EDITOR’S NOTE: One remarkable component of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is its complete suite of wild North American mammals living much as they did before European explorers arrived. In fact, no other place in the Lower 48 has such a collection of predators and plant-eaters; from lynx to grizzly bears and from beavers to bison.
That puts an onus on us as guardians of such a rare landscape to both maintain its qualities and share its lessons. This series of stories wrestles with how we define the word “wild,” in a place tangled with prehistoric food webs and artificial boundary lines.
So what can a Yellowstone grizzly bear teach a Eurasian lynx? Do Polish free-roaming bison have advice for their American cousins? And can a world-class wild trout fishery double as a world-class business? Is rewilding really wild?
In this Mountain Journal Sunday Read, here’s Part 2 in our series, “What Is Wild?”
Montana’s official fish has some identity issues.
When Governor Thomas Judge crowned the blackspotted cutthroat trout the state’s piscatorial mascot in 1977, he politically made happy twins out of two feuding sibling species. The wild westslope cutthroat trout is native to waters west of the Continental Divide. The Yellowstone cutthroat trout, now known as the Rocky Mountain cutthroat, evolved on the eastern fringe of the Rockies. Both have the namesake red slash of color below their gills. But genetically, they are different fish.
So what? So, one of the ways overseers of Yellowstone National Park sought to attract visitors as far back as the 1880s was to brag about its fishing. But the native cutthroats weren’t enough; so they were augmented with loads of nonnative rainbow, brook and brown trout. Thousands of those fish were dropped into historically fishless lakes and streams.
The additions went wild, numerically and literally, becoming self-sustaining populations in their new homes. One result was today’s billion-dollar fishing industry. But another outcome was a perpetual maintenance machine involving fish hatcheries, water rights, disease control and complex human tinkering of an ostensibly untrammeled ecosystem.
Not only that, but the fish didn’t get along. Before the “blackspotted cutthroat” genetic differences were recognized, wildlife managers transferred reams of Yellowstone cutthroats over the Rockies to help out struggling populations of westslope cutthroats. The two species can interbreed, but the resulting hybrids lose crucial strengths of both parents. Government biologists have dumped loads of fish-poisoning rotenone into Glacier National Park lakes to get rid of artificially stocked cutthroats from Yellowstone. Meanwhile, biologists from those same agencies have set up commercial fishing fleets to exterminate nonnative lake trout in Yellowstone Lake because they’re eating all the Yellowstone, now Rocky Mountain, cutthroats.
In September, the U.S. Forest Service lost a federal lawsuit when it proposed rotenoning rainbow trout in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness in order to replace them with hatchery-raised-but-native Rocky Mountain cutthroats. The rainbows often eat or out-compete the native cutthroats, and hybridize into “cutbows” that have a reduced chance of survival than either genetic parent.
So then, how should an angler think about the fish on the hook? A recreational pastime? A communion with wild nature? A next meal? And how should the rest of us help manage the fisheries in this wild ecosystem and its waterways?
“That’s the challenge we face as stewards of the resource,” said Adam Strainer, the fisheries division administrator or self-described “Fish Chief” of the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks. “We’re walking a knife’s edge recognizing the value of native species and recreational species, trying to keep those species endemic to the landscape.
“But people value fishing — period,” Strainer told Mountain Journal. “Whether they’re in a boat, or wading or whatever, that’s one way they connect to the aquatic resource.”
Big business
Cold-water game fish, mostly trout, compelled more than 450,000 licensed anglers to spend $919 million in the 2024-25 fishing season. That revenue supported more than 15,900 jobs in the state and $1.5 billion in economic output, according to a recent study by the University of Montana’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research.
About 30 percent of last years’ anglers also cast for warm-water fish such as bass, pike and paddlefish. But the large majority of both resident and nonresident license-holders sought the Salmonidae family in cold lakes, rivers and streams.
“Our cold-water fishery generates an economic impact on the scale of a national park for the state of Montana,” said Jeffrey Michael, BBER director and lead author of the study. “Cold-water angling attracts anglers from around the world. And at about $5,000 per trip, for the average nonresident, cold-water fishing trip, that’s a big economic impact.”
