Rainbows, tigers and cutthroats: Finding variety at Spokane County’s Williams Lake

Chris Donley loves fry plant trout.

By that he means trout born in a hatchery and planted in a lake when they’re still fry – maybe 3 inches long and six months old, having just learned how to feed.

Then the fry are left to grow, same as any fish born in the wild. Give them a year and they can become pretty and plump 12- to 15-inch fish with plenty of strength.

Which is why Donley, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife’s eastern region fish program manager, was in for a fight Tuesday afternoon when the bobber above his chironomid went down at Williams Lake, south of Cheney.

The rainbow ran, jumped and fought hard, showing energy right up to the moment Donley netted it from his drift boat.

Then he showed it off, pointing out its intact fins, full stomach and bright colors.

“You can’t tell me the difference between that fish and a wild fish,” he said.

Williams Lake is one of many lakes around the state that WDFW stocks with fry trout each year, an annual effort to maintain trout populations in lakes where the species can’t naturally reproduce.

It’s also one of a smaller number that biologists manage as a trout monoculture, meaning it’s home to trout and only trout. No bass, perch or panfish allowed.

Keeping a lake that way takes a lot of work. Unwanted species have a way of just showing up, generally through illegal stockings but sometimes through other means. In response, agency officials periodically treat the lakes with rotenone, a piscicide derived from the roots of tropical plants.

Donley likens the use of rotenone to hitting the reset button. Clean the lake out, start from scratch. Some lakes in Eastern Washington are nearly on a regular rotation for the treatments. It’s like a game of whack-a-mole – once the undesirable fish are snuffed out of one place, they show up in another.

This has been going on in Washington for roughly seven decades. Williams Lake has been treated nine times, most recently in 2022, after floodwaters inundated a fish control structure at the lake’s south end and allowed tench, yellow perch and pumpkinseed sunfish to sneak back into the lake.

Three years later, the lake is in good shape and full of trout. Donley invited me out this week to try to hook some of them from the front of his aluminum drift boat.

Donley grew up near Amber Lake and knows all the lakes in the area well. Now 57 and 30 years into a career as a fisheries biologist, he never gets tired of catching fish. Nor is he tired of the geological story of this part of Spokane County.

Williams Lake sits in a gorge carved by the Ice Age era floods originating from Lake Missoula. Periodically, the ice dam on the lake would weaken or rise and let massive volumes of water out.

The water flowed west, carving up the landscape.

“You had multiple episodes, probably in the hundreds, that ran through this area and scoured it out,” Donley said.

The result is the channeled scablands, this vast network of dried up riverbeds and exposed basalt rock. Some deep spots filled with water and became lakes. Williams is one of them and so is Badger, just east of here.

The two sit in the same ancient channel and are connected by a seasonal stream. These days, they’re both cold, clean and productive.

“They’re pretty rich from a mineralogical perspective, which is great for trout fishing,” Donley said.

They haven’t always been trout lakes. In the early days of fish stocking, they got bass and other warmwater species. Williams earned a decent reputation for kicking out big bass.

In the 1950s, though, trout started to become the preferred species for planting in lakes.

Fishery managers were soon emptying lakes of undesirable fish and restocking them with trout.

The shift stuck, although not because biologists like trout more than bass. Donley said there aren’t enough forage fish in these lakes to support bass. There is enough food for trout, however.

“Trout work better in these waters than warmwater fish,” he said.

After warmwater species were first culled from Williams Lake in 1956, rainbow and cutthroat trout were stocked. Soon the lake gained a reputation for growing nice trout.

Lakes’ reputations ebb and flow over the years, especially when the emergence of undesirable species prompt WDFW’s chemical interventions. It’s unlikely 2022 will be the last time Williams Lake gets treated. For now, the lake is full of trout that are willing to eat.

The fishing started slowly. We caught a few on chironomids and picked up a handful more when we switched to sinking lines and woolly buggers. By the end of the day, we had caught rainbows, westslope cutthroats and one tiger trout – a piscivorous brook trout and brown trout hybrid planted here in the hopes that it would eat the young of any potential invaders.

Not all of the fish stocked at Williams are fry plants, and with each fish Donley pointed out the differences in body condition.

There was one broodstock fish, planted after years of service in a hatchery where it was used to spawn new fish. It was big but not a great fighter, and its fins showed some wear and tear.

There were a few “catchables” – 8- to 10-inchers planted this spring. They looked fine, albeit a little skinny.

Each fry plant was just as plump, feisty and acrobatic as the first. It’s hard not to love a fish that takes a fly and then jumps 3 feet in the air.