Trout in the Desert: On Fly Fishing, Human Habits, and the Cold Waters of the Arid Southwest
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Trout in the Desert: On Fly Fishing, Human Habits, and the Cold Waters of the Arid Southwest
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609404864 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wings Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2015 |
| Series: | Heartstreams |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 96 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Trout in the Desert
On Fly Fishing, Human Habits, and the Cold Waters of the Arid Southwest
By Matthew Dickerson, Barbara Whitehead
Wings Press
Copyright © 2015 Matthew DickersonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60940-487-1
CHAPTER 1
Love and Trout in New Mexico
Summer, 1978; I had just turned fifteen. Many of the details — distances and travel times, exact dates, place names — have long since become blurry. Or else they simply weren't important at the time; perhaps I never even learned them in the first place. But the overall impression would last a lifetime.
I was in New Mexico, in the vicinity of Albuquerque where my family was visiting old friends. We took an overnight camping trip somewhere nearby. Surviving in my memory is a dim recollection of the name "Pecos Baldy," and there is a mountain by that name in the state park and wilderness area east of Santa Fe. Though only one of over a dozen 12,000 foot peaks in New Mexico, it is the major one around Santa Fe, so we were probably somewhere near it. But it was not the summit or the altitude I remember. In fact, I never even reached the summit, nor the small lake near the summit. What I remember was a little trout stream that flowed through the alpine meadow past our campsite in a bowl somewhere below the peak. It was there I had my first experience fishing a small, hike-in alpine water.
And I fell in love. I was only fifteen years old, as I already noted, but this was not a passing teenager's crush. It was a deep and abiding love that has proven itself over a lifetime.
Now I know what many readers think, probably with just cause. I was not even halfway through the adventure of being a teenage boy. Years of terror for parents and school teachers alike, and not a time when anything like true love happens. But I was not a terror. Though I hadn't enjoyed freshman year of high school any more than my three unpleasant middle school years, I was not a bad student, and I was certainly not a trouble causer. (At least not a regular one.) I was simply unpopular among my peers. Too bookish. Too good at math. Too interested in the outdoors. Not athletic. This combination of factors actually made me too unpopular to cause much trouble.
I enjoyed math and science and occasional opportunities to learn, but mostly I just endured school with all its bullying and meanness by day-dreaming my way through classes until I could get home. Once out of school, my fifteenth year became a time of wonder and exploration. Hopping off the school bus, I would dump my books inside and take off into the woods behind my house, exploring streams, building stick forts and dams, catching frogs in the swamp. Sometimes I didn't even make it past the stream at the start of our road where the school bus dropped me off; I'd leave my books on a bridge-side boulder and start following the water down into the woods. Or, reversing course, I'd meander my way upstream toward the boggy area between the ridges over the hill from my house. Or I'd just sit out on the old stonewall by the overgrown abandoned orchard across the street watching animals and imagining.
More than anything else, I spent time fishing.
I lived in the northeast of the United States, far from New Mexico, in a rural Massachusetts town of 800 residents. When my family moved onto a dead end road in the late 1960s, there was only one other house: a colonial farmhouse built in 1736 with a barn dating to 1810. We were surrounded by hundreds of acres of woods that had reclaimed old farmland and turned stone walls that once lined planted fields and pastures into mysteries. Why is this stone wall out in the middle of the woods? These were the days before the high-tech development boom of the 1980s hit the town, when some twenty or more houses would make our quiet cul-de-sac much less quiet, and block access to many of the acres of woods I had once roamed freely. Those early high school days were quiet ones, when all the woods were mine to play in.
