Chasing native Colorado trout with Mark Cole

0:00This is Daniel Galhardo and you're listening to the Tenkara Cast, a podcast about the simple Japanese method of fly-fishing, Tenkara. In the Tenkara Cast we'll be sharing information on techniques, history, philosophy, and Tenkara stories from anglers all over the world. This podcast is brought to you by Tenkara USA, introducing Tenkara outside of Japan since 2009. It's only possible we create content such as this podcast and videos because of your support. So we thank you so very much for purchasing Tenkara USA Rods, Lines and Flies. I hope you enjoy learning more about the simple method of fly fishing. So today I have the pleasure to sit down with Mark Cole, a good friend of mine, somebody who's got a lot of experience in fly fishing and tenkara and some really unique experiences to share with us in regards to chasing native Colorado trout as well. And Mark will share a little bit with us his background and his stories and his knowledge about Colorado trout in particular.

1:06I'm really excited about this, so thanks for tuning in. Mark, welcome to the office here. Well, thank you, Daniel. It's a pleasure and an honor to be here today. Yeah, I'm happy that you made the drive. You just drove. How long did it take you to get here to Boulder? It took about three hours today because of the snowy conditions on the roads and the construction that's going on at Idaho Springs and elsewhere along the route. Yeah, so you just drove from Leadville, and I think for a couple of weeks we forgot that winter is here because it's being warm. I'm imagining not as warm up there, but somewhat warm. It has been spring-like conditions in Leadville the last, well, last three or four weeks. We've had highs in the mid-40s through yesterday, and today it'll only get up to about 36, I think. Yeah, that's amazing. I was actually fishing South Boulder Creek here yesterday in a T-shirt. Looking at the weather forecast, at the weather report on the news, I can believe that.

2:11And what about you? Have you been fishing in a T-shirt in Leadville recently? No. Usually my fishing in Leadville ends sometime in November because typical year, everything will be frozen over where I normally fish. And this year, you could reach open water if you don't mind walking out on the ice shelves, which is a little dangerous. I've been on ice shelves fishing in the past when they have broken off. And the interesting part was the number of fish that escaped out into the main stream as that ice shelf sunk into the water. They're totally okay just hanging below the ice shelf by the moment it breaks through and then they run away. Their ceiling was coming down on them and they decided to get out of Dodge and that's what they were doing. And since the topic of today's conversation is the Colorado native trout, what kind of fish are those?

3:16They usually dart from below the ice where you fish. Well, the last time this happened to me, it was probably a mixture of Colorado River cutthroats and some brook trout. They were moving pretty fast, and it was difficult to tell. But in that section of stream, I've caught both species. So since you mentioned brook trout, I mean, let's talk a little bit, just give our listeners a little bit of a background on, you know, just kind of the general, you know, trout that we're mostly familiar with. So I think a lot of people are either catching rainbows or they're catching browns or brook trout. I think those are probably the three main fish. Those are the main fish that most people fish for in Colorado. and where I live in Leadville, not far from the most recent gold medal water in Colorado, the Arkansas River. It's the longest gold medal stretch of stream that exists.

4:19this. That's a whole other topic for discussion is the evolution of the Arkansas River from a essentially a dump for the mine tailings in Colorado or in California Gulch and how the EPA and other state and federal agencies have cleaned up that river to the point where the river now is the longest stretch of gold medal waters in the state of Colorado. Before the cleanup occurred, the trout that lived in that section of the Arkansas only survived for about three years. then the cadmium and other heavy metals build up to where it was toxic to the fish and so it was not a very good fishery but once the waters have been cleaned up we have gold metal status now which is a remarkable turnaround from what that the stream used to be and i'm not sure if uh gold metal i mean i think it's probably you know it It gives all of our listeners a good indication it's really good fishing water, but I'm not sure if it's a designation that's throughout the country.

5:44Can you give us a little bit of an overview of what means gold medal? I can't give you the technical means, but it's a certain number of fish over 14 inches per hectare or mile of river, and I don't remember exactly what those specifications are. So just to go back a little bit, We started talking a little bit about the rainbows and browns and brooks. And the gold medal doesn't require a native population. No, it does not. And mostly the fish in the Arkansas are brown trout. There are some rainbows, particularly around the Salida area. But mostly you're fishing for browns. the largest brown that i've seen come out of the the northern part of the water up near leadville is about 24 inches during electro shocking surveys yes and the reason i'm kind of starting to go that route and eventually i'm going to backtrack and we're going to talk a little bit about your experience with tenkara you know it's just because there's a lot of there's some kind of confusion in terms of the terms native versus wild and then what is native you know like a lot of times like I've heard of people saying oh we can eat brook trout because they're not native but then hey brown trout are not native here either you know so like that's correct we can maybe we should spend just a minute talking about those differences and you're probably a good person to explain well the the the native trout which is what we're going to talk about today is limited to cutthroats.

7:22And there are several subspecies or lineages of cutthroat trout that exist in Colorado. They were the original habitants of these waters. Once about, well, in 1870s, when mining began to take hold in Colorado, That was when the native trout first became in trouble. Because the mines, not only do they discharge toxic waste, as we saw in the Animas River this summer, but they also require timber for mine supports, for fuel, and for other uses. and that led to the wholesale destruction of the forests in large parts of Colorado.

