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In this video I’m spending 3 days fly fishing The driest state in the US… Nevada. With an average of only 9.5 inches of precipitation a year, this state doesn’t have much water. Which is why it’s surprising that I’ll be catching cutthroat on a taco out of a small spring fed creek, searching for the elusive bull trout, and exploring my first alpine lake in years… all within the boundaries of a state known for it’s desert environment. Let’s get into the video.
So as you can tell the fish we decided to chase the bonneville cutthroat trout on the first day of this video. This fish is native to the drainage area of the ancient lake bonnevile basin, which included parts of nevada, idaho, wyoming, and Utah. These fish are really only in one small part of nevada, but they’re thriving in the handful of spring fed creeks they live in. Plus this section of country is beautiful… and brutal
After talking it over we decided to go into town and grab some pizza. We were content with our bonneville cutthroat experience and decided to move on to something different. We knew it was a long shot but we decided to go for bull trout, which is a fish species you’d never expect to live in the driest state in the country. It was also convenient that the bull trout, redband trout, and the whitefish were all in the same drainage and those were the last fish we needed for Nevada’s native fish slam. So we figured we should at least give it a shot even though the odds of finding a bull trout were slim to none.
The idea for this day was to focus on some higher elevation areas since we had read a paper about how the bull trout in nevada favored the upper ends of these creeks. The idea being that the up higher in these systems are where the water temps stay favorable for bull trout year round. So we actually did quite a bit of hiking, and just fished holes we thought the bull trout might hang out in. Oh also, the bull trout in Nevada don’t quite get as big as the bulls further north in idaho, so we weren’t necessarily looking for a 30 inch fish. A big bull trout in this system would have been anything over 20 inches, so realistically we were looking for a fish not more than 18 inches in length.
At some point during the day the sun went away and it started raining, which just isn’t something you’d expect given that this is the driest state in the country. Of course, you wouldn’t know that by looking around at the greenery around us. This particular mountain range is one of the wettest in nevada, with an average of 20 inches of precipitation or more depending on the area. It’s safe to say that without this mountain range that average of 9.5 inches of annual precipitation would be much much lower.
So we had read that in areas that the bull trout spent most of their time, at least in this drainage, that there was a big drop off in the redband population. So not catching a ton of redband trout kind of gave us confidence that we were in the right area. Our biggest issue however was the time of year. It was the end of May and realistically the bull trout were spread throughout the system since water temps were good everywhere. So after hiking many miles back into this drainage we weren’t sure if we were even doing anything right, which is par for the course if you’re ever looking bull trout. If you watched my idaho videos from last summer you know that I struggled even in drainages where the fish are fairly common. We were also freezing to death, with temps plummeting into the low 40’s after that rain. Which is why we eventually decided it was best to turn around after about 8 hours of fishing and exploring.
This wasn’t the most productive day of fishing, but showing that failure is part of these trips is important. Also with bull trout in general I think social media makes them seem really easy to catch, and in reality, at least in America, they are almost always difficult to find. So we decided to hit an alpine lake for day 3, which was something Micah had never done before. We found a lake where the hike was reasonable and that supposedly had lahontan cutthroat in it. I don’t think the lahontan cutthroat are native to this area, but we wanted to stick with a fish that were at least native to the state of nevada. Plus we knew lahontans had the ability to get big, so it was worth a shot. We even had to walk through snow, which was a site for soar eyes after spending the bulk of our week in the desert.