I had already come to enjoy fishing in the old secluded bass pond over the hill and through the woods behind our house. Early on I mostly caught pan fish on a long cane rod without a reel, using for bait whatever I could dig up or pluck off the trees. Bluegill are not picky. If overturned logs and rocks did not reveal worms, bright red berries would often do the trick. But by the time I entered high school, I had begun to set my sights on more challenging targets: the largemouth bass that haunted those same waters. When my older brother landed a seven-pounder just short of two feet long, I abandoned the cane pole and pan fish altogether and began chasing the big bass with my closed-faced spinning reel and an assortment of Daredevil spoons, rubber worms, and surface plugs of the Hoola Popper and Jitterbug variety. And I was successful, too.
Annual wilderness camping and fishing trips to northern Maine with my father had also started when I was only eight years old. On these trips, catching wild brook trout by trolling streamer flies from a motorized canoe had introduced me both to cold water fisheries and to wilderness camping. Back home in my small Massachusetts town, even the small local trout stream that flowed out of our bass pond, under my road, and through several miles of then-undeveloped land had yielded a few fish for me, giving me the option to pursue trout or bass on those long Saturdays.
It was in the mountains of Colorado and New Mexico, however, far from the familiar streams and ponds of home, that a fifteen-year-old New England boy would first experience fly-fishing, and then a week later get his first taste of fishing a remote alpine stream. My father had a week-and-a-half of business meetings, first up in the mountain town of Granby, Colorado, and then down in Denver. So he made a family vacation out of it, and as a combined birthday present for the three of us, he hired a guide to take my two older brothers and me fishing for a day. It was my first experience with a professional guide. He got us into a mess of trout in the West Branch of the Colorado River. We caught rainbows and cutthroat, and even one small lake trout come upstream from a local reservoir. And all were taken on flies.
I still remember the flies. We used only two patterns all day. One was an Adams. The other was a Hornburg. The guide had tied one of each onto his line, and on his first instructional cast he hooked and landed two fish at the same time, one on each fly. Not a bad introduction to fly-fishing! Even the guide was surprised, and with a grin assured us that the occurrence was rare. But at that point, statistically speaking from own experience, fly-fishing yielded an expected two fish per cast. After that, every free minute of time during that family vacation was spent fishing. If my older brother didn't have a car to drive me down to the Colorado River, I fished the little mountain stream I could walk to from our lodge.
It was a week later that the business part of my father's trip ended and we made our way south to New Mexico to see old friends and do a little camping and possibly some wilderness fishing. The camping trip almost didn't happen for me. The day we were to leave on the hike up into the Pecos area wilderness, I woke with a stomach bug. I lost the previous night's supper, and I couldn't hold down breakfast. I was heartbroken. I probably should not have gone on the trip, and I understood that. But I pleaded and begged and cried and whined. And my father and his friend yielded. My saving grace was that our host had two horses that were to be our pack animals, and given how light I was, I was allowed to ride one of them up the mountain along with our food and camping gear.
As noted, I don't remember many details of the trip. I am not even sure it was in the Pecos Baldy area. I think my older brothers were jealous of me, as they sweated and toiled their way up the mountain while I rode in comfort, plopped on top of a pack on top of a horse. (For the record, since I made it through the first day without losing the contents of my stomach, I was made to walk down the mountain on my own legs.) In any case, atop the packhorses I certainly was in a position to enjoy the beauty of the surrounding mountains.
Then we arrived at the camping site, and set up our tents in a meadow. The moment I had finished my duties I unpacked my little ultra light spinning rod. (I didn't own a fly rod at the time, but I would get one within a couple years.) The stream was one of the narrowest I have ever fished in for trout. I could jump or even straddle it in places. It carved a serpentine path through the soft meadow soil, almost as deep as it was wide, etching out big undercut banks. And it was loaded with little brook trout, ranging from four inches up to veritable monsters that sometimes topped seven inches. I spent all afternoon trying to catch them. We ate several for supper, fresh from the stream, fried in a pan over the fire, delicate and small enough they didn't even really need to be deboned.
At the time, because I was an easterner and because I was as yet unfamiliar with conservation topics such as "invasive species," the irony was lost on me: I was catching eastern brook trout, transplanted into the Rockies where they were apparently thriving. They looked just like the brook trout I caught in New England: dark green on the back, with their bright red and yellow spots on the sides. Perfect in their mystical beauty, but not belonging in that mountain stream in New Mexico.