8:24If you visit Leadville today, it's surrounded by lodgepole pine forests. It looks very natural. If you look at photographs from the 1890s, 1910s, these hills that are lushly vegetated today were barren. And so that induced sediment because there was nothing to hold back the snow runoff, the snow melt runoff, or rainfall. The streams were flooded with sediment which destroyed habitat for the native fish. And so that led to a rapid decline in native trout populations in Colorado. And that's one reason why we have so many brook trout, brown trout, and rainbow trout. These are actually exotic species that have been introduced as a replacement for the native trout that were wiped out through the mining, the logging that went to support the mining, ranching.

9:40And we, as anglers, have to take our blows as well because we overfished the waters. Back in the day, there were essentially no regulations. And people caught fish, nets, hook and line, dynamite, whatever worked. No regulation, but the ethos, just the whole ethics of catch and release wasn't there back in the day. It's catch a fish and you keep it, right? And that was when the American West was being settled, when the mines were in full flower. The resources in this country were looked at as being infinite. There were no limits to the amount of fish. There were no limits to the number of trees you could cut down.

10:41No limit to the amount of mine tailings that you could dump in the nearest creek. And so the environment really took some major blows in those days. And we're still recovering from that. Yeah. And so essentially we have the cutthroat being kind of the trout of the Rockies in a way. And we'll talk a little bit about the different types that we can find here in Colorado. But then we have rainbows primarily coming from the western coast of the United States. And people are bringing those back here because they're a little bit more prolific, perhaps. They kind of tend to reproduce more rapidly. They're easier. The reason that brown brooks and cutthroats were introduced is they were easier to raise in hatcheries than the native fish population. There's a saying that real trout don't eat pellets. And I think that may have come from when the hatcheries started to raise fish for propagation.

11:48They had trouble raising the native species. In fact, when the original hatcheries started, what they did is they went out to where trout were reproducing naturally. They artificially spawned the trout, brought those eggs back to the hatchery, and hatched them in the hatchery. And then when they were just fry, they were put in milk cans, put on trains, wagons, and taken all over the place to be stocked. So those are the rainbows. And then the browns, of course, were brought originally from Europe. And the same thing, I guess, they could reproduce a little faster and better, more easily. And they were more survivable in the degraded water conditions that existed. And so from a fish stocking standpoint, it made sense to stock these foreign or exotic or invasive species because the reason that people were stocking fish, the U.S. Fish Commission and later the Fish and Wildlife Service, was not for recreational purposes.

13:04It was to supply food for the miners and the settlers because they were relying on fish as food. And once the native population was killed off, they started to replace the natives with the imports. Yeah, and I think it's important to talk because I know a lot of people will be very interested in the Colorado natives, you know natives but i think the common you know there's a common story throughout the you know all parts of the united states where you know different fish have been replaced by no native species for you know whatever practical reasons the the government kind of might have seen or different or even people too but you know there's a whole lot of backstories to every area and we don't have to get into that and then just since we talked about the rainbows and the browns i was just you know touching upon the uh the brook trout which are native to the east coast you know and Those are very prolific and also have been introduced here in Colorado.

14:06And the native brook trout of the east have gone through similar trauma to our fish here because rainbows and brown trout, particularly brown trout, were introduced back east and they competed with the native cutthroat, or not cutthroat, but brook trout populations. So it's all over the place. It's not just limited to Colorado. No, you know, and before we go further too, why do you think, you know, like it's been interesting for me to think a little bit about this, you know, knowing a little bit of where the different trout come from. But it always seems to me that a lot of people that I fished with, they tend to see the brook trout as the invasive species. They tend to think of rainbows and browns as being like our fish. And it's such an interesting thing to me because, you know, none of them are native, but there seems to be this, I don't know, prejudice against the brook trout. Why do you think that is?

15:07I don't know. That's a very good question. I think one reason that there's a prejudice against the brook trout, more so than rainbows or brown trout, is brook trout, at least in the environment here in Colorado, don't tend to grow as large as the brown trout or the rainbow trout do. If you're fishing and you're catching brook trout, they're usually 6, 8 inches. If you catch a 12-inch brook trout, that's something to brag about because that doesn't happen very frequently. But to catch a 16-, 17-, 18-, 20-inch brown trout or rainbow trout is not that unusual in the right environment anyway. That's a good point. So size prejudice. It's a size prejudice. That's what I believe anyway. Yeah, I think that's a very valid point.

16:08But I do want to point out that rainbows and browns are also not native, if somebody is always thinking of those. Yeah, they're all exotic. Let's go back a little bit. We haven't talked about, usually, I think most conversations start with a little bit of an introduction of the angler. We went on for quite a few minutes already talking about this background of the fish, which I think is important. But you and I have known each other for several years now. and you are an early adopter of Tenkara. Why don't you tell us a little bit about how long you've been fly fishing and when you took up Tenkara? Well, I've been fly fishing since my first daughter was born. My wife, Judy, wanted me to replicate the enjoyment that she had fishing with her father when she was a little girl. and so she encouraged me to learn something about fishing and um so i i did i i bought a book or two and then when we were living in denver there was a an organization called i believe it was the free university um the colorado universe something like that but you paid a paid a fee and and took a class for and there was a fly fishing class and so i signed up for it big mistake it it certainly altered my life and so i became a fly fishing an aficionado and uh have been fly fishing since the early 80s. Before that, my only experience with fishing was with my father.

18:08And father and I and mom and my sister would go to a place called Potash Lake in Ontario, Canada every summer. Dad and mom had a long history with Potash Lake. And so when they determined that my younger sister was old enough to travel, we started journeying to the lake. Dad built a pop-up camper from scratch, and we lived in that for a month on Potash Lake. And that ruined me from fishing, because my father's idea of fishing was to fish for pickerel in a 12-foot aluminum rowboat with a 3-horsepower Johnson motor trolling for Pickerel on Potash Lake. Well, here you have an 8-, 10-year-old AHAD kid sitting in a boat going nowhere with nothing happening for hours on end.

