The Fish That Climbed a Mountain
May 29, 2025 at 03:30PM
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Alex Brown | Longreads | May 29, 2025 | 4,697 words (16 minutes)
One hundred thirty baby girls stare up at me with bulging black eyes. They’re all gasping, fading fast. I’m on a rescue mission, deployed with an elite team of federal operatives, staged in remote mountain wilderness a stone’s throw from the Canadian border. Things are not looking good.
One of my partners hustles over to a creek and fills a container with cold, fresh water. As he returns, another team member pulls out a canister of oxygen and unwinds a long tube. The fate of the infants will hinge on this operation.
A few weeks ago, the girls were selected from the product page of a breeding company: Rainbow trout eggs, disease resistant, all-female, bred with an extra chromosome to ensure sterility, genetically selected for high growth rates and maximum fillet yield.
Yesterday, our team collected the baby fish from a metal trough in the state-run hatchery where they’d spent the entirety of their short lives. From there, we shuttled them via car, boat, and backpack into the “American Alps” of North Cascades National Park—a jagged, glacier-capped landscape in Washington state.
The journey has been hard on these little trout, and the water in their small plastic container is now warm, stagnant, and low on oxygen. They’ve been starved for some time, so they don’t suffocate on their own fecal matter during the trip. Several of the girls are belly-up, still breathing but nearly motionless. A mass of lethargic fish clusters at the bottom, their pink-tipped tails hardly moving.
We need these fish to survive, because we’re operating under a mandate from Congress to stock trout in the park’s mountain lakes. Trout might be the archetypical creatures in the popular imagination of an alpine lake, but, in reality, they’re aliens on this landscape. The plunging waterfalls that give the Cascade Range its name block fish from swimming up into the mountains. But, in this one national park, the government has made a rare exception to usher the aliens in.
My teammates on this mission are a quartet of National Park Service scientists and two Trail Blazers—members of a small fishing club based in Washington state. The park service and this club waged a decades-long war over trout in the mountain lakes of the North Cascades. Now, under the orders of Congress, the group’s volunteers and park biologists are working together on a plan to bring these fish into the alpine.
We pour out the stagnant water. Quickly, the two Trail Blazers refill the jug with frigid stream water and snake the oxygen tube into the opening. The pinkie-sized fish are thrashed around as gas bubbles roil the water. We seal the container back up and I replace it in the top of my backpack. As we get back on the trail, I hear the splashing of tiny bodies just behind my head. Have we resuscitated them enough to make it to their new home?
And the other question I can’t shake: If we can get them there, do they even belong?
My first time casting a line in a mountain wilderness was the summer of 2014. I had joined my dad, brother, and some family friends on a backpacking trip in the Eagles Nest Wilderness in Colorado. After we made camp by a lake, I walked down to the shoreline and assembled a small fishing rod.
The first cast splashed into the reflected mountains that stretched across the lake’s surface, spreading ripples across the rock faces and snow patches. I had just started retrieving my line when suddenly my rod doubled over. I yanked back on the pole and started reeling. The fish zigged one way, then the other, leaping above the surface and thrashing furiously. After an intense battle, I pulled the exhausted fish to shore and unhooked a gorgeous, iridescent trout. A few casts later, and I had another one.
For several days, we ate fresh trout for dinner every night, sizzled in a fry pan with a blend of seasonings. I spent nearly every daylight hour fishing on the shore of the lake, obsessed with this wild place and the thrill of living off the land. I caught at least 50 trout, only keeping a few for the evening feast, but never tiring of that fresh pulse of excitement when a fish struck my lure.
It was a trip that changed something in me. I’ve spent the decade-plus since reorienting my life to spend more time in wild places. In 2017, I spent five months thru-hiking the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mexican border to Canada. My wife and I spent our honeymoon last summer road-tripping through the mountains of Canada and Alaska.
Would the Colorado trip have been as impactful if there weren’t fish in that lake? I truly don’t know.
