Chadd VanZanten on what cutthroat trout mean to him
In The Habit of Rivers, Ted Leeson confesses that he prefers fly fishing to all other forms of fishing, and trout to all other species of fish.
And I feel exactly the same way.
Leeson ranks trout over suckers, catfish, whitefish, and grayling, and he even places trout above steelhead and salmon. He says, “I prefer to fish trout, in part, because they take artificial flies readily … and I like to fly fish, in part, because it is the way you catch trout.”
Within the trout family, Leeson outlines his sub-hierarchy of choiceness. Unsurprisingly, brown trout top the list. Rainbows come next, and after them are the brook trout.
Cutthroats are at the bottom of the list. Oncorhynchus clarkii , the signature salmonid of the western United States, are least desired.
Trout are Leeson’s first choice among all fish, which means the cutthroat are the “worst of the best,” but really? Cutthroats last?
I can understand Leeson’s penchant for brown trout. They’re tough, canny, and under the right circumstances brawny, with the irresistibly baleful comportment of the wolf or monitor lizard. They are the true trout, and even their narrative is bold and dominant—everyone knows that the legendary unhookable old lunker allegedly lurking under a sunken log in the local swimming hole is a Loch Lomond brown. And the spread of Salmo trutta from Europe and Asia to practically the entire rest of the planet seems less anthropogenic and more like an act of will by the trout themselves.
But cutts at the bottom?
Cutthroats are at the top of my list, and in the spirit of angling comradeship and in deference to Leeson’s profound talent as a writer, I’ll overlook the slight. Leeson himself points out that each angler’s most-wanted list is not only subjective, but also arbitrary, since our choices are usually just reflections of our experience and backgrounds.
This is certainly true in my case—I value cutthroat trout over the others because when I took up fly-fishing I happened to live in the Bear River watershed of Northern Utah and Southern Idaho, where cutthroats are indigenous, self-sustaining, and genetically pure.
In the Bear River, cutthroats are not just natives, they’re aboriginals.
If you find it petty to apply a DNA test before bestowing approval upon a captured fish, I won’t argue with you. It seems discriminatory and even fascistic. However, it’s not a matter of intrinsic genetic superiority. It’s more about connection. Catching one fish, any fish, and feeling the throb of it in the flex of a fishing rod, is a way for anglers to connect with all fish. In the same manner, capturing the native fish of a specific river is a way to connect with its entire biome and natural history. A flyline that connects you to a Bear River cutthroat also connects you to the Great Basin’s earliest epochs. They’re like potsherds or arrowheads, but vastly older. A Bear River cutthroat trout is an artifact fifty times older than Stonehenge.
The Bear River cutthroat trout narrative is likewise compelling. In prehistory, as the cutts roamed the mighty fluvial waterworks of the Bear River, they grew to their full measure and choked the tributaries with their spawning runs; the Shoshone had only to walk up to the banks and take what fish they needed. Then came the white settlers in the 1850s, and their overharvesting drove the Bear River cutts to the edge of extirpation. The cutthroats hung on, but their numbers were woefully impacted. In the late 1800s and early 1900s came dams and irrigation, grazing, timber harvest, non-native species introductions, and continued overharvesting. Somehow, the cutts held on again.
Other cutthroat strains in other drainages have suffered similar indignity. Everywhere in the west, cutthroat subspecies are battered and squeezed. Lahontan cutthroats, once considered extinct, were rediscovered only by accident and now inhabit a miniscule fraction of their native range. The greenback cutthroat, the aboriginal trout of the Platte River, is holed up in a single stream in Colorado. The yellowfin and Alvord strains were not even that fortunate and are gone now for good, mostly due to hybridization with rainbow trout.
The outlook for cutthroat trout is slightly better in the Bear River, which originates at the northern tip of the High Uintah in eastern Utah, flows north through extreme western Wyoming and into the southeastern corner of Idaho, hooks south like a shepherd’s crook, and finally winds back into Utah at its northernmost border before draining into the briny Great Salt Lake. The Bear may once have thundered along at 10,000 cubic feet per second, fed by a fertile network of high-country second- and third-order tributaries and spring inputs. It’s still the largest river in North America that withholds its flow from any ocean, and it contributes more water to the Great Salt Lake than all other inputs combined, but today the Bear is dammed a dozen times, encroached by agriculture, and heavily diverted; many of its tributaries are completely de-watered by annual irrigation claims. The Bear River is an impressive system nevertheless, but it’s a shadow of its former greatness, and the cutthroat trout population there subsists as a remnant of a remnant, the ghost of a ghost.
And that is the allure. That’s the hook in their story.
The Bear River cutthroat trout is not re-discovered, re-introduced, or genetically re-assembled. They are real. Their antecedents are the primordial salmonids that rose up from the Pacific Ocean and probed westward into the Snake and Columbia drainages over the course of perhaps 5 million years. Cutthroat trout migrated into the Rockies and the Great Basin and then over the continental divide. Think about that. Slowly they evolved, never speciating completely but changing enough so that they are now sorted by fish biologists into many subspecies.
