis runs the nonprofit Unity Ice Academy, which focuses on increasing access to figure skating for kids of all backgrounds at Lakewood ICE.

“ That's just very much how the skating world is. It's very small, you never know who you're going to run into at any time,” Ellis said. “ Could you imagine just being on the ice with a national champion and Olympic skater of any sort? It's just so inspiring for the kids to see that and be within the vicinity of that.”

And Liu wasn’t the only 2026 Olympic figure skater who's used the facility. Li Yu-Hsiang, the Taiwanese national champion who represented Chinese Taipei in Milan this year, also trains in Lakewood.

The rink’s coaches

The small world of skating means that even novice skaters can take classes from world-class skaters: 1976 Olympic silver medalist Dianne de Leeuw teaches there, as do national medalists (and future Olympic contenders) Starr Andrews and Josephine Lee.

 "To get to see them and to get to share ice with them just has a layer of magic that you can't replace and you can't get anywhere else,” Overett said. “ You see the turnover of generations, and it brings in a huge element of history.”

What Liu’s win means for the skating world

Ellis is already using Liu’s example to stress the importance of mental health to the kids and families she works with, like one parent who was worrying about her child taking two weeks off skating due to pneumonia.

“I was like, ‘Alysa Liu took two plus years off and she just won the Olympic gold. Do not worry about it this two weeks,’” she said.

A bipartisan bill aimed at protecting pets during disasters has been introduced in Congress, with a Southern California representative citing the rescue efforts of local organizations during last year’s L.A.-area fires.

The PETSAFE Act of 2026 — which stands for Providing Essential Temporary Shelter Assistance For Emergencies — would expand the use of emergency management funds so local governments can plan for evacuations that move animals to safety, as well as provide veterinary care and rescue equipment during disasters.

Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA) helped introduce the bill earlier this month with several House of Representatives colleagues, including Republican Rep. Brian Mast of Florida and Democrat Rep. Dina Titus of Nevada.

Chu, who represents Pasadena and Altadena in the 28th Congressional District, said when the Eaton Fire tore through her district, many families delayed evacuations because they couldn’t bear to leave their pets behind.

She told LAist she’ll never forget seeing the cats, dogs and other animals with burned feet and singed fur who were being cared for by Pasadena Humane in the aftermath.

“But to think, if there is even one more thing we could do to keep our precious pets safe, wouldn't we want to do that?” Chu said. “So this PETSAFE Act could go a long way towards making sure that our loved pets can indeed survive a disaster.”

About the bill

Pasadena Humane teams looked for pets and wildlife in Eaton burn zones, dropping off food and water along the way.

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Courtesy Pasadena Humane

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The PETSAFE Act now has been referred to the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. The bill would amend the Emergency Management Performance Grant program to increase the federal cost share for certain animal-related preparedness activities from 50% to 90%.

Supporters say this would lower barriers and make it more affordable for communities to roll out emergency protection plans for people and pets.

Specifically, the PETSAFE Act would allow state, local and tribal governments to use grant money awarded by FEMA toward pet supplies, crates, veterinary equipment, emergency generators and training, among others.

Pet owners whose homes are under disaster-related evacuation orders can be faced with an “impossible choice” — leaving their pets behind or staying home with them, which risks the owner’s own safety and complicates rescue efforts for first responders, according to Chu’s office.

The bill aims to address the challenges pet owners and first responders face without authorizing new federal spending, according to Mast’s office.

How we got here 

Chu said local shelters, including Pasadena Humane, and communities across California stepped up to care for all kinds of animals during the Eaton Fire, which ignited in January 2025.

Pasadena Humane helped more than 1,500 pets and wildlife during the fire and in the aftermath by providing shelter, medical care and emergency resources.

A horse was housed in the organization’s garage when Chris Ramon, Pasadena Humane’s president and CEO, ran into its owner walking down Raymond Avenue for miles.

“Part of me likes to think that this won’t happen again,” Ramon told LAist last month. “But the realist in me realizes … disaster preparedness is something that just is an ongoing conversation for us at Pasadena Humane.”

Chu also cited the work of the ASPCA, which helped more than 530 animals during the Eaton Fire, including goats, parakeets, pigs and a gecko, according to the organization.

She said local organizations did “tremendous” work and “lovingly cared for” the rush of animals affected by the fire.

“But what we would want to do is to make sure that there is an even better system for animal evacuation and ways to ensure that pets could be safe,” Chu said, adding that would relieve the burden on places like Pasadena Humane.

Other laws aiming to protect pets

This is not the first time last year’s fires have led to new legislation focused on protecting pets during emergencies.

A new state law known as the FOUND Act, which went into effect Jan. 1, was inspired by Oreo the Pomeranian, who reunited with its Pacific Palisades owner in an emotional, viral video during the Palisades Fire.

The law requires cities and counties to include procedures for rescuing pets during mandatory evacuations in their next emergency plans, which need to be updated every five years to qualify for FEMA assistance.