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What I do know—now—is that the trout in the lake were dumped from an airplane by Colorado Parks & Wildlife. That the first salmon I ever caught, on a river along Lake Michigan, was a species that didn’t exist in the Great Lakes until 1966. That the rainbows I pulled out of Green Lake in Seattle, the fishing that kept me sane during the pandemic, reached their impressive size after years of being fattened in a hatchery. My treasured memories, I’ve learned, are all subsidized by a massive Fish Industrial Complex—one that has taken a toll on all sorts of insects, invertebrates, frogs, and salamanders.
It was a Twitter post that first alerted me that this system included a national park: North Cascades, about three hours from my home outside Seattle, is one of the most remote, rugged landscapes in the Lower 48, and the only park to stock non-native fish. I became obsessed with how this came to be. I pored over decades’ worth of newspaper clippings and congressional testimony. I called up state wildlife managers, federal scientists, fishing club members, and environmentalists. Then, after over a year of research, I found myself on a mountainside deep in the park—with 130 baby trout on my back.
While they don’t get much public attention, in the US, our state Fish & Game agencies are our wildlife authorities, with jurisdiction over just about everything that swims, runs, hops, burrows, and crawls. These agencies get the vast majority of their revenue from fishing and hunting license sales, plus a federal tax on the sale of hook-and-bullet gear. This is what’s known as an “enterprise funding model,” and it allows anglers to take pride in their role in paying for conservation work.
The problem is that a great deal of that “conservation work” is focused on producing enough products for hunters and anglers to keep buying licenses. The agencies spend much of their money on fish hatcheries and other interventions to place target species on the landscape. “I used to joke that we ought to be part of the Agriculture Department,” Fred Koontz, a former member of the Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission, once told me during an interview. “What we do is produce animals for harvest, we plant pheasants and fish, we’re producing crops.”
My treasured memories, I’ve learned, are all subsidized by a massive Fish Industrial Complex—one that has taken a toll on all sorts of insects, invertebrates, frogs, and salamanders.
Then we have the feds. Wildlife managers at the national level mostly concern themselves with animals listed under the Endangered Species Act, leaving states to handle the rest. But there have long been clashes over whether states’ management authority extends to federal public land, and whether the Wilderness Act of 1964—a US federal statute to preserve wild lands in an “untrammeled” state—allows for fish stocking.
For decades, national parks have taken a hard-line view that forbids state officials and their fish. Only in the North Cascades has the door remained cracked open for trout.
Thirty-five years before my trout came to life, another batch of rainbows sat in a state facility, awaiting their marching orders. A cold war between the state of Washington and the federal government was escalating toward real conflict. These fish had been conscripted to serve as paratroopers in the state’s first attack, dropped behind enemy lines.
For years, officials at the National Park Service had been seeking to restore lakes to natural ecosystems teeming with amphibians and invertebrates instead of fly-fishing playgrounds stocked with trout. Emerging research indicated that lakes with high densities of planted trout were in bad shape. The aggressive fish gobbled up frogs and salamanders. The invertebrates at the base of the lakes’ food chain—crustaceans, plankton, tiny shrimp—plummeted as well. Some scientists came to regard trout-infested lakes as ecological deserts.
By 1987, every national park but North Cascades had phased out its fish-stocking program, and this last park was finally poised to fall into line. But Washington State Wildlife Department leaders still felt it was their authority to decide which animals appeared on the landscape. Recreation added to the park experience. Fishermen were their customer base, a constituency to be served. Growing desperate, they prepared to take matters into their own hands.
Director Jack Wayland told the press that his agency had secured a helicopter and a pilot. The following day, they would collect thousands of rainbow trout from a state hatchery and “bomb” a dozen lakes in the national park—federal policy be damned.“The state looked at lakes like a farmer looks at a cornfield,” Jon Jarvis, the park’s natural resources chief at the time, told me. “Their job was to produce more things that people can hunt and catch.”
These fish had been conscripted to serve as paratroopers in the state’s first attack, dropped behind enemy lines.
