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The Gila Trout

More Than Just A Fish

By Craig Springer

Found in: | Outside | Fishing | Fly Fishing |

Fishing for Gila Trout

The seasons for Gila trout vary, depending on where you fish. Two things are certain, however. You’ll need are a high-clearance vehicle and a willingness to take off some boot tread. Even the most accessible wild Gila trout population is 25 rough miles from pavement. Visit the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish online (wildlife.state.nm.us), where you can get a Gila Trout Permit (free).

Morning light makes pictures for our occupation, as it breaks over the canyon walls. This is a land of stark contrasts: gnarled alligator juniper and spare grasses stud the friable south-facing rocky hillsides. The slopes on the other side are wetter, forested with cinnamon-yellow ponderosa pine that smell of vanilla. The ground is blackened by a recent forest fire. The ashen hulls of burnt deadfalls lie like frozen ghosts facing upward, watching the passing moon. A thin riparian ribbon bisects the bottoms, curling with the creek. Gila trout - colored with a touch of lemon like the light that peeks over the ridgeline - swim here.

I'm in the Aldo Leopold Wilderness with my wife and children, in what seems like a place as remote as the moon. The gelid creek water comes off the Continental Divide in the Black Range flowing westward intending to go to the Sea of Cortez. But it will never make it. Instead, what doesn't evaporate will irrigate chile fields in Virden, or make cotton grow in Pima.

But for now, in this canyon bottom this new water freshly off the high mountains courses around our calves. The grit of gravels in my shoes feels good. I have this morning a singular focus, and that is to catch a Gila trout, a species that swims nowhere else in the world, but in the headwater streams of the Gila River.

I pay out some line on my fly rod, and come to my knees where the creek comes to a high canyon wall. The creek is small, the water clear like clean window glass - clear enough to see five feet deep. And these trout recognize a predator when they see one, so I have to hide. I have to inch forward, low to the ground, concealing myself as I can by willow sprigs. A school of Sonoran suckers are invisible, save for their silent shadows over a cobbled strait of stream. They seem oblivious to my being. That bodes well for me. The Gila trout that lie in the shade of tree roots near the throat of a riffle probably don't know I'm here either. They wait there, facing upstream for the food they eat to come to them.

Adrenalin squirts into my bloodstream with the possibilities. My senses heighten. My fly line unfurls in a sinuous curl. A fly glides on glass by the roots. In a spot of time, a Gila trout reveals itself from the shade; with a tilt and a dart, it smacks the fake grasshopper.

This moment that a Gila trout rises is only ephemeral, but passing moments rightly made become never-ending. This moment of catching my first-ever Gila trout has a Zen-like quality. It's a clarifying as if it unfolds, while I look on at myself from a distance. In a matter of a few seconds, I wrest from the deep pool a beautiful yellow trout flecked with pepper-spots over its back and upper flanks. Parr marks run the length of the fish, as does a faint rosy-pink band not unlike the pink on the bottom of curded clouds that hang overhead in this first light of day.

This Gila trout that I hold is a prize, but not for its size. This little fish, maybe 10 inches long, carries with it a lexis from the past, a language expressed in how it survives in such a harsh place.

These trout are left over from another time. Coiled in their DNA are provisions to make a living in spare water. They can survive in isolated pools with no flow, save for the cienegas that seep through the cobbles. These trout own a temperament to make a living in what nature hurls at them. Scientists reason that ancestral Gila trout ascended the Gila River from the Sea of Cortez a good long time ago. They share the yellow skin of the Apache trout in Arizona, and the Mexican golden trout south of the border. The Gila trout is native only to the Gila River basin.

The names we give to places and things, fish included, tell a story of the past. The names on maps are vignettes of our encounters with the land. The Gila region, and the Gila trout itself are no exception. The local lexicon speaks to a harsh existence: Deadman and Massacre canyons; Rainy Mesa, Raw Meat Creek, Hells Hole, Hard Scrabble Canyon, Loco Mountain. This place where Gila trout live is rugged, the lay of the land formidable. Defiant Apaches held on here for so long, aided by the lay of the land. The word "Gila" relates to the lay of the land - in Apache, it's "tsihl" or "dzil," meaning "mountain."

The Gila trout has been known for centuries. Beaver trapper, James Ohio Pattie, one of the first writers of English to traverse this remote place made mention of fish - most likely Gila trout - in his personal narrative. Pattie came through New Mexico in the early 1820s, passing through Santa Fe, and then southward and onto California. He wrote of his 1824 experience at the confluence of the West and Middle forks of the Gila River near the site of the Cliff Dwellings National Monument.

"On the morning of 13th [December] we started early, and crossed the river Helay, here a beautiful clear stream about thirty yards in width, running over a rocky bottom and filled with fish. We found here a boiling spring so near the main stream, that the fish caught in one might be thrown into the other without leaving the spot where it was taken. In six minutes it would be thoroughly cooked."

The boiling spring is still there, but the Gila trout retreated to the headwaters in the face of nonnative fishes.

The Gila trout wasn't formally recognized by science as species until 1950, 125 years after trapper Pattie cooked them in a hot spring. But conservationists early on in New Mexico's history knew that the Gila trout was distinct, and the New Mexico Game and Fish Department attempted to culture them in the 1920s at a small hatchery deep in the Gila National Forest. Remaining pure Gila trout populations in five streams were closed to fishing for about 50 years. Only in 2008 after the fish's range was significantly expanded, were they again available to catch. They remain, however, one of the rarest trout in the world.

So, this 10-inch yellow trout, wriggling in my hands, is more than just a fish. I hold an artifact of natural history. From near extinction to outwitting one with a fly rod seems a paradox. But these opposites clarify one another.

Craig Springerwrites from Santa Fe County, N.M.