Finding four species in three days on Minnesota-Ontario border

Izaak Walton said that God never has made a more "calm, quiet innocent recreation than angling," and the four of us wouldn't argue. Contented in the bow of the canoe that I paddled from the stern, Dan Steichen of West Lakeland, Minn., seemed dwarfed by the steep rock shoreline not far away. Nearby, brothers Bob (of Stillwater, Minn.) and Pete (of Grant, Minn.) Simmet trolled in their loaner boat, one rod extending to each side, like outriggers.

Cruising for lake trout, we pulled behind us variations of small, shiny spoons, and wondered just how deep these cold-water fish might be. Though lake trout inhabit only a relative handful of Minnesota lakes, they are bountiful a stone's throw away, in Ontario, where a quarter of the world's population swims.

There.

A lake trout struck my lure just that quickly, its struggle disproportionate to its weight, and my line tightening nearly straight toward the lake bottom, telltale of the head-tossing protests these fish mount.

Turning toward me, and peering into the depths, Dan awaited the congealing in the clear water of a fish that is as pretty as it is stubborn.

Nice fish.

Alongside the canoe, the trout was resplendent. Gray-brown on its sides, to silvery, with light-colored spots, the fish had suspended itself far beneath the canoe before succumbing to its fate.

Hoisting the fish by a gill plate, I introduced it briefly to the human netherworld, then removed the lure, releasing it again to roam its home waters.

A happy conclusion to the skirmish depended on the canoe staying upright, and Dan and I had accomplished that.

Now we again let out our lines, and more line still, our shiny spoons tightening their angles of descent as we did.

Let's get another.

The rain had let up. Not quite like glass, neither was the lake's surface anything more than ripples, even to the far windward shore.

Again I pulled on my paddle, bracing the butt of my rod against the canoe's floor, and sandwiching it in front of one ankle and behind the other.

Chasing my Heritage (Trout)

I left Redding with my girlfriend, Katie Mackey, around six in the evening on August 26, 2005. We were both exhausted from a long week, so we stopped at a campground near Adin around 8:30 that night. In the light of my LED headlamp, I studied up on our quarry. We were after two varieties of redband trout, the Goose Lake redband and the Warner Lakes redband. Katie and I picked these fish for our first trip because of their proximity to each other. Some of the home streams of the two fish are less than 10 miles apart. Trout and Salmon of North America , which is beautifully and accurately illustrated by Joseph R. Tomelleri. According to Behnke, the Goose Lake and Warner Lakes redbands were two of the seven redband varieties known as the redband trout of the northern Great Basin, or the Oregon redband trout. All of these fish live in closed basins with no access to the ocean. In Oregon, Warner Valley contains the bodies of water now known as the Warner Lakes. They are remnants of the ancient Warner Lake, which used to fill the valley. Like Goose Lake in California, the Warner Lakes fluctuate dramatically, depending on snowfall and precipitation, and sometimes dry up completely. In both drainages, the lake-dwelling form of the species has been wiped out numerous times by lengthy droughts. Each time, stream-dwelling fish have recolonized the lakes. Now if you’re into intelligent design, I propose something along these lines: God led the ancestors of the redband trout up the ancient rivers to the northern Great Basin and suggested to them that they might want to get used to hot water for He was about to make the climate much warmer and He didn’t want the poor redbands to become high desert trout fossils. Being isolated from other types of trout, the northern Great Basin redbands were able to evolve independently. However, although nature has kept these redbands isolated from other trout, humans haven’t done so well. It appears that hatchery rainbows have been introduced into both the Goose Lake and Warner Lakes basins. When hatchery rainbows hybridize with native trout varieties, genetic diversity can be lost. This fact leads to two conclusions. First, there may not be any absolutely pure Goose Lake or Warner Lakes redbands left. The second conclusion is more uplifting: Since the native redbands had superior evolutionary adaptations that allowed them to cope with extreme local conditions, the progeny of hatchery trout and hybrids would be less likely to survive. The fact that the physical characteristics of these fish continue to be significantly different from those of hatchery rainbows would support this conclusion. Digging a little deeper into the literature, I read about the distinguishing physical characteristics that define the Goose Lake trout. The distinguishing physical characteristics were described in terms of numbers of gill rakers, vertebrae, and scales above and along the lateral line. I’ve cleaned hundreds of trout, and I’m not opposed to eating fish under the appropriate circumstances, but I harbor no desire to dissect a trout. we were on the road, headed for Goose Lake. There were several tributaries that I wanted to investigate, all draining the west side of the Warner Mountains, on the east side of Goose Lake. I decided to drive all the way up to the northernmost California tributary of Goose Lake, a little stream called Pine Creek. From there, I’d work my way south to the others. At the town of Pine Creek, which straddles the Oregon border, Katie and I drove eastward on a dirt road that closely follows Pine Creek. We found a parking spot that we liked and began to rig up. I walked to the closest pool on the creek. While casting downstream to a pool that I had probably already spooked, I actually saw a fish rise in the next pool up. On my third cast of the trip, I hooked an eight-inch fish on a traditional Adams. It looked like a redband. I called Katie over to take a picture. While I was waiting, I examined the fish. The most striking physical feature was the bluish splotches, some of which looked like parr marks, or remnants of parr marks. The bluish dots varied in size from 2 to 10 millimeters and were distributed thoroughly. They were smaller below the lateral line. Near the tail, it appeared as though the bluish dots were arranged in a zigzag fashion. They extended all the way up onto the back of the fish. Cutting through the bluish dots was a fairly prominent red band, right along the lateral line. The overall background coloration on the sides was a yellowy gold, yielding to a golden olive color on the fish’s back. The operculum, the gill cover, was pinkish red, with a couple faint bluish spots. The fish had a generous sprinkling of small black dots, mainly on the upper body above the lateral line. This was obviously an atypical rainbow, if it was a rainbow. But did that make it a redband? I wasn’t about to ask it how many gill rakers it had, so I decided it must be a genuine Goose Lake redband.

Field & Stream

Field & Stream

Field & Stream

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