Calling all fishermen!

There has been a recent (re)discovery at Pyramid Lake. The Lahontan cutthroat trout, once thought to be extinct, has resurfaced. For years in the late 19^th and early 20^th century, fishermen frequented the lake hoping to hook the Goliath trout (the official world record was a 41 pounder caught in 1925). However, after the Truckee River was dammed, the population of the cutthroat dropped until they were completely gone from the lake by the mid 1940s.

In the 1970s, a biologist found a strain of the cutthroat in a small creek on the border of Nevada and Utah called Pilot Peak. Apparently a Utah man had stocked the small creek with the fish in the early 1900s and had never made a record of it. And so, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service worked hard to preserve the fish by bringing the eggs they found to a hatchery in Gardnerville. In 2006, they stocked Pyramid Lake with the cutthroat spawn and crossed their fingers.

Those prayers were answered in November 2012, when a Reno man caught a 24 pound trout. Since then, sportsmen have visited the lake in hopes of catching (and releasing) the biggest fish of their lives. According to biologists, the fish that have been caught are still adolescents, with more than 2/3s of their life left. For fisherman far and wide this is great news. There is still time to break that 41 pound record. 

-Sophie