I recently triumphantly returned from California with four new additions to my list of Western Native Trout Challenge (WNTC) fish: California Golden Trout, Little Kern Golden Trout, Kern River Rainbow Trout, and Lahontan Cutthroat Trout. I fished with my life coach and aesthetician (we’ll call him Viator to continue with the snooty theme and his student role), and he also managed to hook, land, and photograph these fish. I’ll have a lot more to say about the WNTC in later posts.
I should hasten to add that Viator and I had already caught each of these fish types/taxa long ago when we were actively engaged in participating in the California Heritage Trout Challenge. We first caught the three upper Kern River fish (the CGT, LKGT, and KRRT) in 2007, when we were a fair amount younger and the LCT was one of our first achievements in 2000. It was slick to go back and catch these fish again (half in new waters), but our primary motivation was that the WNTC does not “grandfather” fish caught before its inception in May 2019.
We did some hiking to get to these fish, had some adventures of a moderate intensity, and enjoyed some camping.
Welcome to the Trout Tracking blog. The purpose of the blog is to provide information to anglers who are interested in pursuing official salmonid (i.e., trout and trout relative) fishing Challenges/Slams and, possibly, in creating and pursuing their own DIY fishing Challenges. There are and have been some excellent blogs and websites out there with similar themes, for various and sundry fish taxa, especially regarding life-lists. This focus of this blog will be the research and effort needed to learn about, find, and catch the types of North American salmonid species that might be part of a Challenge, particularly in the western United States.
Most of those reading this far will be aware of the official state Challenges/Slams that are available. The oldest of these, I believe, is the Wyoming Cutt-Slam, which was initiated in 1996 by a Wyoming Game and Fish Department biologist named Ron Remmick. I completed the Wyoming Cutt-Slam in 2000 and have been working on similar official and DIY projects ever since. I am a stickler for using “cutt” as a nickname for cutthroat trout and will not respond to anyone referring to them as “cuts” or “cuttys.”
Similarly, I am not fond of the term “Slam” and will usually refer to any such program or project as a “Challenge.” The Wyoming Cutt-Slam acquired the term legitimately because requires the angler to catch four types of cutthroat trout and is a reference to the baseball term “grand slam” which scores four runs. Subsequent formal and informal fishing Challenges have been referred to as “Slams” but usually without the tie to the number four. I also think that “Slam” sounds inherently violent, while I like to think that what I’m doing in a challenge as a learning experience. Pretty pretentious, huh? Here’s another snooty pretension: I’ll capitalize “Challenge” when it refers to one or several named programs (official or DIY), but use the lower case when referring to salmonid challenges in general.
There’s probably not a sharp distinction between a salmonid challenge and any sort of fish life list. The primary distinction between challenges and life-lists, as I see it, is that challenge has an inherent geographical emphasis while a life-list emphasizes a timespan–obviously most often the full lifetime of an angler, birder, etc., but sometimes less, as in the birding “Big Year.” Tell me why I’m wrong–I love to argue or even learn something new sometimes.
I’m inexperienced in this website/blog thing, and also lazy. I hope to put a post up weekly, and I hope to figure out how to allow readers to comment on posts and possibly also to post some of their own content. We’ll see. I also invite you to e-mail me at Piscator@TroutTracking.com with comments and questions.
