Review by Hal Walter
Wildlife – June 1994 – Colorado Central Magazine
Cutthroat – Native Trout of the West
by Patrick C. Trotter
Published in 1987 by University Press of Colorado
0-87081-166-5 (paper)
ISBN: 0-87081-160-6 (cloth)
I remember as a boy of 10 hooking with a black woolly worm behind a casting bubble in Nevada’s Pyramid Lake. After what seemed an interminable battle, I beached the 18-inch fish and, with shaky hands, unhooked it in the sand and briefly admired the orange slashes under its throat, its deep silvery sides. I walked back to the water, set the fish free and watched it swim back into the alkaline depths of that mysterious Great Basin lake which has no outlet.
That boyhood memory never would have swum to the surface had I not read Patrick Trotter’s Cutthroat: Native Trout of the West. The book outlines 14 subspecies of Salmo clarki and the status of each. It also contains eight striking color plates of cutthroat subspecies from paintings by Bob Friedli.
We call this area we inhabit Colorado Central, but from a fish historian’s point of view, it might have been “Cutthroat Central.” Trotter believes the area to be a hub that was key to the evolution of several subspecies of this trout.
When early explorers visited this area, they found the smallish Greenback cutthroat in all tributaries of the Arkansas and South Platte. The Colorado River cutthroat swam that river’s tributaries on the western flanks of the Sawatch. The Rio Grande cutthroat inhabited that river’s basin perhaps as far south as Chihuahua, Mexico.
In the late 1800s the now-extinct Yellowfin cutthroat grew to great sizes in Twin Lakes near Leadville, although the author is uncertain as to whether the fish was actually native to the moraine-dammed lakes or stocked there from another drainage. It also appears that Yellowfins were raised for a short time in the Leadville National Fish Hatchery.
Trotter’s theory is that all of these strains evolved from the large-spotted ancestral cutthroat of the Green and Colorado River drainages. At a time of high water the fish swam into the Arkansas system via Fremont Pass, elevation 11,115 feet, or Tennessee, 10,424. The Greenback migrated from the Arkansas to the Platte River drainage via Trout Creek Pass (how ironic the name), 9,346. Other cutthroats slithered over Poncha Pass, 9,010, and became the Rio Grande River’s namesake strain. Those that remained on the Western Slope became the Colorado River strain.
It’s a small world, after all — though steep in places.
TODAY GENETICALLY PURE STRAINS of cutthroats native to this area exist only in a few isolated fisheries. The Greenback inhabits Cascade Creek, a tributary of the Huerfano River on the northeast flanks of the Mount Blanca massif. The Rio Grande cutthroat lives in isolated creeks on private land in the San Luis Valley. Some pure Colorado River cutthroats may still swim the creek above Clinton Reservoir on Climax Molybdenum property.
Most of us are more familiar with the generic “native” cutthroat in the lakes and streams of Central Colorado.
Some places I’ve been intimate with these fish: Lake Claire in the morning shadows of Mounts Harvard and Columbia; Rito Alto Creek, which ends in a series of irrigation ditches in the San Luis Valley; Goodwin Lake, tucked away behind the now defunct “Mudcliff” ski area, and Little Sand Creek Lake, whose outlet pours along the northern edge of the Great Sand Dunes National Monument.
According to area fish expert Del Canty of Leadville, the cutthroats in our local waters are a genetic hodgepodge resulting from stocking and interbreeding with other strains such as the Yellowstone cutthroat. So our native trout are not really native at all.
If Cutthroat has any overwhelming message, perhaps it is the swift “cutthroat” manner in which modern man has unwittingly — but effectively — genetically altered these native fish of the Mountain West. In 100 years we’ve radically altered what it took millions of years to create. The book is a great lesson for anyone interested in mankind’s role in evolution, as well as a good read for those who have fished for these beautiful trout.
— Hal Walter
