I sometimes think that the strangest quirk to have arisen in the 50-million-or-so-year history of salmonids on this continent is the fact that they’re often so similar to each other. The variegated geography of the West, and especially of California, has meant that many of our genetically similar trees and shrubs take on wildly different physical forms and modes of survival, even when they’re separated from their kin by only a mountain range or two. But the only salmonid I catch with any regularity that doesn’t look obviously similar to the others is the mountain whitefish, which most of us probably tend to catch by accident. Brown trout aren’t native to the Americas, but they fit right in here, and they look and seem so much like our native trout that I don’t think most casual anglers spend much time thinking about their unlikely proliferation in our home waters. Among American fish, there are big genetic cleavages between the salmon, Pacific trout, and char such as brook trout, bull trout, and Dolly Vardens, but within these groups, the fish often look astonishingly similar, are happy to interbreed, and share extremely similar life histories. Sometimes all three things are true, despite great geographical differences.
I don’t really object to any of this similarity, and I obviously don’t find any of our trout species boring. If I did, I wouldn’t spend my most pleasurable waking hours thinking about them. But I sometimes think it’s funny that I can get so excited about catching a new species of trout — which I always find more interesting than catching a big rainbow or brown — when basically even the rare cutthroats or redbands I might rack up as new species are all just another kind of pretty little fish that points its nose upstream in cold water. If I’m doing some very exciting salmon or steelhead fishing, it may be that I’m catching bigger pretty fish that go out to sea and then come back and point their noses upstream in cold water. I sometimes contrast this with the experience of friends of mine who hunt, who spend the year thinking about which pass an elk herd will be coming over, musing how best to flush ducks in a swamp, and then on to spotting coyotes and prairie dogs across a level pan of sagebrush desert.
So it was a bit of a new thing for me when I set out to catch my first coastal cutthroat and to do it in California, at the southern end of their range. To be fully honest, I had never even heard of coastal cutts before I started the California Heritage Trout Challenge, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife project that awards a certificate for any angler who can catch and document six of the state’s native trout species in their native waters. This is the sort of thing that makes the Heritage Trout Challenge fun: until I began it, I had no idea that there was an anadromous cutthroat trout that lived anywhere, much less in California. Their southernmost population, in the Eel River, is a long drive north from my home in Los Angeles, but it still seemed neat that I could find them in California.
It was the summer of 2018, and I’d just caught the six species that qualified me for my certificate, but I wanted to catch all eleven species. I was camping up in the Modoc National Forest, in the vicinity of where I’d just managed to catch some rare Goose Lake and Warner Lakes redbands, and I had the phone number of a retired fisheries biologist from Humboldt State University named Terry Roelofs, who long ago had been a mentor of one of my best friends, taking her steelheading on the Umpqua and teaching her all sorts of magical and interesting things about how our native salmonids spend their lives. So I called him.
“It’s one of our least-appreciated fisheries,” he said. Coastal cutts are a fish that are poorly understood and don’t get fished for much, and the result has been that we don’t think much about how to protect their delicate habitats or work to preserve their genetic distinctiveness the way we do with many of their kindred. I asked where to find them. “I don’t know what to tell you if you can’t find them,” he said. “I could catch one out of the creek behind my house right now, if you asked me to.”
It turns out that these fish actually do much more than point their noses upstream in cold water. I learned from him that the coastal cutt has one of the most diverse and interesting life histories of any salmonid. They’re the only species of cutthroats that use the marine environment, but they do it differently than steelhead or salmon, which take to open water to hunt prey and grow large before returning to their natal streams to spawn. Coastal cutts that run to sea stay close to shore, rarely going more than 50 miles from their home river, and they return quickly, after only two to three months in the salt. They feed on small crustaceans there and have a high survivability rate — as many as 40 percent live to go out and spawn again, a much higher rate than other salmonid species such as Atlantic salmon, which can run out to sea and return to spawn multiple times, but often have much lower rates of survival when they do. Coastal cutts can and do often change their spots and coloration at various times throughout their lives: upon their return, the fish look like steelhead, but they generally stay small, with a usual maximum size of about 16 to 22 inches. Spending time in the sea is just one of the four life histories that this species can adopt, but even within it, there is a huge variation — in some river systems, separate groupings of cutts run at different times of the year and maintain intense homing patterns that keep the populations separate.
