Catching our First Yellowstone Cutthroat Trout!

Hiking in all of our gear

This week we electro-fished the wonderfully named Jackass Creek in Grand Targhee National Park. The sites we were surveying had only been electro-fished once before and the notes on how to find the sights were pretty vague. One description informed us that the beginning of a unit was near a “large split pine”. There were around a million large split pines on the creek. Luckily, we had some GPS coordinates. Unluckily, the first day, we plugged in the wrong coordinates and spent around an extra hour crashing through the woods before we realized we had hiked way too far carrying all of our heavy gear. Oops. On the bright side, the wildlife sightings were great! We saw a baby skunk, some snakes, a bird’s nest, and best of all; Matt found a full set of epic moose antlers!!

Yellowstone Cutthroat!

     
Hands down, the stars of the show at Jackass Creek were the Yellowstone Cutthroat Trout.  These were the first YCT we’ve caught this summer and they are stunning fish. We learned that the population at Jackass creek is unique because it is the only pure and original YCT population left in the Henry’s Fork Watershed. The rest of the watershed has non-native brook or rainbow trout mixed in, or has been seeded from Yellowstone Lake. The fish we caught were incredibly wild and very difficult to measure and keep in the bucket. We also caught more of them than had been caught the last time this creek was surveyed, so that is potentially very good news for the cutthroats.  It was exciting to explore  this remote part of the watershed full of bear signs and cutthroats. 

Matt and the Antlers

Bird’s Nest

Gillnetting Island Park Reservoir

The other day we met up with some great folks from Fish and Game (Greg, Jamie, and Jordan) and helped them survey the fish populations in Island Park Reservoir.  They had put down ten huge nets at various sites the night before, and we pulled them out in the morning.  We brought the nets over to the shore and set about detangling the fish. Gillnets are appropriately named because the fish’s gills get tangled in the holes when they try to swim past. Untangling them without mutilating them was a little tricky, but we had to be careful because we needed to accurately measure the length of each fish.

Fish and Game has been tracking fish populations in the Island Park Reservoir for a while, so the data we were collecting will help them determine population trends. For each fish we weighed and measured them. For the few rainbow trout we caught we also collected the otoliths aka the ear bones. Charlie was able to pull them out in a record 11 seconds! All in all we caught close to 1,000 fish, mostly suckers and chubs. One little kokanee also made it into a net!  Working with Fish and Game was super fun; they treated us to a delicious lunch and taught us the difference between the types of fish.  Hopefully we can grab a few more beautiful days out on the water with them.