# Fishing History

Source page: https://carsonriverresorts.com/fish/history

East Fork Carson River

The comeback from extinction, the Carson King fly, the Fourth of July weigh-in, and the planting ledger's old pages back to 1864. The working tools — regulations, live flow, recent plants, alerts — stay on the Fishing page.

The Lahontan cutthroat is the largest cutthroat trout in the world, and it
is native to this river. A 41-pound world record came out of Pyramid Lake
in 1925, and railcars of iced fish shipped to San Francisco. Then Derby Dam
blocked the spawning runs, the fishery collapsed, and by the early 1940s
the giant strain was declared extinct.

In 1977 a biologist found its descendants surviving in a desert creek a
person can step across, on Pilot Peak at the Nevada–Utah line. Eggs reached
the Lahontan hatchery in 1995; DNA from century-old museum specimens
confirmed the match; and in 2006 the strain came home to Pyramid Lake with
the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe.

The rarer cousin is closer to home. The Paiute cutthroat's entire native
range is eleven miles of Silver King Creek, upstream of the resort in the
Carson-Iceberg Wilderness. A Basque herder carrying surplus fish over a
waterfall around 1912 saved the pure strain by accident; on September 18,
2019, biologists carried its descendants back down by mule, returning the
fish to its historic range for the first time in about a century.

> The comeback ends in the water in front of the cabins: the Lahontan
> cutthroat stocked in the East Fork today are raised from the Heenan Lake
> broodstock, six miles up the Monitor Pass road.

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Carson River Resort · 12399 Highway 89, Markleeville, CA 96120 · (530) 694-2229 · store open 8am to 6pm, every day.
Machine-readable facts, units and policies: https://carsonriverresorts.com/api/agent/index.json