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Shadyside architect Michael Graybrook has spent 20 years chasing the West’s cutthroat trout. Here are an excerpt and photos from his new book on the subject.
Michael Graybrook of Oakland has chased the cutthroat trout across the West.
I purchased a large map of the United States. Using color overlay and shaded relief to indicate elevations, the map had a three-dimensional quality. I cut off the Eastern half and taped the Western half of the map to my studio wall.
Every day, I stared at the map, my eyes drawn to the mountain ranges rising up out of the flatlands. I tried to imagine what the landscapes looked like. I tried to imagine the trout. On more detailed maps, I followed dead-straight roads that went on and on, crossing big open spaces. I followed smaller roads that wiggled into the hills. I ran my finger along rivers and streams, searching for the names and places I read about.
I noticed that some species of native trout were found in very remote landscapes, particularly a few of the cutthroat trout. Many of these landscapes appeared as expected — rugged, vertical and thick with trees. Several of the cutthroat trout were located in places where the map looked blank, suggesting there would be little or no vegetation.
The land looked wild and lean. Some of the streams were intermittent; several ran for short distances and then sank into the earth. Even on a map, the isolation was unsettling. Visions of trout in dry, desolate landscapes filled my head. The need to go there was becoming hard to control.
Soon I was making phone calls and corresponding with federal and state biologists and wildlife personnel across the Western United States. At each agency, I would ask for the people who worked with native trout in their region. With their help, I began learning where the populations of the most pure strain native trout were located. I peppered my contacts with detailed questions about stream access, roads, trails, weather, spring runoff and camping locations. I was now buying maps by the box.
In 1996, I flew to Colorado to catch my first cutthroat trout. Accompanied by my friend Dwight Landis, the author of “Trout Streams of Pennsylvania: An Angler’s Guide,” I caught and photographed Colorado and Rio Grande cutthroat trout. Over the next few years, I photographed Apache trout in Arizona, Mexican golden trout from the Rio Verde watershed in Mexico and golden trout in California’s Golden Trout Wilderness.
Every summer from 2003 through 2006, I would load up my car and drive west to photograph native trout. Each year, I would have to explain to the clients of my architectural practice that I would be away for a “little while.” It became six to eight weeks, and another 10,000 to 12,000 miles on the odometer.
I once thought that trout were found only in tree-lined, tumbling mountain streams and smooth, spring-fed pastoral meadow waters. While that is sometimes true, many cutthroat trout live in hardscrabble places, the blistering hot landscapes of stone and sky in the American West.
The West, once seen, leaves a mark on you. The big open spaces, the smell of the earth, the moon on the ridge, the open road winding its way into the high country to a trout stream where the current swirls around your legs and the trout, tight to your line, flashes gold in the sharp sunlight. It was all of this that brought me here.
I have crashed through chest-high sagebrush in Oregon and scrambled up dry brush-choked gullies in Nevada to see the bold slash of orange-red under a cutthroat trout’s jaw. I have followed the sound of water across high meadows in Wyoming and California and up rocky, forested valleys in Montana to stare at the gold, yellow, crimson, tints of rose and shades of purples on the side of a trout. There were times when the trout’s spots, the deep black spots of all shapes and sizes, would fill my head. And there were times that I would drive all day, or straight through the night, chasing clear skies so that the sunlight might fall perfectly on the side of the cutthroat trout in the viewfinder of my camera.