Jarvis was part of a new generation of National Park Service leaders who valued landscapes as much for their ecological balance as their recreational potential. When state officials dismissively said that trout eat “squigglies in the mud,” Jarvis countered that those squigglies were protected.
After the state announced its plan for a piscine air strike, he plotted a counterattack. “Our plan was to go right in behind them and poison the lakes,” he recalled. He intended to use rotenone, a chemical compound lethal to fish. Park scientists would send fly fishermen home empty-handed and keep frogs and salamanders in their place atop the aquatic food chain.
The helicopter never took off. A high-ranking bureaucrat from the US Department of the Interior in Washington, DC, himself a fishing enthusiast, declared a temporary truce: Fish stocking would continue, but the state would help to pay for a study on the effects of trout in mountain ecosystems.
The air raid had been scrubbed, but the war would drag on for decades.
By July 2014, Jarvis was three promotions removed from his fish-poisoning scheme and entering his fifth year as President Obama’s director of the National Park Service. Five years had also passed since the last trout was planted in North Cascades National Park. In 2009, after endless negotiations, truces, and studies, the park finally concluded that its mandate to protect wilderness was not compatible with dumping non-native fish into lakes for the enjoyment of anglers.
Unless Congress revoked its own commandments for wilderness, there was no choice but to return the landscape to a fishless state. The long saga, in the eyes of the government, was over.
Not so for the anglers.
The Trail Blazers hadn’t given up. This Washington-based fishing club is a small clan of about 50 volunteers who conduct trout stocking and survey work across the state—a group of grizzled Johnny Appleseed-like characters who roam the landscape planting fish instead of trees. Where other states drop trout from airplanes, Washington wildlife managers send Trail Blazers trudging into the mountains with baby fish on their backs.
Now blocked from the North Cascades, the club’s members decided to climb Capitol Hill instead. Sandy McKean, a longtime Trail Blazer, was one of the club members who “sponsored” lakes in the North Cascades, hauling in the fish provided by state hatcheries. His idea of paradise is to be reclined in a tiny backpacking raft in the middle of a lake surrounded by mountains, waiting for fish to bite, occasionally enhancing the experience with a substance now legal in Washington state. North Cascades National Park, where glittering lakes sit beneath towering rock spires and brawny glaciers, represented just about the most idyllic version of that nirvana.
McKean was not about to give up on the dream. “We decided to call the bluff of the National Park Service,” he told me. “They said, ‘Unless Congress authorizes fish stocking, we can’t do it.’ So I said, ‘Let’s get a bill passed.’”
Former US Representative Doc Hastings, a small-government Republican whose district included the park, was sympathetic to the club’s arguments. The North Cascades landscape had a long history of trout stocking, preceding the relatively recent establishment of the national park in 1968. As Martin Doern, who was then serving as Hastings’ legislative director, told me, “Although the mission of the Park Service evolved, [Hastings] was definitely more of a defender of the community’s understanding that they would still be able to do this [after the park was formed].”
Doern and McKean put their heads together and drafted a bill that directed the agency to restore its fish-stocking program in North Cascades National Park. For years, the legislation went nowhere. Even McKean, the dogged advocate, gave up hope and stopped paying attention to the latest developments on Capitol Hill. Then one day in 2014, he got a call: His bill had become law.
“Frankly, I didn’t believe it,” McKean said. “I thought it would never pass.”
Hastings was serving his final term as chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources and trying to wrap up a few final priority issues, Doern recalled. He may have swapped favors with some colleagues. The bill quietly slipped through the Senate with little fanfare: The Trail Blazers had won.
Congress was now telling Jon Jarvis that the alien trout belonged after all. His boss, President Obama, signed H.R.1158, the North Cascades National Park Service Complex Fish Stocking Act, on July 25. “We tried to rally the conservation community to our side on this issue, and got basically nowhere,” Jarvis recalled. Environmental groups, he found, had boards that were composed heavily of fly fishermen.