19:12And so I was not a fan of fishing until Judy mucked it up and got me started on fly fishing. And talking about Judy, we have Judy here in the office today. Judy, say hi. Hi, everybody. And you guys also have a great story. I forget now if it was the 2015 or 16 magazine and the Tenkara magazine. We have a story that you wrote about fishing together. you know oh yes that was uh last year right 2015 issue that was the fifth yeah that was the most recent issue oh it's still 16 16 yeah sorry yeah i don't i don't remember what the dates are on the issues um i should know better but uh because i did after all but that was kind of a cool story about you guys fishing together and using tenkara as a tool yes uh to do that so when did you get when did you take an interest in tenkara because you guys covered that in the story a little bit Yeah, well, your website went live in April of 2009.

20:19Good memory. Well, I do remember that, but I had to go back and look to see when I bought my first 10-car rod, and that was May 4th, 2009. Oh, pretty good. So you hadn't been live very long. Yeah. I was looking at an ultralight backpacking site, I don't remember which site it was, but there was a reference and a link to Tenkara. And so I clicked on the link, and the rest is history, as they say. We bought a Yamame. It was the first rod. and I've got pictures of Judy and I down on the East Fork of the Arkansas River catching fish with that tin car rod. And at that point I was hooked for the same reasons most people get hooked on it, just the simplicity of it, particularly for Judy.

21:23Judy doesn't like to rig up tackle, didn't like messing with lines. And so when Tenkara came along, it was a real nice alternative to Western angling because of the simplicity. Not only that, but the effectiveness of it. I've caught just as many fish, if not more, on Tenkara than I ever caught fishing Western tackle, at least in the streams that I like to fish, which are high mountain streams. One of the comments I often make is, if I see another angler, my day is ruined. Not quite that bad, but usually where we're fishing, you don't see anyone else, or very occasionally do you see anyone else. And there's a reason I want to talk about this background of you guys fishing together because we're talking today about native Colorado trout, but more specifically, I think you mentioned you and Judy pursuing catching those native trout.

22:33So why don't we get into that topic and talk a little bit about what it is that you were interested in doing in terms of, you know, you're interested in native trout and going after them. I've been interested in native trout for quite some time. Back in the middle to late 80s, I was at a Trout Unlimited auction and bought a print of a greenback, quote unquote, from South Apache Creek. And that kind of got me interested in native fish. and since then I've been following the evolution of the history of the greenback trout and in conjunction with that the other subspecies of native cutthroat trout.

23:35And so that's been going on for quite some time. The other thing is I have worked on several restoration programs. back in 2004, I think it was. I was going to say D-O-W. It's Colorado Parks and Wildlife Today. They had finished reclamation on Lake Fork, which drains into Turquoise Lake from Timberline Lake. And that whole drainage was reclaimed for greenback cutthroat trout, or so we thought at the time. And so the first fish that were stocked into Turquoise Lake, or excuse me, not Turquoise Lake, Timberline Lake, I carried up on my back along with one of the summer hires for CPW.

24:42and so I've worked stocking fish in the high country. I've helped other projects where we've worked on stream rehab, work on a couple of those projects. And so not only have I been interested, I've been active in reclaiming at the time we thought were greenbacks. Turns out they're not, But we'll get into that segment of the story here shortly, I'm sure. So that was your first interest in the native trout. Well, and then, of course, your continued interest as well. But I think it will help people, too, if we, you know, now that we start talking about the Colorado, you know, the native trout of Colorado, maybe we can give a little bit of a geographical kind of overview of the state and where the main kind of lineages or... That's a good place to start.

25:44And today we'll talk in terms of lineages or more common names rather than the scientific names. Because there's the nomenclature for the Colorado cutthroat trout is in some... Well, it's being revised. Let's say that. So the historical view of Colorado cutthroat trout was that Colorado river cutthroat trout occurred on the west slope of the Continental Divide. greenback cutthroat trout occurred on the east slope of the continental divide primarily in the arkansas and south platte rivers then in addition to to that we had excuse me we had colorado or excuse me, Rio Grande cutthroat trout that occupied the Rio Grande drainage.

26:55Then in addition to that, we had an extinct species, or what is believed to be an extinct species, called the yellowfin cutthroat trout that was living in Twin Lakes in Lake County. And that was the only place that the yellowfin cutthroat trout was found was in Twin Lakes. So originally there were four species of trout in Colorado, divided between the East Slope, the West Slope, and the Rio Grande drainage. And then the yellowfin and Twin Lakes, that was like one small drainage? Yes, and the yellowfin was famous because it was a rather large fish with fine spots. The other Colorado cutthroat trout all have fairly large black spots.

27:59And that's a new one to me. I hadn't heard of the yellowfin yet. Well, I guess you make a note that it was extinct a long time ago. Well, the yellowfin was declared extinct in 1904. And the greenback was declared extinct in 1937. But we have now learned that all of what I just told you is wrong. But that's the historic, or it's also sometimes referred to as the geographical distribution of fish. And these distinctions were all made on the basis of physical characteristics of the fish. Spotting patterns, teeth, the number of folds in the stomach.

