THE HELICOPTER VAULTED over Music Pass and touched down in an alpine meadow, kicking up grit, October sun sparkling off its cockpit. Estevan Vigil swung out, hustled away from the rotors, and peeled off his flight suit. The chopper rose, a speck against the snow-dusted wall of southern Colorado’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains, leaving me, Vigil and Vigil’s backpack, which contained about 700 Rio Grande cutthroat trout.
“This is the best day of work I’ve had in a long time,” Vigil, an aquatic biologist with Colorado Parks and Wildlife, called over the helicopter’s receding whump. “Coolest part of the job, hands down.”
Vigil was here to empty his backpack’s piscine contents into Sand Creek, which wends 12 miles from the Sangres to the glittering quartz and volcanic folds of Great Sand Dunes National Park. Sand Creek, like many of the drainages that filigree southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, is the Rio Grande cutthroat’s historic domain. For centuries, “Rios” — which, like their eponymous river canyon, come in a range of ruddy pastels — fed the Taos Pueblo, various Apache bands and Spanish-speaking shepherds, including Vigil’s great-grandfather, Felipe. “He’d be up there all summer with his flock and