My 130 baby trout have finally made it to their new home. It’s been nine years since Congress instructed the National Park Service to find up to 42 lakes and fill them with fish. I’m standing on the shore of one of them, a 15-acre lake shaped like a drumstick, flanked by fir-covered slopes that march up to rocky precipices.
For now, there are no fish in these waters. The last survivors of the batch planted here in 2017 likely died out over the winter. I’m told the fish caught here last summer, nearing the end of their life cycle, were absolute monsters.
On the far shore, a pair of our team’s Park Service researchers walk the bank, dipping nets into the water periodically. They’re sampling for all sorts of insects and aquatic invertebrates, the “squigglies” that will soon make up the diet of our little trout.
The stocking program today doesn’t just dump fish in the water. It’s a careful partnership between the National Park Service, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, and the Trail Blazers club. They plant sterile trout in small numbers—a safeguard to ensure frogs and salamanders aren’t wiped out by a runaway fish population. Counterintuitively, the trout that reproduce naturally cause the most ecological harm. The new method, where each generation of fish is raised in a hatchery and carried in by hand, seems to allow these waters to retain more of their natural balance.
In addition to hauling in the trout, the Trail Blazers conduct their own survey work that helps inform the park’s management plans. Plenty of lakes still have self-sustaining trout populations, an artifact of the days when the fish planted here weren’t sterile. In some cases, those fish have reproduced in immense numbers. These “stunted” lakes are full of thousands of undersized trout, not great for fishing or ecological balance. The research conducted with the aid of the club has helped determine not only where fish should be stocked, but where they should be eradicated. It’s provided valuable information on how the presence of trout affects invertebrate populations—it could even be argued that the reimagined stocking program has done more good than harm to the park’s habitat.
The Trail Blazers certainly feel they’ve created a model program. Years of advocacy, now backed up by grunt work and sweat, have restored a treasured recreation opportunity while using modern methods to avoid the pitfalls of old-school fish planting. Lakes that once hosted thousands of fish now have a curated batch of a few hundred, topped off maybe twice a decade.
“What people don’t understand is that the best way to create a fishery in these high lakes is to stock them, to control the population. The environmental damage happens when the fish populations get out of control,” McKean told me.
I wade into the lake and pick up the carton holding the trout. They seem lively, much improved from their sluggish state a few hours ago. I open the top and slowly pour out a little water. A few fish shoot into the lake. They dart around, looking for cover, quickly fanning out in the rocks and weeds. They seem right at home.
Soon, the carton is empty. No trout float to the surface; all 130 have survived. Before long, they’ll have explored every nook and cranny of this lake. They’ll learn to feast on what the lake has to offer. Some will be eaten themselves. In a few years, they’ll have grown to a catchable size, and the Trail Blazers will be back with their fly rods.
I won’t pretend I can get inside the mind of a trout, but it does strike me as a wild experience. To be raised in a metal trough, fed on pellets, then carted up a mountain into a completely new environment—but maybe one that feels more like home than the hatchery ever did. I imagine explaining to the fish that their lives will play out here now because Congress decided that recreational opportunities are important.
David Fluharty wishes I hadn’t carried those trout into the park. Prior to my trip, he told me to give him a call, so he could share the “terrible tale” of how this stocking program came to be revived, how fishermen and politicians teamed up to defeat the scientists and conservationists.
Fluharty is an emeritus professor at the University of Washington and also served for a time as president of the North Cascades Conservation Council. That group’s advocacy was pivotal for securing the creation of North Cascades National Park in 1968. Since then, it has served as a conservation voice for issues related to the park.
In Fluharty’s telling, his group partly pushed for park status because so many of Washington’s lakes had been taken over by planted trout. While lakes in the US Forest Service system were basically free rein for fish stockers, converting the land to a national park offered some hope for protection. “Out of 4,000 high lakes in Washington, we thought it wasn’t too much to ask that we put the 275 lakes in the North Cascades off limits to fish stocking and try to restore their natural integrity,” he said.
I imagine explaining to the fish that their lives will play out here now because Congress decided that recreational opportunities are important.