29:03the scales along the lateral line, the number of scales along the lateral line. So it was all based on physical approximation. And of course nowadays we have all kinds of genetic testing that people can do to differentiate between species and probably subspecies as well. Subspecies and it even goes deeper than that. Just variations of subspecies. Yes. Yes. Well, populations. Populations. That's a better term, I think. Because, you know, I know, like I used to live in California and, you know, there we do have, you know, they used to have the, I think they still have the heritage trout challenge. They do. And some people have gone out with tenkara rods to catch those native trout, you know, trying to get a certain number of, you know, trout that they have there. And you make a note that Wyoming has a Wyoming cut slam. Cut slam. But Colorado currently doesn't have any official programs.

30:07No, they do not at this point. I've talked to people at CPW, and they would like to initiate a similar program to Wyoming and California's, but until the nomenclature of the trout is finalized, and that means through the scientific literature, it's premature to do that because they're afraid if they set it up on on the basis of existing knowledge they would have to go back and revise it as things might change in the future makes sense so um we'll talk a little bit more about how things got got messed up here yeah i'm sure we can get into that but do you want to tell us a little bit about the your first you and judy's A personal challenge of pursuing some of these? Yeah. We've had a great time chasing the four existing lineages of Colorado cutthroat trout.

31:17And these lineages are based on genetic information. It's far better than the information, the physical characteristics that were used in the past. And the first lineage that we chased was the green lineage. And the green lineage is Colorado River cutthroat trout. And the first time we investigated it, we were coming back from Marble, Colorado to Leadville going over Hagerman Pass, which is, if you've ever been over it, it's a gnarly Jeep road. And the first time we tried looking for the green lineage fish, we took a wrong turn and ended up at a place called Hell's Gate. Very rugged country, kind of beautiful in its own right, but we didn't find any fish, so we gave up and went home.

32:29The next summer, we tried again. After a little more research, we found out exactly where the fish were and how to get to them. And so as we drove our camper, we have a lance camper on a Ford truck, and it gets us into some pretty tight spots. We got in and found the stream, parked the truck, and set up camp, and it was clouding over the sky. So we ran down to the stream and grabbed the rod and caught a couple of fish, but didn't document them. Because just as soon as we caught three or four fish, the skies opened up. So what were the fish that you caught? This would have been green lineage, Colorado River green lineage cutthroat trout.

33:30So that would be essentially the quote-unquote greenback cutthroat? No, not greenback. Don't confuse green lineage with the greenback cutthroat trout, the trout that only exists today in Bear Creek, a couple of hatcheries, and Zimmerman Lake. That's the purple lineage. Okay, so let's do a little overview of the different color lineages. Okay. That sounds like a... I think you mentioned it, but I got a little confused. Okay. Sorry. Well, before we do that, maybe we ought to see where these lineages came from. Okay. Talk a little bit about that. the the as i mentioned earlier we were heavily involved in restoring the greenback cutthroat trout and every time i say greenback i'm doing quotes with my fingers um the there was a greenback recovery team that was established back in the 70s i think to work with reintroducing these native fish back into their supposedly native waters in the South Platte River and the Arkansas River.

34:52And as luck would have it, the program was designed so that there were a total of, well, let me rephrase, I'll start with a little more ground, back up a little bit more. The greenback, as I said, was declared extinct in, I think, 1937. In 1953, some relic populations were discovered. And then the Endangered Species Act was passed, and the greenback was listed as being endangered. And what that means is that there can be no harvest, there can be no fishing for a fish with that designation. Later, a couple years later, once the recovery team had started stocking these greenbacks into their native waters in the Arkansas and the South Platte, that listing was downgraded to threatened, which does allow harvest and fishing for.

36:15Usually it's catch and release, but in some areas you could harvest the greenback. And the plan, the greenback recovery plan, called for 15 stable populations in the South Platte River basin and five stable populations in the Arkansas. We weren't quite, there were a total of 20, but there were only three in the Arkansas basin. And so what was going on is we were trying to establish two more so that the fish would be eligible for delisting. Well, that work was progressing, and I was hauling fish on my back up to Timberline Lake and working on stream rehab projects. And Jessica Metcalf and her co-authors published a paper that threw all of that work out the window.

37:23She did some genetic work that showed what we were stocking as greenback cutthroat trout were, in fact, Colorado River cutthroat trout. When I first learned of this, I was on an electroshocking crew just north of Granite in Chafee County. And several of the people working on the crew had gotten wind of this paper and were discussing it. And the people that had been working on the greenback recovery program were pretty crestfallen because it showed that in some cases a lot of their career had been spent stocking, recovering the wrong fish. and that did not go over well there were there were a number of crestfallen people on that that crew at the end of the day is as this word spread amongst the the crew well this is a new development too so my very first trip to colorado it must have been around 2009 2010 and i wanted to catch one of the greenback cutthroats i went to you know i was in rocky mountain national park doing a clinic. I think you were part of that clinic on the very first trip. Yes, yes, we were.

38:51And then I got some information on where to find the greenback cutthroat, quote unquote. And I was really excited, caught a couple, you know, a couple of good photographs. And about three, four years later, we moved here. And, you know, and that's when the debate was really picking up steam, right when I moved here about what is the, you know, what was the greenback cutthroat you know like do we really know and and as you mentioned you know the now we know there's pretty much only one population that you know exists you know of that kind of the actual green back yes and i will mention really quickly too to the listeners of this episode um you know like because there's a it's a complex you know theme there's a lot of you know things about the scientific names and the populations so i'm going to be posting this information on our podcast page you know, tenkarausa.com forward slash podcast on the one that, you know, in the episode that we talk about the Colorado native trout.

