The first time I saw a trout as long as my arm follow my lure almost to my waders, I squealed like a kid. I clearly saw the speckled black spots along its flanks, the large and iridescent blotch of pink across its cheeks and the whiteness of its open maw. I watched in awe as the dark-shouldered fish opened its jaws to snatch my one-ounce spoon, only to wheel around at the last moment, a manholesize swirl on the surface the only evidence of its existence.
While that trout and I didn’t connect, from that moment I was hooked. I now understood why barren, high-desert Pyramid Lake draws trout pilgrims from across the country in search of one of freshwater fishing’s trophies: huge Lahontan cutthroat trout that trace their ancestry to the Pleistocene Age, when ancient Lake Lahontan covered some 8,500 square miles of northwest Nevada, California and southern Oregon.
To twist a line from a certain famous dinosaur movie, this is a fishing adventure 10,000 years in the making. (To be fair, the Jurassic period was 145 milllion years ago.) However, Pyramid Lake — a remnant of Lake Lahontan — in it’s more recent history has been fraught with greed, stupefying water management and a fisheries plan based on displaying as many big, dead fish as possible. It got
