Our Own Fish Story
Art: Dick Sakahara
In Utah folklore, seagulls get all the credit for saving the early Mormon pioneers. In 1848, when a cricket plague of Biblical proportions threatened the pioneers’ first harvest, seagulls swooped in by the thousands to gorge themselves on the crickets. The story goes that enough crops were spared for the pioneers to survive through the winter.
In reality, though, many of those pioneers would have starved were it not for another stroke of good fortune — this one also with Biblical overtones. In a New World twist on the miracle of the fishes, the pioneers discovered that Utah Lake and the surrounding streams were teeming with fish — huge fish, some weighing as much as 40 pounds. The fish were so numerous and large that the pioneers harvested them with pitchforks, salted them and survived almost wholly on fish through the first lean winters. Though the pioneers wouldn’t have known it, the fish were a unique strain — Bonneville cutthroat trout — and were holdovers from a time when the gigantic freshwater Lake Bonneville covered most of Utah and corners of Nevada, Idaho and Wyoming.
The fish got little thanks. Instead of being memorialized and having monuments erected to them like the gulls, the Bonneville cutthroats were fished to the brink of extinction and summarily forgotten. The large lake-going cutthroats of Utah Lake were completely wiped out, and their smaller stream-going cousins were fished out of all the accessible creeks and rivers.
Bonneville cutthroats were thought to be extinct until the early 1970s when wildlife biologists discovered remnant populations in a few isolated pockets across the Great Basin, the geographic area once covered by Lake Bonneville. Since those discoveries, the forgotten fish have begun to receive their due. The state of Utah has embarked on a large-scale reintroduction program to bring the fish back to their native waters, and in 1997, the Utah State Legislature named the Bonneville cutthroat as the state fish (interestingly, before that time, the rainbow trout was Utah’s state fish, but rainbows are an introduced species not native to Utah).
Bonnevilles are finding their way back into Park City waters. It turns out there’s a wild population in Chalk Creek in the nearby Uinta Mountains, and what biologists call a conservation population in Park City’s own Kimball Creek. Cutthroats sometimes cross-breed or hybridize with rainbow trout, so biologists refer to a population that is at least 80 percent pure as a conservation population. Little Dell Reservoir in Parley’s Canyon is home to a brood population of Bonnevilles, meaning the Division of Wildlife Resources takes eggs from those fish to repopulate other waters.
One of 15 recognized subspecies of cutthroat trout, Bonnevilles, like all cutthroat, can be recognized by a “cut” — a patch of orange or red on the throat. They typically have longer heads and jaws than rainbows and are often identifiable by their larger spots. To local anglers, the reintroduction of Bonneville cutthroat is a mixed blessing: cutthroats are said to be less wary, thus easier to catch, but they reportedly don’t put up the fight that the rainbow and brown trout now inhabiting most local waters do. Either way, the return of Bonneville cutthroat to their native waters brings back a link to our area’s unique cultural and natural history.
Mark Menlove muses about nature in each issue of Park City Magazine and has been known to tell a fish story or two.
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