39:53And there's a nice chart that Mark put together with the lineage colors, you know, where the greenback cutthroat are actually part of the purple lineage. and you know and then we can't be also has the you know the basin where the the the fish come from as well as their scientific names and a little bit more information so you know don't don't you don't need to if you're really interested in this uh it's hard to learn about all of it and by listening i think uh you know unless you have a much better processor in your head than i have So we'll be posting that information later on. But let's go back and maybe a little bit of a quick, you know, so you talked about going after the green lineage, going through, you know, a couple of different attempts. Yeah, and the second attempt where we got sidetracked, we were talking about got the camper parked and started raining after we caught a few fish but hadn't photographed anything that we'd caught.

40:57So we hadn't actually documented anything. And started pouring rain, went to bed that night. It poured rain all night long. I woke up with my feet splashing in water. The new camper had a major leak over the bed, and water had been pouring onto the bedclothes all night long, and I was actually splashing when I got up in the morning. Awful. And it continued to pour. So we bailed. I bet. Well, there was no way to dry the bed clothing, and the forecast was for continued rain all day. And so we just packed up and got the camper back, took it down, got it repaired. and so last summer, third time's the charm, we went back, found our old campsite, grabbed the rods as soon as camp was set up, grabbed a camera, went down, caught fish, photographed fish and we ended up spending three days on this stream and once we had documented it we poked around a little bit we were in this drainage for three days we saw two people and a dog the whole time we were there and this is is I'm I should point out at this point I'm not going to speak directly to any of the streams that Judy and I fished And the reason for that is simply these streams are very small, fish populations are low, and so I don't want everybody flocking to one stream.

42:57Daniel will, at the end of the, on the podcast page, he can tell you where to get the information to tell you to go. there's a couple of sources that we'll reference and that will allow you to go and pick your own stream hopefully not everybody will go to the same place if you're very interested in knowing exactly where to fish, visit in tenkarausa.com I'll give you GPS coordinates and what fly to use as well in the Metcalf article she gives stream locations stream names but not locations. In the Best Gen article, he gives stream locations with GPS. So you can find them much more readily. When I started this project, the only information was in Metcalfe's. And that was part of the fun, was trying to figure out what stream she was referring to.

44:04do you know how many bear creeks there are in colorado exactly yeah exactly so so maybe i'll leave the uh maybe i'll misspell the uh the reference that has the exact gps locations there's a number of of streams but actually that's kind of like an interesting you know thing that maybe we can talk about a little bit because uh in california you know with the heritage trout challenge i mean there's uh 11 species of trout or not necessarily species but variations very well yeah subspecies subspecies of trout and uh you know at least there's one stream that i liked fishing that had the piyuti cutthroat uh yeah you can't fish that stream but you can't fish there i mean that's uh well so you could fish below the dam and you could catch hybrids right but you You can't go above the barrier. Yeah, so you can go above the natural barrier and catch them. Is there anything here in Colorado that either prevents or discourages people from targeting a specific species?

45:08No. Okay. So if people know where to go. We don't have that limitation. with one exception that I'm aware of, and that's Bear Creek, where the last surviving population of genetically true greenback cutthroats were discovered. You're not allowed to fish there. Okay, good. But you can fish for genetically pure greenbacks in Zimmerman Lake. As long as it's not during their spawning. Yeah, it's closed from January through the end of July, I believe, to fish. Okay, so people have to look at the regulations. You have to make sure you look at the regs. And is there any kind of concern about sensitivity of that population, as everyone like? No, because that population is an offshoot from hatchery populations. Got it. They stocked Leadville National Fish Hatchery is one of the several hatcheries in the state that is propagating greenbacks.

46:10And so that's where those fish came from. And so as long as the hatchery has stock, they can replenish those. While we're speaking of that, that's the only place that you can fish for them in the state, although there's going to be several streams. Graham Gulch, not Graham Gulch, Herman Gulch, And just this side of the Eisenhower Tunnels will be stocked this summer. And presumably it will be open for fishing once it's stocked. And I should mention, too, I mean, like, you know, we're talking about very, I mean, indistinguishable fish. I mean, like, we're talking about genetically distinguishable. But, you know, like I caught my greenback cutthroat, quote, unquote, in Rocky Mountain National Park. Anybody looking at a photo of those fish will probably never be able to tell. or most people probably would not be able to tell the difference. There's a broad overlap in the physical characteristics of these fish.

47:20Statistically, they are distinguishable. That's what the best gen study looked at. So there are a few minor differences. Well, statistically, you can separate them. And that's an important point because the Endangered Species Act doesn't go by genetics. It goes by physical properties, basically. And so you have to, if you're going to protect a species, you've got to be able to differentiate that from other species that are similar based on physical characteristics. And that's what Bestgen and his collaborators were able to show, that statistically you can separate all of the existing lineages of fish. So when you're saying statistically, you're talking about... Multivariate analysis. There's a couple of ways that theoretically you could separate, but it all has to be done on a population basis.

48:30If you receive or catch a single fish, it is very difficult to distinguish that individual fish. But if you catch 25 fish and do the statistics on those 25, then that population can be distinguished from the other populations. That's an important, that's a cool thing to learn about because you're talking about counting the scales and the rays on their fins. I'm sure there's variation, but within a population it can get an average, and that's probably somewhat what you're going to based off. Yeah, for the angler, you can look at things like spot counts on various parts of the body. Okay. And that will differentiate certain fish from other fish. But again, it's a statistical thing. You can't just take a single fish generally and distinguish it from another fish from a different population.