By comparison, agriculture adds about $1.95 billion to the state’s $78.4 billion gross domestic product, according to Michael. The BBER study examined the many ways trout turn into money, including guide fees, hotel accommodations, restaurant meals, truck rentals, and groceries.
“And they spend their money differently than the average Montana visitor,” he said. “They’re spending more money on services that are labor-intensive, things that directly support jobs and income in the state.”
One of those job-holders is Hilary Hutcheson, a professional flyfishing outfitter specializing in the waters around Glacier National Park. The North, Middle and South forks of the Flathead River were among the first to gain federal protection when the Wild and Scenic River Act was passed 50 years ago. The law ranks rivers on their “Outstandingly Remarkable Values,” or ORVs. The presence of fish, Hutcheson told Mountain Journal, is not an ORV.
“The Flathead is not known for giant trophy fish,” she said. “The reason this place got the highest level of federal protection was never trophy trout. We have about 600 fish per mile on the Flathead, compared to 8,000 on the Missouri [River]. We just had our busiest season ever … and no one was disappointed about not catching big fish. No one was going, ‘Where are the brown trout?’”
Hutcheson says many people think of fishing as a progression from catching a fish, to catching a bunch of fish, to catching the biggest fish. But just as the old joke reminds, it’s called “fishing,” not “catching.”
“Now they’re seeking out the experience of being in a wild place, or something wilder than what they’ve experienced before,” she said. “The bucket-list fishing experience now is being able to catch a native, wild black-spotted cutthroat fish in a native ecosystem.”
A powerful attractant
Fish have been people-magnets for millennia, but often not in ways we might expect. In prehistoric North America, they attracted humans to festival sites where trading and socializing were the focus, not food collection.
Historian Richard White observed that even the massive salmon runs throughout the Columbia River watershed in pre-settler times didn’t convey much status or power on the Indian tribes that dominated the area. When the salmon were running, there was too much food for anyone to control or profit from. When the run ended, there was no way to revive it besides waiting next to an empty river for 11 months. Despite the Coastal Salish practice of staging smoke shacks full of dried salmon in remote spots of the Pacific Northwest, fish generally aren’t a storable or tradable resource.
Toward the end of the 19th century, conservationist John Muir promoted fishing as a lure for enticing Americans onto their public lands. He saw the hobby as a way to build personal connections to wild places, thereby garnering political support for protecting those lands from logging and mining. Muir talked up fishing as a way to restore vitality in Americans whose spirits were leadened by urban isolation.
“And if you look at the advertising the railroads used, they weren’t lying; there’s some great fishing out here. But it’s largely an artificial, manmade environment. It’s more an idealized version of nature.”
James Thull, trout and salmonids librarian, Renne Library, Montana State University
That campaign coincided historically with the expansion of transcontinental railroads, development of national parks such as Yellowstone, Grand Teton and Glacier, and a burgeoning tourist industry. Women as well as men were pictured in promotional fliers wading riverbanks, rowing boats and showing off hooked trophies.
“And if you look at the advertising the railroads used, they weren’t lying; there’s some great fishing out here,” said James Thull, trout and salmonids librarian at Montana State University’s Renne Library. “But it’s largely an artificial, manmade environment. It’s more an idealized version of nature.”
The development of Yellowstone National Park helped set the trend. “I noticed with surprise the barrenness of most of the water of the Park,” Superintendent Frazier Boutelle observed in his 1889 annual report. “Besides the beautiful Shoshone and other small lakes there are hundreds of miles of as fine streams as any in existence without a fish of any kind.”
Boutelle aroused the interest of U.S. Fish Commission Director Marshall McDonald in transforming Yellowstone to “see all of these waters so stocked that the pleasure-seeker in the Park can enjoy fine fishing within a few rods of any hotel or camp.” (Not to be confused with a fishing pole, a rod was a surveyor’s measurement usually totaling five-and-a-half yards – and for anglers’ amusement, also colloquially known as a “perch.”)
