Thank you for dropping by–I’m glad the ezine was viewable on your Mac. That WAA magazine has some very nice Flash (way out of my budget). Your wife’s piece was excellent. My first love was architecture and I went to a school in Arizona when I first graduated from high school (unfortunately, not Taliesin West–if only!).

With such informative and well-written thoughts, how could I not help but indulge you? You remind me of the stories that the early Mormon pioneers told of 30″+ Bonneville cutthroat in Utah Lake (now filled with carp–although they are trying to rehabilitate it). With such fragmented watersheds, and so few natives able to use their historic range, it certainly does limit their current size. Lets get some of these watersheds back where they need to be so maybe future generations can enjoy natives who again reach their potential.

Plans are to fish the Big Lost below Mackay Res this upcoming Friday. Would love to meet you on the water if you could make it.

For another example of an Ezine that also is available as a hardcopy, check out Western Art & Architecture at: http://sgsdigital.com/pubs/waa/sample/ shows an example of their magazine with different software than you are using. I knew about this one because my wife writes for them as a freelance contributor. I think you can register on their site and look at the magazines online for free. Might give you some additional ideas. The same publisher has a magazine that is entirely online and not in hard copy – Wildlife Art Journal.

I also really enjoyed your article on the size of native fish. Lot’s of folks just assume that wapiti (or elk) as well as cutthroat trout subspecies always occurred in the headwaters and mountains of the American West. Just as the grizzly bear, grey wolf, and elk used to be a Plains animal before being pushed to the remaining, relatively isolated higher elevation habitats with shorter growing seasons, more extreme weather, and much lower productivity, cutthroat trout such as the Rio Grande cutthroat trout that I used to study and help restore in Colorado used to be found in some of Colorado’s “Blue-Ribbon” trout waters like the mainstem Rio Grande, Conejos River, and the Rio Chama, which now feature non-native, but wild brown trout and rainbow trout that excite many fly anglers.

Likewise, the beloved South Platte River near Denver used to feature native greenback cutthroat trout, as did the Arkansas River, instead of introduced brown trout, rainbow trout, and brook trout. On the other side of the divide, some of the legendary trophy trout waters that used to sustain wild trout fisheries like the Gunnison River (much of it inundated by Federal reservoirs and blocked by dams), upper Colorado River, Upper Green River, and some of their larger tributaries like Aspen’s Roaring Fork, used to feature robust populations of Colorado River cutthroat trout.

Closer to my home, in the Big Hole River Basin of Montana as well as the other fly-fishing “Meccas” of the Upper Missouri River Basin (Madison River, Jefferson River, Beaverhead River, Gallatin River, Missouri River) used to only feature large Westslope cutthroat trout, rather than the behemoth brown trout and rainbow trout that anglers worldwide seek. The rivers and streams of Yellowstone National Park and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem were the home of trophy Yellowstone cutthroat trout, not brown trout and rainbows, while the Snake River and its tributaries featured beautiful fine-spotted Snake River cutthroat trout.

Most notable on the size issue are the monsterous cutthroat trout that used to haunt Colorado’s Twin Lakes (the extinct Yellowfin cutthroat trout) and of course, the once thought extinct pure Lahontan cutthroat trout that used to ply the waters of Pyramid Lake and Lake Tahoe as well as other water bodies within the basin of Ancient Lake Lahontan.

When Lahontan cutthroat trout were rediscovered in a tiny, overgrazed stream in Nevada, they were finger-sized, like your photograph shows, not the size of Pacific salmon (up to 4 feet in length) that greatly excited anglers as well as fish culturists. Some caught as late as 1913 weighed almost 62 lbs! and of course, acted as the top fish predators in these desert and mountain lakes.

Once I found a small tributary with deep holes and undercut banks that had not been fished and was isolated because the stream it flowed into was a Superfund Site full of heavy metal wastes from mining. No one probably wanted to cross the orange and green fluorescent waters nor did they suspect any life in or near this heavily polluted stream. I spied a green twig across the river, indicating spring flows and life and chanced my health and the well-being of my chest waders. Lo and behold, I found pure Rio Grande cutthroat trout in this tiny little tributary, but because the habitat was intact, including hiding cover and over-wintering cover in the form of large woody debris, undercut banks and deep pools, the pure cutthroat trout found there were not the typical 4-6″ variety, but rather 16-18″ with some weight to them.

The bottom line message to you is that habitat size matters for determining what size the native cutthroat trout are, but does not really limit their genetic potential. The little Lahontan cutthroat trout found in that Nevada desert stream have the capability of becoming maybe 40 or 60 pounders!

In my neck of the woods, Interior redband trout that have been isolated for 100 years or so because of irrigation diversions and tributary disconnects by dewatering, if given the opportunity to migrate to the Pacific Ocean would be predictably as large as any Snake River Basin steelhead of the Upper Salmon River. Perhaps, even larger, since they probably lack the hatchery influence of stocked and released cultured fishes.

So remember, when you catch-and-release a small, native, genetically pure cutthroat trout in the American West, that it might not be necessarily young, but actually might be reproducing earlier and at a smaller size (just another life history strategy in native trouts’ bag of survival tricks) than some of its ancestors that used to swim in the larger, downstream waters like the Madison River, South Platte River, Pyramid Lake, the Salmon River and had the benefits of larger habitat with more food and the opportunity to grow to their potentials.

thanks for stimulating my thoughts today, hope I did not go on in a tangent too long and thanks for indulging me!

cheers

Larry Zuckerman, Central Idaho Director, Western Watersheds Project, Salmon, Idaho

Anyhow, I want both great color and easy reading. I’m liking some aspects of the iPad because it’s in color. And it can do the web. But, apparently, it’s backlit and not as reader friendly as the Kindle. And it doesn’t do Flash (I have no idea what’s up with that, but I have heard it professed from Apple-types that it has something to do with security?). As I mentioned to Harry, the Adam by Notion Ink looks like it could be just the ticket. I’m a bit concerned that the OS is going to be Android, but there has been some talk of Ubuntu.