There are also are lacustrine populations that live in large lakes such as Crescent Lake in Washington. For some mysterious reason, these long-lived predatory fish tend to stay small, almost never achieving the trophy size so commonly attained by lake-dwelling rainbows. There are also fluvial populations, which run from creeks into big rivers such as the Rogue and back again without ever deciding to journey to the sea. And there are resident small-stream coastal cutts that spend their lives landlocked, staying small and living for only a few years, against the 10-year lifespan that some sea-run cutts achieve. Coastal cutts are also the only type of cutthroat to have coevolved with steelhead and rainbow trout, creating a fascinating interplay between the two: in some systems, they maintain their genetic distinctiveness by spawning in smaller creeks, leaving the bigger tributaries to steelhead or salmon. In some scenarios where the fish suffer from habitat disturbance or the unfortunate presence of large numbers of hatchery rainbows, the fish mingle and form a hybrid “swarm” of interbred fish displaying the characteristics of both species.
I probably should have been heading back to LA to gin up some writing work, instead of chasing another fish species. I have no doubt that someone fishing with a guide or who had time to spend fishing in and around Humboldt County would have found it pretty easy to locate coastal cutts, but I had only a day to spare for trying to catch an exemplar of this fascinating species, and when I got to Arcata, after sleeping overnight in my truck by the side of the highway on my way there, I tried Terry Roelofs’s landline about a thousand times without success. I knew which creek he’d told me he lived on, so I drove up a rural road and asked around to see if anyone could tell me which house was his. I asked at a church and then at a playground. No one seemed to know, or possibly they made the sensible call that they didn’t want to give out a neighbor’s address to a random stranger who had showed up asking for an old man’s address at their out-of-the-way playground. I couldn’t find any public access on that creek.
So I gave up and I went to try one of the other creeks he’d mentioned that were supposed to be good coastal cutt fisheries. I picked one by using my trusty, torn-up Benchmark California Road and Recreation Atlas. But when I got there, the homeowners’ association had put up a big sign welcoming visitors to their beautiful creek valley, full of gorgeous country homes and some of the most pleasant and prosperous local farms I’d ever seen, by announcing “No Stream Access” and “No Fishing Allowed” I may get myself in trouble here by saying that I don’t like this sort of sign very much. But that valley had a bridge over the creek, and I figured I could work my way in there. So I parked, ducked under the bridge, and began my journey, heading downstream.
It seemed then like the strangest stream I’d ever fished, though now that I have more experience in the area, I know that it was in many ways typical of a coastal stream in far-northern California in late summer. Its bed was mostly beautifully white egg-sized gravel, with some shallow sections of gradient that made it look like a very shallow western freestone stream. But then there were swampy and silty sections where the water barely moved and where I couldn’t believe that a trout could live — the stream was fully exposed to the sun and extremely clear, with no bottom structure at all. Those sections had no oxygenating movement of water, and they looked totally bereft of piscine life. And then there were whole breaks in the streamflow, strange, deep pools that are so typical of some coastal streams — 20 feet deep or more, with gigantic white boulders surrounded by water so bright and blue that it looked like the blue of glacial lakes in high mountain regions.
The pools were so deep and clear that anyone who looked for a moment could see big fish ranging around the bottom, apparently comfortable enough to be feeding as though they were inhabiting a pond that they’d be happy to live in all their lives. I was fishing with my 15-foot tenkara rod, and at the sight of those big fish I obviously couldn’t help but stop and cast. I didn’t necessarily even know what kind of fish they were. I figured they must be cutts, just because I’d been told this was a cutthroat stream, but I’d also heard that stream-resident coastal cutts stay small, and these fish seemed quite large indeed. I didn’t know when the searun cutts were supposed to be back from the ocean or if this was a good time to be targeting them. Maybe they were just resident rainbows or juvenile steelhead. I had been excited about the idea of targeting a new fish with habits I didn’t know much about, but I found it suddenly frustrating to realize that these uncommon habits meant that I had no real idea how to fish the stream or even what fish I was fishing for.