Fluharty has hosted Trail Blazers at his house, finds them to be thoughtful guys, and respects their commitment. Yet he remains deeply frustrated that they won. The idea that they’ve engineered a solution that may be less harmful to the lake ecosystems does nothing to quell that. He’s not impressed with the “Frankenfish” that can’t reproduce. “That’s not the standard to which the National Park Service is supposed to be managing,” he said. “To me, it’s absolutist that you protect everything and let natural processes take place. We shouldn’t be trying to decide if there’s an acceptable tradeoff.”
At one point, Fluharty found himself in a debate with a Trail Blazer who argued that trout just eat mosquitoes. “I said, ‘Well, I’m for the mosquitoes. Frogs need the mosquitoes, salamanders need the mosquitoes.’” Those arguments—it’s just a few lakes, it’s just mosquitoes—are what Fluharty sees as the root of the problem. If even federal wilderness in a national park is subject to manipulation, no matter how carefully crafted, what does that say about the rest of our landscapes?
If Congress will pass a law, if wildlife agencies will breed sterile fish, if the National Park Service will escort stockers into the alpine, just to ensure a small fishing club can enjoy some summer weekends, what does that say about the reasons we value wild places?
The North Cascades is one of the few places where these questions are even considered. For most of the last century, anywhere outside of national parks, wildlife managers have operated under a Manifest Destiny to breed trout by the millions and establish a fishery in almost any lake or stream that will support them. For Fluharty, the fight over the North Cascades feels like trying to save one remaining manuscript from a library that’s already been plundered.
In America, rainbow trout are somewhere between an agricultural product, an apex predator, and sporting goods for a multi-billion-dollar industry. Once found only in certain coastal streams along the Pacific Ocean, they’ve now staked a claim to nearly every corner of the world, thanks to our zealous hatchery programs.
In the wild, the fish lay thousands of eggs along gravel stream bottoms. Freshly hatched trout carry a yolk sac, which feeds them for a few weeks. They quickly learn to feed on plankton and grow to the “fingerling” stage—the size of the fish I carried into the park. At this point, they’re lined with vertical stripes along the length of their tiny bodies.
In America, rainbow trout are somewhere between an agricultural product, an apex predator, and sporting goods for a multi-billion-dollar industry.
These little fish know how to get the most out of a lake’s buffet. If it’s in the water, rainbow trout will eat it: Plankton, eggs, tadpoles, minnows, crayfish, leeches, and flies are all on the menu. They grow quickly. Within a few years, they may be well over a foot in length and meaty enough to make a hearty dinner. By now, they’ve developed an olive color, speckled with dark spots, and the distinctive highlighter-pink stripe that gives them their name.
It was in 1875 that the first rainbow trout were transplanted outside of their native waters, a batch of 500 eggs gifted to the state of New York. They were soon drawing rave reviews, as Anders Halverson reports in his book An Entirely Synthetic Fish: “‘We believe we shall have conferred the greatest possible boon upon the anglers, not only of New York, but of all the Atlantic States, by the acclimatization of those fish,’ New York Fish Commissioners wrote to state lawmakers. . . . ‘But for hardiness, for certainty in hatching and safety in raising, they are far superior, and in game qualities more than their compeers.’”
Today, the rainbow trout has become a self-perpetuating industry and a defining feature of many of our country’s most iconic lakes and rivers. Generations of anglers have obsessively tracked trout’s favorite flies and crafted intricate replications to deliver a tiny hook. The fish have their own substantial shelf in the American literary canon, taciturn writers suddenly waxing rhapsodic about their delicate dance with a cautious trout.
Halverson estimated that state and federal hatcheries produce 80 million rainbows a year to be stocked in public waters, an endless campaign covering all 50 states. The fish has been listed as one of the 100 worst invasive species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. It’s done nothing to slow its deployment.
Roland Knapp, a research biologist at UC Santa Barbara, has made a career of studying the effects of trout on mountain lakes in the Sierra Nevada. “If we proposed something exactly analogous to fish stocking, but on land, there would be a massive outcry by everybody,” he said. “It’s as if [California’s wildlife agency] planned to introduce zebras because they provide an interesting opportunity for wildlife watching. But if you take a non-native, top-level predator that completely alters the biota and put it in a lake, we don’t even notice.”
