Cutthroat revival spawns more research at Priest Lake

FISHING — Note to self: Go fly fishing for cutthroats at Priest Lake this year.

In the late 1970s, I wrote a story about the excellent cutthroat fishing fly fishers enjoyed for the Idaho state fish at Priest Lake an Upper Priest Lake.  One day of “research,” involved joining Greg Mauser, the Idaho Fish and Game Department fisheries biologist who was studying the lake’s native westslope cutthroats at the time.

We cruised over the glass-smooth water along the shoreline in his powerboat. When we saw a pod of rising cutthroats in the distance, Mauser would cut the engine so we’d drift into the path of the oncoming trout.  When the rises approached casting distance, we’d lay out a dry fly ahead of the surface-dimpling cutties — and wham!  It was a blast.

The cutthroat fishery throughout the Idaho Panhandle, including Lake Coeur d’Alene and Priest Lake, was in a downward trend at the time. The decline persisted.

But recently, the Priest Lake cutthroats have been increasing.

Changes in habitats — especially to spawning tributaries — and changing fish communities, such as the infiltration of non-native lake trout, raised havoc with the cutthroat’s centuries of adaptation.

Fishery managers, with their options limited, banned the harvest of cutthroat at Priest (and many other Panhandle waters).

The fish responded.

I ran into Mauser this fall. He said it wasn’t like the good ol’ days, but the autumn dry fly fishing for cutthroats was pretty darned good.

Fish and Game researchers have been sampling the fishery in order to monitor trout abundance. Cutthroats caught in sampling gillnets ranged to 18 inches long.

With only one year of surveys, the numbers per net don’t mean too much except that they had consistent catches throughout Priest Lake. That’s good news. Perhaps better news will come from follow-up surveys in upcoming years.