49:38You've got to have 25 or so fish for that to work. That's interesting. So it's not like the average angler is going to go out there, catch a fish. Oh, there's half a dozen spots here on this part of the body. and there's half a dozen spots here on that part of the body, that makes it an X, Y, Z. That's not going to work. So I know it's an ongoing work. There's still some discussion. But what I presume to have been a greenback cutthroat, what is that one called nowadays? The greenback? Yeah, but not the genetically pure greenback. You mean the one that you caught in Rocky Mountain National Park? The fish that you caught in Rocky Mountain Park is green, most likely, was a green lineage Colorado River cutthroat. Okay. That's most likely. Green lineage, not to be confused with green back. And we'll have that chart on our website.

50:40Yes. So, okay, let's go back to your story of pursuing the lineage. So that was the green lineage. So we checked one off the box. The next lineage we were going to pursue is the blue lineage, and that's a Yampa River drainage fish. It also extends into Utah and Wyoming. Okay. And so we journeyed up to part of the country, part of Colorado we had never been in. and we were only a few miles south of the Wyoming border on some of the tributaries to the Amper River. And our first spot we were going to stop was already occupied. There were people camped there already, so we continued on down these dirt roads and found a beautiful little stream, a spot to camp right next to the stream. and once we got camp set up it was getting dark but but grabbed a rod and saw I snuck up the stream nice pool saw this fish finning away cast spooked gone and so um that was it for the first day next morning we got up and and uh the fish was not back where he had been that evening.

52:11And we started fishing up the stream and catching and photographing fish. And that was blue lineage. The next day we worked our way downstream. Where there were too many cows. And there were lots of cows. And then that evening came back and caught the one that eluded me the first evening. And so that worked. That was the blue lineage. That's the Colorado River. And we drove, gosh, somewhere between 60 and 100 miles on backcountry dirt roads to get to where these fish were. And in that stream in particular, you have a pure population of that? Based on the genetics that have been done, that was a pure blue lineage population. Now, this is where it gets confusing because the blue lineage fish, Colorado River cutthroat.

53:17The green lineage fish, Colorado River cutthroat. The scientific name for the Colorado cutthroat probably belongs to the blue lineage fish that occurs in the Yampa, southern Colorado River drainage basin, and into Wyoming and into Utah. the green fish the green lineage fish has not been described in the scientific literature and so it does not have a formal scientific name but it might be but it's probably distinguishable it is it is and physically physically based on spot counts you can separate so statistically Statistically, you can separate the green lineage and the blue lineage fish. Okay. So what we're waiting for is for the scientists to get together and describe the green lineage fish in the scientific literature and assign it a scientific name.

54:25It's conceivable that the name assigned to the blue lineage could end up with the green lineage, and the blue lineage would need a new scientific name. But that all has to be worked through and worked out. So that's where some of the uncertainty is coming from. And also just to clarify, like you're pursuing all these lineages, you've been fly fishing for a long time. Are you doing that only with a Tenkara rod? Oh, yes, of course. Yes, we're using purely Tenkara rods. Any practical reasons you're doing that? Well, these are small streams, and Tenkara is obviously the best way to fish small streams. And, of course, I've fished some pretty good-sized streams with Tenkara, too. But as we said at the outset, I really like Tenkara for its simplicity and its efficiency in catching fish.

55:27So it's not necessarily that you want to be the first person to catch all this fish with a Tenkara rod. No, no. It's very practical. It may turn out that that's the case, but that wasn't the driving factor in using Tenkara. And I've used dry flies, Sakasa cabarees, and caught all of these fish with one exception on drys and Sakasa cabarees. Just so I could please Daniel and do it in the traditional fashion. Hey, I think it would be cool. You're the first person to catch them all. Well, like I said, that wasn't driving. I just wanted to catch the lineages. Yeah, that's cool. So the next lineage that we chased is the purple lineage, supposedly the generic greenback cutthroat trout. and so that was up in the cash lapooder drainage which is where zimmerman lake is and we drove again packed up the camper and headed up there and and found a place to park and it's about a mile hike up to the lake um and so we got there three o'clock in the afternoon and and hiked up and scouted from the dam all the way to the inlet stream.

56:50Didn't see a fish, not one, which I thought was very unusual. We were there in October, and the water was murky, turbid. Visibility was very restricted. So we broke out the Tenkara rod and started fishing our way back to the trailhead. And a few fish started rising in the middle of the lake and then eventually some closer to shore. And I was fishing a Sakasa Kabare and zip, zero, nothing. There was absolutely no interest in those fish in that fly. so it was getting getting on towards dark so we hiked down the trail and and made made you know ate dinner and and got up the next morning and hiked back up the mile to the lake and and this time started fishing at the at the dam and because of the the turbidity i wanted to be able to fish a little bit deeper than i could with a normal sakasa kebari so i tied on a killer bug and trailing off of that i tied on a size 18 frank sawyer pheasant tail tied the way he he tied him with the copper wire and judy tied on a uh a dry fly i think and and so we started fishing and i was using the the standard countdown stripped back because the the flies were weighted enough that they would would sink and so we started various depths various retrieves long strips slow strips and worked very well with the with the tin car ride wasn't a wasn't a problem finally i don't remember you know counted down started stripping wham fish got it to my feet you all know where that goes it wasn't a long distance release it was a short distance release the air turned blue but that fish was gone so then I tried again and about the same place same countdown Cotton yelled at Judy and she grabbed the net and we landed that one And so I have photos of that one.

