California’s spring-run Chinook salmon were already in the midst of a population crash before the Park fire exploded into the state’s fourth-largest wildfire in history. Biologists now worry the fire could push the fish closer to extinction by scorching forests along creeks that provide critical spawning habitat. The wildfire has been burning through the upper Mill and Deer Creek watersheds, threatening forested canyons that provide some of last intact spawning habitat for spring-run Chinook salmon. … The two creeks are considered vital strongholds for federally threatened spring-run Chinook salmon, which have suffered long-term declines because of water diversions, dams that have blocked them from reaching spawning grounds, and increasingly severe droughts worsened by climate change.

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