The Paulinskill River flows from the source in marshlands of Fredon Township near Newton 41.6 miles to the Delaware River at Columbia. It basks in the valley of Kittatinny Ridge, descending by a relatively shallow gradient compared to the Pequest and Musconetcong, which helps account for the river’s historically warmer summertime temps and big smallmouth bass. According to Brian Cowden, a principal of the Trout Scapes LLC stream restoration company, the river is, however, richly embedded by limestone.
Cowden spoke of an Urbani Fisheries restoration project done at a club on the south side of Blairstown years before his company formed. The club’s situation improved from “having to stock every single spring, to holding-over virtually all of their fish.” He elaborated on the use of an excavator, “You’re digging enough deep pools that you’re breaking into the groundwater. It’s right there!
“Limestone karst is that rocky layer more like a sponge…like sandstone,” said Cowden, adding “It breaks down very easily when water flows over it or through it. It looks like waves on the stream bottom, because those are the areas where water’s moving through. Basically, carving its way through.”
Natural erosion is responsible for new groundwater seepage, but restoration work means “that river will change dramatically,” according to Cowden, who likened the machinery’s force to the breaking of an egg, “You know you’re breaking into those areas now pulling in more groundwater, because you’ve broken that shell, so to speak,” he noted.
Dam removals are also essential to improving the river. The Columbia Dam existed near the confluence with the Delaware until The Nature Conservancy led the removal project in 2018, and last summer, the Paulina Dam’s removal above Blairstown. Estimates are that the river’s summertime temperature will register 3 to 5 degrees cooler. Shad have been caught in Blairstown. Walleye, too. I asked Cowden about shad moving further upstream than Paulina.
“You’ll see shad shooting right through there. And here’s why we know that. The Musconetcong, when we removed the lower dams -we weren’t certain. It had been 300 years. We weren’t sure if shad would go up, but, yes, they came back to that river,” Cowden said, and added that river herring may accompany them, “When they were doing some electrofishing below the Columbia Dam, when the Columbia Dam was still intact, they did come into some river herring, so they are making it that high up into the Delaware, meaning they should turn right, into the Paulinskill.”
Smallmouth bass, and some big ones, have existed in the Paulinskill probably since the middle or late 19th century, and now that the Columbia Dam is gone, it’s likely some bass move in and out of the Delaware. Trout attract most anglers, however, and although Cowden says the river has some wild ones, he points out that with the improved conditions, only clubs will stock brown trout. That’s the species he suspects will reproduce. “Will it be a big wild trout fishery? I don’t know. I don’t see a lot of evidence of it,” he said, pointing out that hatchery-raised browns “are so removed from wild fish that they don’t reproduce well at all.”
Stockings by the state throughout the Paulinskill’s East and West branches, and on downstream to the confluence with the Delaware, give anglers loads of spring, fall, and winter opportunity. But when Tom Gilmore published his Fly Fisher’s Guide to the Big Apple in 2011, he noted that the Limecrest Quarry no longer infuses the Paulinskill East Branch with cold water releases, negatively impacting the river’s wild trout population. He couldn’t have known about the dam removals, but he noted the presence of limestone springs, hoping that “the wild trout populations will continue to challenge anglers.”
Gilmore couldn’t have known, either, about “a lot of tree planting along the main river and tributaries, controlling invasives that cause a lot of problems in establishing native trees,” which Cowden said the Nature Conservancy and other organizations have done. “Once the natives are established, they’ll probably out-compete the invasives,” he concluded. For a river warmed by farmland, the thickening canopies of native trees blocking sunlight may help remnants of that wild trout population reproduce.
Keep an eye out for Bruce Litton’s book, “The Microlight Quest: Trout, Adventure, Renewal” available soon.