59:38It was this big. Size doesn't matter here. We're just after the lineages. Exactly, Dan. Size really should never matter. And then we caught one more after that, and it was getting late, and so we backed down the trail and headed for home. but that was the only one I didn't catch on a Sakasa kebari I tried the evening before without success fair enough, turbid water well and I quizzed some of my friends who have fished Zimmerman Lake in the past because typically high mountain lake the water you can see many feet and they said when they fished it that's the way it was so I'm sure it was just fall turnover um you know muddied the water but so that's one place that you can fish for those fish and then the next lineage the orange lineage which is the the Rio Grande cutthroat we went down to the San Luis Valley up some some roads during hunting season and found a place to camp.

1:01:00And there the stream was very interesting. The stream was about as wide as this table where we were fishing. And this table is probably, what, 18 inches? Not only was the stream very narrow, but it was crossed over with all the dead grasses that had died during the year. and then to top it off the wind was blowing about 25 30 miles an hour so this is where you make one cast and you're too far on one side of the stream you make the next cast and you're on the other side of the stream well usually the third time is the charm you've corrected too far you split the difference and you drop the fly right in the stream well that's except the fly never hit the stream because of all the grass so i'm on the stream the fly is dangling but no no fish um we saw a couple fish that evening but i just simply could not get a fly to them if you got the fly on the water you found a little wider spot or where there was no grass as soon as the fly hit the water or or submerged the wind just motorboated that fly down the stream the wind was blowing down the stream and just motorboated it and so the fish were not going to respond well to that so the next morning we we got up and tried one more time on that narrow stream and was unsuccessful so we broke camp drove upstream we found a beaver pond where there was clear water coming into the into the pond and that's where we caught the the Rio the first Rio Grande was he was holding in that inlet stream coming into the beaver pond and and so wow you got all four of them got all four then that's awesome and then And then later we got into quite a few more fish.

1:03:09Oh, that's great. Farther downstream. Farther down. But you had to look. You had to find some decent water that was open where you could actually get a fly on the water that wasn't blown off the water immediately. And so we had a good time doing that. And the best part of all of this was it took us to parts of Colorado that we had never been before. I was just about to say that. So you got to see a lot of new country, and a lot of it is just gorgeous, just beautiful. And I want to go back. I was just going to say that because, you know, like for, I mean, to begin with, I think fly fishing in general is just an excuse to be outside and very often an excuse to go and visit, you know, different places. and like when you have a goal in mind and I think that's one of the beautiful things and one of the reasons the heritage program is popular in California is because people want to have a reason to go somewhere they don't want to just say I'm going to drive 10 hours to fish because I can fish an hour from home or something you know so that's probably one of the coolest things about having this even if it's not an official program right now having this personal challenge and it's like what are we going to do next weekend oh let's go catch this one yeah let's go up to the amphid drainage and and look for some fish yeah absolutely yeah it's it's it's a lot of fun we enjoyed the heck out of it are there like any other trout uh you know particular trout that you're still looking for you know for to catching here in colorado not not really um we're thinking of moving up to wyoming maybe next summer and do the wyoming cut slam.

1:04:50Judy has a sister who lives in Santa Rosa. We're thinking maybe heading in that direction, pursuing this. It might be a little different because you're going to catch the cut slam. You can catch some real large cuts up there instead of focusing on the smaller... Go after some of the Lahotan and stand on your ladder out there with your tin car rod. Are those in Wyoming as well? I know they have that in California. Yeah, those are in Pyramid Lake. That sounds like a good challenge, a new way to learn more about the country and the native fish nearby. It's a good incentive to get out and see some of the world that you wouldn't see. Most people, they head to the famous waters, the Frying Pan, the Roaring Fort, the Arkansas, the Colorado River, South Platte, chasing large fish, But these are small fish in small streams, but you're going to see country that most people don't get to see.

1:05:57And at the same time, too, like, you know, we'll probably run out of time here sometime soon, but I want to talk a little bit about just conservation because there's definitely, you know, like there must be like an aspect that maybe people are not very familiar with. But like I know, for example, here in Colorado, we have the greenback chapter of Trout Unlimited, which is a younger chapter focused a lot of times on conservation. And one of the projects that they took on, you know, heads on a couple of years ago was the preservation of the Bear Creek greenbacks, the pure greenback cutthroat. You know, in that particular program or initiative, they're trying to protect this native species that only exists natively and wildly in that one area. and there's a lot of erosion on the banks because there's some trails that mountain bikers were going on and that kind of thing. So they had to do a lot of work to kind of mitigate that kind of problem. Are there some challenges that some of the other native trout that you have pursued are facing, either damming or pressure or something like that?

1:07:07Well, they all are facing pressures. the fish if you look at the table which daniel's going to post most of these fish are occupying 11 to 13 percent of their original habitat so they've been pushed up into the headwaters where they can they can survive generally they're above some type of barrier a lot of this comes from pressure from brown trout and and brook trout because the the colorado river cutthroat well excuse me cutthroat trouts in general are spring spawners up in leadville it's i'd call them summer spawners they're They're spawning in July.

1:08:09Yeah, spring comes a little later. A little bit later up there. And because the fish, the exotic, the introduced species, are able to outcompete them because they are fall spawners. And part of that problem is the result of spawning in the fall, the eggs are hatching in the spring. So the brook trout and the brown trout, the fry from those species, has occupied all of the good habitat. So when the rainbow fry hatch later in the summer, spring or summer, depending on what the water temperature is, All of the niches are filled by the invasive species. And so they can't compete against that.