I fished probably six different f lies and a whole myriad of approaches, having waded out to a boulder in the middle of the pool, a boulder that was so enormous that it looked like a miniature version of a craggy island in a glacial lake. I don’t think I even spooked the fish — I just couldn’t come up with anything that interested them.
I started working back upstream. In one of the shallow riffles, where the water poured thinly over the big white gravel, I cast a Humpy a few times behind some of the larger rocks that formed tiny little pockets. I caught two fish that looked, to me at least, exactly like steelhead smolts. I couldn’t figure out what species they were. I released the first one immediately, because it was a very hot day, and I didn’t want to keep the little fish out of the water too long while I inspected it. The second one I released because as I pulled it out of the water, a gigantic Rottweiler that I’d been hearing bark for a while as I traveled the stream finally keyed in on me and bounded out from a patch of Russian blackberry almost at the exact moment I hooked the little silver fish. I broke it off my tippet and fled — I wasn’t wearing waders — as far out as I could get into the middle of the stream, flopping and flailing as I went and dropping my rod. Luckily, the flow was so thin that the rod didn’t run away, and luckily, the giant dog seemed to lose faith in his footing once he got out into the water. He barked savagely, but stayed ankle deep in the stream. I started wading upstream, and he lost interest in me.
Eventually, I came back to one of the spots where I’d been sure no salmonid fish would ever choose to live, the swampy expanse where the water turned from looking like a gorgeous miniature glacial lake into a silty and seemingly stagnant expanse that resembled a clearer version of a midwestern farm pond. I had a couple of orange Mop Flies that I’d never tried, and I had no particular hope that they’d be any good on this mysterious creek full of fish I couldn’t even identify. But my attention and hope were flagging, and I thought I’d mess around a bit.
The take was so savage and immediate that I saw the whole thing as one moment of chaos and kinetic action. The Mop Fly had barely begun to sink as one big fish shouldered two other slightly smaller ones out of the way and took it with a wide-open mouth that looked like a bass going after a frog. I never did figure out where these three fish came from — there didn’t seem to be any structure for them to hide in. The big one, the one that won the race to the fly, took off. I instinctively plunged into the water to follow, since I had the tenkara rod and no reel to let him run on. He got about to the point where the 35-foot extent of my rod and line were going to max out and jumped over the decaying limb of a tree that had uprooted and fallen over part of the creek. I’d never seen anything quite like this — he ended up looped around the limb, still hooked, dangling with his tail in the water and nose in the air, thrashing violently. It was, for a coastal cutt, a very large fish. I didn’t know this at the time, because it was only when I was researching this story that I learned how rare it is for one to grow to a size that would be fairly modest for a brown. But it took me so long to reach him by climbing out on the tree trunk to the limb he was looped around and now limply thrashing trying to free himself that my first reaction was to break him off immediately and get him back in the water.
So he was gone before I managed to touch him or to get a photo. But that Mop Fly turned out to be murderously effective. I can’t say why, and I will be the first to admit that I haven’t the faintest idea what it might have resembled that was so exciting to those fish. Almost every time, it would produce a fervid strike. The Rottweiler kept following me at a distance, barking and crashing through blackberries and poison oak, and eventually I decided that I’d had enough and that it was time to get out of there. But the day was the best reminder that I could imagine that trout can act in mysterious ways and that the sport, lifestyle, and obsession with catching salmonids that so many of us share can offer new mysteries every time we give ourselves the chance to try new things and every time we admit that we can never fully know how these complicated trout we love will choose to spend their lives.