The Lahontan cutthroat is the largest cutthroat trout in the world, and it is native to this river. Its lake form evolved as the apex predator of the inland sea called Lake Lahontan; when the sea dried into Pyramid Lake, Walker Lake, and the tributary rivers — the Truckee, the Walker, and the Carson, including the East Fork past this door — the giants stayed on in the lakes, and the river fish held the streams. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service cites Gold Rush-era accounts of fish to sixty pounds running between Pyramid Lake and Tahoe.
For the Northern Paiute and the Washoe, the cutthroat was staple food and trade. After the Comstock boom, the fish became commerce at industrial scale: some 250,000 pounds shipped from Wadsworth, Nevada, in 1888 alone; a hundred tons moved by Wells Fargo in a single winter season, iced by rail to restaurants in San Francisco, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and Denver. On December 1, 1925, John Skimmerhorn took a 41-pound cutthroat from Pyramid Lake — still the all-tackle world record for the species.
The collapse came from downstream. Derby Dam — the brand-new federal Reclamation Service's first project, 1905 — diverted the Truckee to farms and blocked the spawning runs, and Pyramid Lake dropped some eighty feet. The last major run left the lake's river in 1938, and by the early 1940s the original Pyramid Lake strain was gone, declared extinct. Tahoe's strain collapsed in parallel.
In 1977, trout netted in a small stream on Pilot Peak — today's Morrison Creek — at the Nevada–Utah line, far outside the Lahontan basin, were identified by the biologist Robert Behnke as the lost Pyramid Lake strain. They had come, presumably, from an undocumented stocking around 1900, when Nevada shipped Pyramid eggs widely by rail and horseback.
A Utah biologist, Bryce Nielson, quietly kept the strain alive through the 1980s. In 1995, Lisa Heki of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service brought Pilot Peak eggs to the Lahontan National Fish Hatchery, where the program started in a garage. UNR geneticist Mary Peacock later pulled DNA from century-old museum specimens of the original Pyramid fish and confirmed the match.
In 2006 the strain came home to Pyramid Lake in partnership with the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, and about half a million are stocked there each year now. On October 5, 2023, an angler caught and released a cutthroat of 31 pounds 4 ounces in that lake. The giants are back.
The rarer fish is the closer one. The Paiute cutthroat's entire native range is about eleven miles of Silver King Creek, upstream of the resort in the Carson-Iceberg Wilderness. Around 1912, a young Basque herder fishing the water below Llewellyn Falls — catching more than he wanted — carried some of the surplus up past the falls in a can.
He could not have known what he had done. Hybridization with introduced rainbows later swamped the trout below the falls, and the pure strain survived only in the water he had stocked above. On September 18, 2019, biologists carried its descendants back down by mule train to the home water, returning the fish to its historic range for the first time in about a century.
The comeback ends in the water out front. The Lahontan cutthroat stocked in the East Fork today are raised from the broodstock at Heenan Lake, six miles up the Monitor Pass road, and eggs from that lake — up to about two million a year — supply cutthroat recovery across California and Nevada.
The stocked stretch starts at the resort's door.