And when the glaciers and Lake Bonneville receded, the cutthroats stayed, flourishing in the most arid country on the continent that can still harbor trout.
And so despite its fallen condition, the Bear River cutthroat has never been entirely broken. They’ve maintained an uninterrupted occupancy of their natal drainage. They are the forest spirits of some ancient cycle of legends: elusive, rarely glimpsed, displaced by modernity.
When you bring a 16-inch cutthroat up from the dark-blue of a bend in a freestone tributary of the Bear River, you sense their incredible potential. If only the Bear could be unleashed again, if only it could be given back to the cutthroats, what a spectacle that would be.
Every Bear River fly angler dreams of this.
When I hike into the Wind Rivers of Wyoming, I pack up my reverence for the cutthroat and take it with me. The cutthroats there are not the Bear River strain, of course. Before the fish-stocking heyday of the late 1800s and early 1900s, only a small fraction of the streams and lakes in the Wind Rivers contained any trout at all, and they were all the Colorado River strain. These were displaced or hybridized in the 1930s by the 2.5 million non-native trout said to have been stocked by Finis Mitchell, an unemployed railroad worker who ran a fishing camp and guiding service at Mud Lake in the Big Sandy Openings.
Nowadays the best one can say is that the lakes and streams of the Wind Rivers do indeed contain cutthroat trout. Untangling their genetic make-up, however, would be like separating a bowl of chili into its original ingredients.
In other words, Wind Rivers cutthroats are mongrels.
But they are hefty mongrels and there are a lot of them. They’re also naturalized and self-sustaining, and catching them is excessively satisfying. Nothing is lost. Nothing is diminished by their dubious heritage. And their appeal has less to do with their size and numbers than you might think. It’s more about what the fish have become. The Wind Rivers is so remote and left-alone, the cutts there have reverted to behaviours they must have possessed before the advent of humans and the artificial fly. Unlike the Bear River cutthroat, who are in many ways strangers to their own waters, the Wind Rivers cutthroats have gone native in waterways where there were no cutthroats before, devolving into primitive versions of themselves, growing wild and unjaded by the inexorable bother of anglers.
They are the cutthroats that we cutthroat anglers wish cutthroats to be.
The fearlessness of unpressured cutthroat in a backcountry stream may surprise you at first. They’re not the strongest or meanest of the trout; they’re almost the opposite, and so you assume they’ll be diffident and skittish. Instead, in the backcountry, the cutthroat move to a dry fly languidly, like a beautiful woman knowingly undressing before a window. Instead of a furtive or lightning-fast strike, you see a backcountry cutthroat’s every motion, from the sideways shift across the drift and the slow tail-wag of the rise, to the offhanded take and the petulant head-jerk that often follows.
It helps that wild cutthroat are found in transparent water. This makes them easy to see, even from long distances. And because seeing the trout so clearly as it eats a dry fly is for many fly anglers the point of casting a dry in the first place, setting the hook on a wilderness cuttie may begin to seem superfluous. It may also require some getting used to—there’s a delay, a sleepiness, to the backcountry cutthroat dry-fly hookset, especially if the fish is large. Lift the rod tip assertively, but act like you’re maybe not very concerned about how it turns out. Fly casual.
If the Wind River cutthroat was worthy of scientific study or preservation, fishing regulations (or your own ethical code) might prohibit you from harvesting them. But if you’re inclined to keep and eat fish, doing so in the Winds will not put a dent in their self-propagating numbers, nor will it interfere with any conservation efforts. On my last trip to the Winds, my son Klaus and I caught and killed two cutthroats, each about fifteen inches long. We’d brought a small bag of masa for making corn tortillas. Klaus added a little water and patted the masa dough flat in his hands. We cooked the tortillas on a hot rock and spread the cutts over the coals of our campfire. Then we squirted the fish with freshly sliced limes, wrapped it in the tortillas, and ate cutthroat tacos, scattering their genetic material yet farther from their multi-varied origins.
These backcountry mongrels, descended from intermixed cutthroat subspecies, were planted too hastily for the philosophy of conservation or the science of ecology to catch up, and so although they lack the continuous habitation of a native cutthroat strain, they are nevertheless a remarkable wild population, perhaps the seed of a new aboriginal species that future fish biologists will puzzle over after our civilization has been gone for a few hundred millennia.
Until then, the Wind Rivers cutts provide such a vivid picture of what their shooed-away and genetically blurred-out ancestors were like originally, they again furnish that strong sense of connection, not just to a fish species, but to a remote place and time. They are the artifact of cutthroats as they were and what we dream they might be again. Not an artifact excavated from the ground, but one instead found in clear water, and not an artifact made of stone, but alive.
If you have enjoyed this piece then be sure to check out Chadd's book On Flyfishing The Northern Rockies HERE