The little stream behind the lodge where we had been staying in Granby also had eastern brook trout in it. Lots of them. They had heads too big for their bodies — or, rather, bodies too small for their heads, as though they couldn't get enough to eat. I wondered at the time if perhaps they had bred too well, and overpopulated the stream. But the real threat of the brook trout overpopulation wasn't so much to other brook trout as it was to the native cutthroat trout. I would learn many years later that introduced species of trout have become a devastating problem for wild cutthroat trout in the Rocky Mountains. We were encouraged to keep as many brook trout as we could catch to get them out of the streams.
Growing up in eastern Massachusetts, where overfishing and farming had long ago eliminated native brook trout from most streams, I was used to fishing for stocked fish. Both hatchery strains of the indigenous North American char known as brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis) as well as imported European browns (Salmo trutta) were planted annually in the streams of my home town. All the local trout fishing was of this "put-and-take" variety, completely dependent on hatchery support; it was not the presence of introduced brown trout that was the real threat to a healthy self-sustaining population of native brookies, but heavy fishing pressure and the degraded habitat that goes with development.
It was a different story for those streams I visited in the Rockies in the 1970s. They were my earliest experiences fishing for introduced species in what I considered to be "wilderness." At the time, I thought that any presence of trout, and thus any introduction of trout to any water at any time, was a good thing. I would only later learn the dangers of this kind of thinking. Cutthroat trout in the Rockies seem to be under attack from all sides.
There are three primary genera of fish popularly called trout, all within the Salmonidae family. The Salmo genus contains various species and subspecies of European brown trout sometimes known as "true trout." Its only member native to North America are S. salar: Atlantic salmon including their landlocked strain, which are the state fish of Maine. Brown trout are easily bred in hatchery conditions, and can also tolerate lower quality waters where other trout cannot survive, and so they have been stocked successfully all across the continent. On many rivers, streams and lakes — east and west — they have thriving, self-sustaining populations. They also play only a marginal role in this book.
There are many members of char genus, known by its scientific name Salvelinus. Char are distinguished from true trout by having bright spots — yellow or red — on a dark background while trout of the Salmo genus have dark spots and a lighter background. Lake trout (S.Namaycush) and brook trout are the most famous eastern char, with brook trout indigenous from Georgia up through Maine and Quebec. Both arctic char (S. alpinus) and Dolly Varden trout (S. malma) can be found in the northwest, and are abundant in many rivers in Alaska. Rare, diminutive blueback trout (S. alpinus oquassa), a subspecies of arctic char, still survive in a few New England lakes.
There are, however, very few indigenous char in the Rocky Mountains, and none in the southern Rockies. Native and rare bull trout (S. confluentus) do haunt a few of the coldest waters in the northern Rockies as well as the pacific northwest. They are voracious predators, dining on cutthroat trout — and occasionally surprising anglers as huge, three-foot long shadows emerging from deep pools to break a twelve or fourteen-inch meal off a light tippet. For all their rapaciousness, however, this one lone species of char native to the same Rocky Mountain waters as cutthroat trout have co-adapted with their prey. Bull trout and cutthroats have long cohabitated in a small number of the same waters. But neither brook trout nor lake trout are indigenous anywhere in the mountains of the west, and yet both — like the brown trout — breed well in captivity, and have a century-long tradition of stocking throughout the Rockies.