Just days after his first tour of Yellowstone in 1889, McDonald gave orders to send 5,000 baby brook trout from the Northville, Michigan federal hatchery by Northern Pacific railcar to Livingston, Montana. From there, the fish would ride the dedicated line south to Cinnabar, just upstream of the Yellowstone Park entrance at Mammoth.
That railcar was a sight. It was custom built with an office at one end, a kitchen at the other, berths for five humans and wooden lockers designed to hold 10-gallon milk cans for the fish — 120 to a can. The car featured hot-water heat for the humans, while the fish enjoyed ice packs on each can lid, hand-cut from the winter before.
By 1892, everything was “thriving splendidly,” according to new Superintendent George Anderson. In 1894, he wrote the stocking had “multiplied to an almost inconceivable extent. It is the general verdict of all who have fished here that no better fishing can be found anywhere in the world.”
Recreation and conservation
Ironically, Muir wasn’t much of an angler himself. When Forest Service Chief Gifford Pinchot met Muir during a three-week exploration of the Glacier Park region in 1896, he described the famous naturalist: “In his late fifties, tall, thin, cordial, and a most fascinating talker, I took to him at once. It amazed me to learn that he never carried even a fishhook with him on his solitary explorations. He said fishing wasted too much time.”
An even greater irony was that the fishing trend Muir used to protect naturally wild places depended largely on unnatural means. As Anders Halverson recounted in An Entirely Synthetic Fish, the discovery that a relatively rare species of rainbow trout endemic to one tiny watershed in California could be transported and transplanted into almost any cold-water ecosystem revolutionized the fish-stocking industry.
That’s what happened in Buffalo Creek, which runs out of the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness into Yellowstone Park north of Tower Junction. The historically fishless creek was artificially stocked with Yellowstone (now Rocky Mountain) cutthroats twice, in the 1920s and again in 1942. It also received a load of rainbow trout in 1932.
Nearly a century later, in 2023, the U.S. Forest Service proposed killing all the fish in the drainage with rotenone and replacing them with native, hatchery-raised Rocky Mountain cutthroats. In its planning documents, the Forest Service cited the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem as the “best sport fishing area in the entire continent.” The nonprofit group Wilderness Watch sued, arguing the plan to use 81 helicopter flights, 20 personnel and almost 5,000 pounds of equipment to tinker with the Absaroka-Beartooth’s wilderness character was unjustified. On October 24 of this year, U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy agreed.
“[T]he wilderness neither depended on Yellowstone cutthroat trout for ecological balance nor contributed them to the watershed as a whole,” Molloy wrote. “It is unclear how the elimination of one of those species in favor of another, in a stream neither originally inhabited, preserves either the primeval wilderness character or the baseline wilderness character at the time of designation. Rather, as argued by Wilderness Watch, ‘this is not ecological restoration — it is continued manipulation.’”
Nevertheless, as Muir predicted, fishing remains one of the most effective attractants to get humans outdoors. FWP’s biennial angler pressure surveys going back to the 1970s show continued growth. There were 3.6 million angler-days 2023 and the agency expects that to rise to 3.8 million when the 2025 reports come in.
A new twist on an old proverb reads: Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day. Give him a fly rod, and you’ll never see him on weekends. Greater Yellowstone never had fish in quantities like the Columbia River salmon runs. The ecosystem’s wild cutthroats did qualify as a major food resource for grizzly bears — before nonnative lake trout devoured the population. But the addition of other nonnatives like rainbows and browns attracted humans in great numbers and created a billion-dollar industry. Advocates like John Muir leveraged that attraction to conserve wild places, although the impacts of recreation often undermine their “wild” qualities.
“I’m a big advocate of getting folks out in nature,” Thull said. “You care more if you get to see that elk running across the field, or feel cold water across your toes. At that point, the difference between wild and native is pretty thin.”
Click here to read Part 1 in the “What is Wild?” series: “Missing Lynx: Rewilding the World.”
