On the Fly Magazine: The Greater Yellowstone Fishing Resource

Precipitous decline has anglers, experts scrambling to save Teton River’s native trout.

As Lyn Benjamin rows down a lazy stretch of the Teton River, she points to new willows budding along the riverbank where habitat restoration efforts have taken hold.

Although Mother Nature has nearly erased the human handy work, Benjamin appears to know this stretch of river by heart. She explains how the carpet of green, now gently rolling toward river’s edge, used to be a steeply cut bank of crumbling dirt.

Yet the habitat restoration successes belie a crisis lurking just beneath the Teton River’s watery surface – a problem more than a century in the making that could be a lot more complicated to solve than streambank restoration.

In 2003, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game revealed that a routine electro-fishing population survey showed a precipitous decline in the native Yellowstone cutthroat trout. The population had plummeted from around 135 fish per mile, counted a few years earlier, to a staggering 10 fish per mile.

“When those numbers were finally made publicly available, shockwaves ran through both the angling and the environmental community,” said Benjamin, who straddles both interests as an angler, a hydrologist and the executive director of Friends of the Teton River. The population bombshell caught even those with intimate knowledge of the river and its fisheries by surprise, she said. “Nobody saw this coming.”

You can read the rest of this article in our print publication.
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