Members of Oncorhynchus, the third and final genus of trout have an evolutionary history tied to ancestors in the Pacific Ocean. The genus includes both rainbow trout (O. mykiss) that are native to the Pacific coast, and the many strains of cutthroat trout (O. clarkii) which at some point in their history made it eastward over the continental divide into the northern Rockies and from there down to the southern Rockies. The genus also includes the rarer Apache trout (O. apache), Gila trout (O. gilae), all five species of Pacific salmon found in North America, and steelhead (an anadromous strain of rainbow trout. )
And what do they have to do with cutthroat trout, in all its various strains indigenous up and down the Rockies? A great deal, as it turns out. Cutthroat have been preyed upon, out-competed, and genetically diluted, throughout their home waters. Lake trout introduced into lakes and rivers of Wyoming and elsewhere in the Rocky Mountains, including the famed namesake river and lake of Yellowstone National Park, have devastated the native population of cutthroat trout through predation. By some reports, each lake trout consumes forty cutthroat trout a year. The problem with rainbow trout is different and in many ways far worse; as members of the same genus they are genetically close enough to the native cutthroat to interbreed with them, diluting and eventually wiping out the entire pure genetic strain of the native fish in waters where rainbow trout have been introduced.
As for brook trout I was catching in Colorado and New Mexico, the problem is competition. Dr. Kurt Fausch, a professor of fish, wildlife, and conservation biology at Colorado State University, has been studying and writing about trout for nearly 40 years. Fausch has noted that trout in general have "been introduced repeatedly almost everywhere that habitat was deemed suitable." Rainbow trout, for example, "are among the most widely introduced fish species in the world" having been stocked in ninety-seven countries, while brook trout are the second most widely introduced salmonid, having been stocked in at least forty-nine countries as of 2008. Having caught brook trout in the Pyrenees of Spain, I can attest to this. And, as noted above, I grew up as one of those people with the romantic notion that more trout in more water is always better. For sixty-five years from 1898 until 1963, the year I was born, between one and fifteen million brook trout were stocked in Colorado per year! And if I had been alive then, I would have been cheering on the stocking. The problem is that these brook trout eventually displaced the native cutthroats by out-competing them. As Fausch explains, brook trout "are now considered a major factor in the decline of most of the fourteen subspecies of cutthroat trout in the interior West. This is especially true for three cutthroat subspecies at the southern end of the species' range in Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico."
Oddly enough, the same thing was happening the southern Appalachians, except brook trout were the victims: the native fish being displaced by stocked rainbow trout. One of the ironies is that eastern brook trout may actually be better adapted for some streams in the Rockies than are the native cutthroat, while western rainbows are better adapted for the southern Appalachians where brook trout are native. One important factor is spawning time. Rainbow trout and cutthroat trout spawn in the spring. Brook trout spawn in the fall. Fausch explains that rainbow trout are therefore better adapted to the rainy winters — and resulting winter floods — in the southern Appalachians because that's what occurs in their native range in the Pacific northwest. Brook trout, by contrast, evolved with spring snowmelt floods, after their young have emerged. Winter floods scour brook trout eggs from the gravel, but rainbow trout spawn in spring, so none of their eggs are present in winter. Conversely, cutthroat trout at the southern end of their range in Colorado and New Mexico must contend with summer snowmelt runoff that can wash away their fry, whereas brook trout fry are larger by then and can handle it. Brook trout are thus pre-adapted for Colorado streams, as are rainbows for Georgia mountain streams.
On that first trip to New Mexico, I probably did not know a cutthroat trout from a rainbow trout. I certainly would not have known a greenback cutthroat from a westslope cutthroat from a Yellowstone cutthroat. What I thought at the time was how beautiful and wild and scenic — and, well, natural — the setting was in the mountains east of Santa Fe. And it was all of those things. Even natural, in a way. What I didn't know was that the most enjoyable part of it for me, catching those "wild" brook trout, was the least natural part.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Trout in the Desert by Matthew Dickerson, Barbara Whitehead. Copyright © 2015 Matthew Dickerson. Excerpted by permission of Wings Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Prologue: Just a Lot of Hot Air,1. Love and Trout in New Mexico,
2. From the Mountains to the Desert,
3. Texas and a Season for Trout,
4. Gila Trout,
Epilogue,
Acknowledgments,
About the Author,