Utah Natives
We’ve extolled the virtues of fishing small waters for wild and native fish before and it should go as no surprise that when Collin and I went out West this summer we set aside some time to fish for high altitude native fish. Now, as fun as this sort of thing is to us species hunters, others don’t quite see the appeal. Our buddy Adam with Blue Line Flies is one such person. He is what I refer to as a “trophy hunter”, someone who is out looking for big fish that generally eat big flies. He is a master at throwing aggressive sinking lines with articulated streamers in order to catch his targets. So we need to applaud Adam for putting aside his usual sensibilities to fish small streams for small fish with Collin and I for a day. And find those small wild fish we did!
We started out the trip fishing close to Adam’s home in Salt Lake. We drove up a narrow and steep gorge driving alongside a miniscule creek that could be spanned by a decent jump in many spots. Beginning just before sunrise, we actually had our first Bonneville cutthroat in hand before the sunlight pierced the morning mist. These little natives were spooky but eager to eat a properly presented fly if the angler could just get into position before scaring the fish. We were using a four weight but would have been much better off fishing my sub-six foot glass 1 weight rod that was safely tucked away in north Georgia, oh well! For the next hour and a half or so we bushwhacked and followed the meandering trails alongside the stream. Though we caught most of our quarry on blind casts we did get to throw some bugs at free-rising fish in some of the larger pools.
Using elk hair caddis, small Chubby Chernobyl’s and a nymph (tied by the late, great Chuck Kraft) called a CK, we found fish feeding happily both on top and sub-surface. The average cutties were about five to six inches long but we actually saw some small stream monsters that almost pushed double digit inches! To someone like Adam, calling those fish “monsters” probably seems rather anticlimactic. Keep our surroundings in mind though. We were somewhere in the vicinity of 6,000 feet of elevation in a creek hardly deep enough to get your thighs wet in most holes. Those ten inch fish we saw were the apex aquatic predators in their modest environs. Luckily we even managed to fool a pair of those larger fish into eating!
I had already landed three smaller fish and was content with fishing just a few more minutes at our first stream. As Collin had landed a few himself, I’m confident he felt similarly. I had stolen the rod back from him after his most recent catch and went to work fishing a medium size tailout with a cut bank 20 feet away from me on the far side of the run. I believe I made two casts with my hopper dropper when a loud ‘pop’ erupted nearby my fly and the bony jaw of a large cutthroat engulfed my fly! This fish was clearly much larger than our previous catches and I put the pressure on her to land the fish quickly. Collin jumped to the situation and had the fish ‘netted’ in my hat in no time flat. My best Bonneville Cutthroat for sure, as large as nearly any fish we small in this small stream, she stretched about 10 inches or so. A real small-water gem!
Just a few moments later we had dropped downstream again and Collin found himself fishing a ‘tub’ maybe 12 feet long but deeper than most of the surrounding water. One or two drifts and Collin nailed a big fish for himself! As would develop to be a saying for the weekend, Adam joked that the fish was “identical to mine… only slightly larger”. From my perspective the fish truly were identical in size! I put Collin’s fish in my hat, as is also a habit of ours, while keeping the fish submerged and happy. We snapped some great photos and pretty much decided to leave as we couldn’t reasonably expect to top the catches we had already made. Both of us had fish of 10+ inches and multiple smaller fish as well. With success in hand, we backtracked to Adam’s to pick up the raft and then head North again.
We made a last minute decision to go after some Bear River Cutthroat which were not far out of our route up to Idaho. As we understand it, the Bear River Cutthroat are a subspecies (of Bonnevilles) of a subspecies (cutthroat in general). We knew we would be fishing potentially even smaller water for these fish. We fished the Logan river briefly before hopping into some of its tributaries to look for the purest strain of the localized subspecies. This little fork reminded me strongly of the brook trout streams in the Southeast. Small and heavily overgrown, the water was icy cold. The creek was made up of plunge pools and tiny beaver ponds and the fish were generally distributed somewhat evenly throughout. We fished at times through high grasses where we forced to bow-and-arrow through the high stalks. We picked up a few fish in and around deeper water wherever we could find it. These fish were feeding happily on hoppers and ants so we met this hatch with small foam topwater patterns. We all caught a few and our best fish probably went 8 1/2 inches or slightly larger. This fish was blessedly stupid and I believe it ate my hopper six times before I finally solidly connected with it! This was close quarters fishing too, I was less than eight feet from the rising fish and almost completely unable to get a good hookset as I was presenting downstream to the fish and the overhanging branches prevented me from lifting the rod too high. After my first few failures though the fish took the fly well enough for my hook to find purchase, a beautiful Bear River Cutthroat in hand! As a side note, these fish look very very similar to their Bonneville cousins. We noted that the Bear River’s colors and spot pattern were slightly different and their bellies were all less dusky than the Bonneville’s.
We spent a great few hours exploring small streams for these unique, native fish. Throwing dry flies in remote blue lines is truly one of my favorite things to do. Collin and I both caught some great fish and Adam even got in on the action for the Bear Rivers to add to his species count (or maybe just to avoid the boredom of waiting in the truck!). Our trip had started off well and already had us thinking about a future trip to complete the Utah Cutthroat Slam. We found ourselves en route to Idaho to the famous South Fork of the Snake to see if we could find some big fish out of far larger water.
Resources:
If you are interested in pursuing these native fish we encourage you to click here to learn about the various cutthroat species in Utah as well as a general guide on where to fish. Like other states, the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources has put together their version of a Cutthroat slam which aids in awareness for these native species and the money raised through the program will be used to help fund native cutthroat trout conservation projects across the state.