By Diana Rupp
I was fishing a lovely little wilderness stream high in the Rocky Mountains, narrow enough to wade across in just half a dozen steps, its shallow riffles alternating with dark pools shaded by large, twisted trees. It was midsummer, and thick, tangled vegetation overhung both banks and made it difficult to cast a fly line without hooking the fly on a branch or bush.
The only option was to stand directly downstream from one of the pools and roll-cast as carefully as possible into the quiet water. So that’s what I did, letting the dry fly touch down lightly near the head of the pool, just like a real insect, I hoped.
The calm water erupted into chaos as a trout’s head smashed through the water’s surface. I brought the line tight and felt the familiar thrilling tug as the rod bent hard and the fish raced across the hole.
When the fish began to tire and I was able to steer it close and scoop it into my net, I saw the distinctive black spots and red slash on the gill plate, and knew this fish was what I had hiked several hours into this remote drainage to catch—a native Colorado River cutthroat trout.
Learn how to identify different species of trout. Image (c) Trail’s End Media
Several weeks before, while in Pennsylvania visiting family, I had hiked up an old logging road to a spot where another little wilderness creek twisted and splashed its way between two ridgelines. There, I caught and released a feisty, 6-inch wild brook trout, a colorful fish native to the Appalachians of the Eastern U.S.
The cutthroat of the West and the brook trout of the East are two of three trout species native to North America. The third is the rainbow trout, which was historically found only along the West Coast. Today, rainbow trout have been transplanted and stocked in waters all over the country—and the world. Brown trout were imported to the USA from Germany in the late 1800s, and have been stocked nearly everywhere, including in the native waters of the brook trout, where they often crowd out the original inhabitants. For their part, brook trout have been widely transplanted to streams in the West, where they compete with native cutthroat trout for habitat and food.
Because for so many decades anglers and fish managers have been moving and transplanting various trout species, native trout today mostly only exist in small portions of their historic ranges, mostly in small headwater creeks. They’ve been replaced, in most places, by stocked trout. Native trout populations have also declined due to other reasons, including habitat loss, pollution, and overfishing, but the largest factor has been the introduction of non-native trout, which often out-compete native species and sometimes even hybridize with the original fish.
In recent years, however, appreciation of the importance of native trout species has been growing. State and federal agencies, including the National Forest Service and National Park Service, and conservation groups such as Trout Unlimited, have been leading the charge to re-establish native trout to their historic ranges.
Why do native trout matter? If you’ve ever cast a fly into a remote mountain stream and connected with a colorful, healthy fish perfectly adapted to its environment, you know the answer. Native trout are particularly well adapted to their home watersheds, possessing instincts to survive and reproduce that are superior to most hatchery-raised trout, which tend to have low survival rates and must be restocked frequently. Native trout that establish stable, self-sustaining populations have the time and resources to grow large. Since they are so well-adapted to their rivers, being born and raised there, native trout are usually more challenging to catch. Above all, they are an important way of restoring balance to an ecosystem; a stream with a thriving population of native trout is a healthy waterway.
Some rivers, of course, either never had native trout or can no longer support them, so stocked and introduced trout serve an important purpose in many places. A lot of anglers are just happy to catch a trout—any trout. But others have come to appreciate how special native and wild trout are, so where conditions allow, removing stocked trout in favor of putting native trout species back where they belong makes a lot of sense.
Projects to restore native trout span the continent. These include efforts to restore native brook trout to places like Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee and North Carolina. The National Park Service has removed rainbow trout from about 40 miles of the park’s river system, making room for the native brook trout to swim once again in their ancestral waters, where anglers eagerly hike up tree-shaded trails to fish for them.
In New England, efforts are focusing on a special sea-run variety of brook trout called “salters.” These fish can get big: famous Massachusetts statesman Daniel Webster caught a salter in 1827 that weighed 14.5 pounds. Since then, these fish have lost much of their habitat due to dams and development, but they can still be caught in some coastal streams in Maine and Massachusetts.
Many restoration projects revolve around the native trout of the West. Cutthroats are the most diverse trout species in North America. Because of the rugged mountain topography where they live, cutthroat trout were historically isolated into specific drainages, which gave rise to some 14 different subspecies.
In Colorado, for example, there at least three major varieties of cutthroats: the Colorado River cutthroat, native to the Colorado River drainage; the Rio Grande cutthroat, native to the Rio Grande River and its tributaries; and the greenback cutthroat, which used to swim throughout the South Platte drainage, which is now the highly developed Front Range. The greenback cutthroat is currently being restored to the headwaters of the Cache la Poudre River as a result of an ambitious partnership involving Trout Unlimited and state and federal agencies.
The largest of all subspecies of cutthroat trout, the Lahontan cutthroat of Nevada, can grow to outsize proportions. Like other cutthroats, this trout declined for a variety of reasons: displacement by non-native brook trout, hybridization with rainbow trout, and loss of habitat. However, as a result of extensive restoration efforts, the Lahontan still swims in a few of its native waters, including the famous Pyramid Lake in Nevada, a coveted destination for fishermen seeking to hook one of these legendary trout. The record Lahontan cutthroat, caught in this lake, weighed an incredible 41 pounds.
Some regions are encouraging recognition of the value of native trout and helping fund restorations with “native trout challenges,” which can be fun activities for adventurous traveling anglers. The Western Native Trout Challenge, for example, invites anglers to catch 18 different native trout in each of the 12 participating western states. The bulk of the $25 program registration fee goes toward conservation efforts for these fish, and anglers receive a certificate and a hat or medallion for reaching various levels of the challenge.
Another example is Wyoming’s “Cutt Slam.” The Wyoming Game & Fish Department awards anglers who provide documentation of catching each of Wyoming’s four native cutthroat trout (Yellowstone, Snake River, Colorado River, and Bonneville) with a personalized certificate and medallion.
These programs help fuel angler interest in native trout, which is important because it is fishermen who primarily foot the bill for fish conservation in the U.S. As such, we play a crucial role in the restoration of native trout. Whether it’s a 6-inch brook trout, a 14-pound salter, or a 40-pound Lahontan cutthroat, catching a trout in its native waters, in the same stream where its ancestors swum for centuries, is a special treat for the true angler.
Main image (c) Trail’s End Media