1:09:12The other problem... You said rainbow. Did you mean cutthroat? Did I say... Yeah, I said cutthroat. Cutthroat trout. I'm sorry. So they don't have... Listen to what I mean, not what I say. The brain is running far ahead of where the mouth is. Good catch, Judy. Thanks for that. Thank you, yes. Yeah, the cutthroats just can't compete because all of the niches for the fry are taken up by the fall spawning fish. And by the time the cutthroats hatch, you have these little tiny fry competing with much larger fry. And so it's a detriment. The other problem that the spring spawners have, and this applies to the rainbow as well as the cutthroat, is when you're spawning in the spring, that's in high water. And so the reds are likely to get either washed out or they get stranded.

1:10:18the fish will spawn in shallow waters during high water time, but as summer goes on, before the eggs hatch, the water drops, stranding those reds where there's no water. And so the spring spawners are at a disadvantage. That is a big disadvantage. I never even thought about the fact that they're... It's a huge disadvantage. You know, maybe essentially spawning on what becomes the banks of the rivers, and then they cannot connect that. Yeah, so they either get blown out during the flood or they get dried up. Wow. And so it's difficult for fall spawners or spring spawners to survive. It's too bad they didn't adapt, you know, evolutionarily to that cycle. Yes. Well, before the exotics were here, it worked fine for them because they didn't— They had enough left, essentially. They weren't in competition.

1:11:21And now the competition is here. So that's an issue that most people don't think about. Yeah, no, that's good to know. In the state of—I know in Colorado there's still stocking programs. We have to keep some rivers stocked up for recreation purposes primarily nowadays. Are there concerns in that regard in terms of stocking drainages and talks about maybe not stocking as much? Well, they're trying. They don't stock these exotics where natives are. Where the pure natives. Where the pure natives are. um the the um like i said they're they're confined to the headwaters for the most part and that means this these fish are going to be small and so you can't stock over top of those because they would they would have get vaccinated yeah when when one of the greenback cutthroat restoration streams is rock creek you and i fished rock creek along with with tim hill a couple of years ago, that was a greenback restoration project.

1:12:39They came in, they reclaimed all of the drainage. They immediately, after a reclamation, they were concerned about anglers' reaction to being no fish in the stream, and so they immediately stocked the greenbacks. Again, quote, unquote. At the time, this was back in the 80s. When I first started fishing Rock Creek, I would catch about one cutthroat to ten greenbacks. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Those are all greenbacks. I'd catch one cutthroat for every 10 brookies that I would catch. When I first fished that, the ratio was a little bit better.

1:13:43Since then, today, it's unusual to catch hardly any cutthroats in that stream. Because the brook trout? Because the brook trout were not entirely removed. They existed on Swamp Creek, which is a tributary to Rock Creek. And from there, they had taken over most of the entire drainage. There's still a few spots above some cascades where the cutthroats are still the only fish in the drainage. But in the main stem, the cutthroats are pretty much gone, even though the Hatchery is, Leadville Hatchery has stocked some cuts in there occasionally. It's such a challenge because, you know, like a lot of times, and it can be kind of controversial to bring a stream back to having only native, you kind of have to completely decimate whatever is there to begin with. Yes. It's a big operation to reclaim a stream because you have to not only use the piscicide through the main stem, but you've got to get every little tiny rivulet that's coming in any place a trout can hide.

1:15:04When we reclaimed, I shouldn't say we because I didn't have anything to do with the actual reclamation of timberline and Lake Fork, it took them three years because there was one set of beaver dams where they had trouble getting the brook trout out. Eventually they did, and so far it's all cutthroats, wrong species, or subspecies, but it's still... Well, and they also built that dam. Yes. They built a barrier dam. Just help keep the browns and the rainbows and the brookies from reestablishing. And migrating up from turquoise lake. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's a dam. It's 12 feet higher. Oh, okay. It's a big occupation. Well, this has been great to learn about all the different trout that we find here in Colorado, and I think every state probably has something very similar to this.

1:16:08And also really fun to learn the story of you and Judy pursuing those fish together. It's been a lot of fun. and there's more streams to be visited in Colorado with these native species and we just hit the tip of the iceberg I bet, yeah, there's a lot of water here and if our listeners want to learn a little bit more about Mark and Judy fishing together take a look at our last issue of the Tenkara Magazine the 2016 magazine and again I'll put the references that we discussed on this episode on our website, tenkarausa.com forward slash podcast. And we can also, if you're in Colorado, you can see Mark in different places sometimes, different fly fishing shows and that kind of thing. Where can people find you, Mark? What are you doing these days? Well, I'll be up some stream in the back country fishing for cutthroat. Are you taking a break from teaching a guide program?

1:17:09No, we will be teaching the guide program at Colorado Mountain College. beginning May... You said how long after we get back? A week. So May 14th? Yeah, I think it begins May 14th. I'm not 100% sure that that's the right date. But the Colorado Mountain College in Leadville has a guide program for people getting into fly fishing, guiding, training. It's a six-week program where we teach you all about guiding fly fishing. and while you're doing that you are earning college credit so if you have any interest in guiding want to know more about fly fishing outdoors look us up where you can google cm colorado mountain college and that will lead you to us excellent well judy and mark thank you both so much for driving all the way down to boulder having this conversation with me about the native trout that now I'm salivating to go catch because I haven't, I've not even touched the tip of the iceberg, I think.

1:18:19So maybe that's something in my near future here. Because I'm also still learning the waters in Colorado. I've only been here for a few years now, three years. So it's a good chance for me to learn more about the state as well. Well, good. Good. Thank you. If you need some guidance, Daniel, you know where to come. Well, thank you so much. and to our listeners until next time on the Tenkara Cast thanks for tuning in and if you have a chance leave us a review in iTunes you know if you can subscribe via iTunes and other programs as well and if you can take a minute to leave us a review we will be very grateful for that thank you so much