The fish have their own substantial shelf in the American literary canon, taciturn writers suddenly waxing rhapsodic about their delicate dance with a cautious trout.
Knapp, known as the “antichrist of trout,” ran into massive pushback when he began his research in the 1990s. State wildlife managers told him that everyone knew fish had little effect on alpine ecosystems. Undeterred, he led an effort to survey thousands of lakes, reaching a striking conclusion. “It was very black and white in the Sierra,” he told me. “Lakes either had fish and no frogs, or they were [fishless and] full of frogs and large invertebrates.”
Knapp’s research helped save the Sierra Nevada mountain yellow-legged frog, an amphibian careening toward extinction as it holed up in a few remaining lakes not conquered by trout. The Sierra case—which prompted a targeted fish-removal campaign—was unique. State officials were desperate to keep the frog off the endangered species list because a listing would have brought in the feds, along with a whole host of regulations and restrictions. Elsewhere, wildlife managers still have little reason to care if trout upset the balance of a certain lake.
I find myself pondering how much that balance matters to me. My brain understands the importance of healthy invertebrate populations. My heart will grab a fishing pole if you tell me there are trout in the water. McKean, the longtime Trail Blazer, told me of his argument with a fish-stocking opponent at a long-ago public meeting. The debate was “religious,” he said, two zealots in different denominations of the wilderness faith, unable to reconcile a core doctrinal difference. “He told me that seeing a fish jump in a high lake would spoil his wilderness experience, because he knew that fish wasn’t supposed to be there,” he recalled. “I said it was part of the wilderness experience. What’s the use of having a national park with a fence around it? You’ve got to have some damn recreation.”
Nowadays, my own fishing is sporadic and casual at best, but I still recall my memories fondly, even as I grapple with my growing understanding that all of those experiences were created for me by officials in a conference room and technicians in a hatchery. Even as I learn that my adventure has been manufactured at the expense of insects and amphibians. That these waters may be poorer because of my desire to fish them.
Time and again, the fish at the end of my line have been the product of this value system, one that has hooked me just as thoroughly.
After I dumped the baby trout in the North Cascades, I hiked down to another nearby lake where we had made our camp. This lake, stocked decades before, is a classic “stunted” lake with a runaway population of puny trout. It’s the type of lake that draws the scorn of both anglers and biologists.
The haunting wail of a loon echoed across the water. The birds like the lake just fine, diving under to catch their fill of fish. It’s one of the few places in Washington where loons actually breed. In fact, one of the Park Service ecologists told me, wildlife managers may be reluctant to “fix” the lake’s fish problem because the loons have become so dependent on it.
A shower of rain started to fall, the surface of the lake still shimmering with light. Over the water, a brilliant, technicolor rainbow appeared, arcing toward the summit of the towering peak beyond. The trees behind it blazed in the golden stage light of a sunbeam.
I extended my hand into the mist as the end of the rainbow dipped toward the shore. No matter how far I reached, it was always a few inches beyond my grasp.
I wish I could tell you the symbolism came with an obvious message, that I discerned something about the rainbow trout and whether they belonged. Instead, I just took a few pictures, most of them ruined by the raindrops gathering on the lens. None of them really captured the scene.
After a few minutes, the shower tapered off and the rainbow started to fade. Little splashes appeared on the water as the trout came to the surface to feed.
Alex Brown is a writer who covers environmental policy in state governments. He’s won awards for investigative reporting, environmental coverage, feature writing, and social equity reporting. He recently launched the Issaquah Alps Trail Cam Project, a volunteer program to monitor wildlife in public lands near his home, and writes the newsletter Critter Cams about his wildlife observations. He lives in Issaquah, Washington, with his wife and dog.
Editor: Carolyn Wells
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/05/29/fishing-national-park-wildlife-recreation/
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