It’s an arduous hike to get into the headwaters of the North Fork Frying Pan River, and the payoff is tremendous. Colorado River cutthroat trout swim these waters, and I’ve gone there with some frequency over the years, just over the mountain from my Denver home.

It’s a tiny creek, where wearing waders is over-dressing. Willow whips in places arch over the water; they make shade, cooling the creek, and they drop bugs into the water. Trout like that. Stealth, a three-weight rod and a bow cast is the order of the day. An Elk Hair Caddis on a #18 hook looks more like a white-winged moth that might fall from a willow on a breeze. At least that’s my reasoning pitting wits with a cutthroat trout, and pulling one in from a seam of water on the edge of an undercut.

This little brassy-green trout is stippled black, mostly on the tail and back. Their bellies are a bruised orange, at least when they are not spawning. It’s then that their undersides are crimson like freshly spilled blood, alarming at first to look at. It’s alarming to me that these fish I like to catch are swimming relics. Catching a Colorado River cutthroat is like holding a fragment of a missing dream.

About 150 pure populations of Colorado River cutthroat trout exist today – fragmented from their original and near-contiguous natural range. A range map shows they lived in a large upside-down U, from northwest New Mexico, through western Colorado and Wyoming, southward through central Utah, essentially marking tributary waters to the Colorado proper. Through that immense area, the Frying Pan, and about 150 others like it are small fragments of what once was a well-connected network of pure Colorado River cutthroat trout streams veining the higher slopes of the Colorado River basin. The Colorado River cutthroat trout lives in about 16 percent of its original range today.

The troubles of this fish I catch close to home aren’t an isolated tale. Western native trout through the 12-state West have similar stories of peril. Their habitats have been altered against their favor. Their waters were developed for irrigation, flood control, and hydropower. Nonnative brown, brook and rainbow trout stocked on top of them in an age much different than ours have now displaced the native fishes. Native trouts couldn’t compete for food and space with the introduced trouts. They hybridized into mongrel fish. The exotic whirling disease found its way into cutthroat waters. Throughout the West native trouts retreated to isolated and fragmented headwater streams, and live in meager remains of their natural distribution. Nine cutthroat trouts through the Rockies and Sierras, and Pacific Northwest are greatly reduced in number. Same for the desert trout – the Gila and Apache trouts of New Mexico and Arizona – and the bull trout of Northwest, and the most beautiful of all, the golden trout of California.

But help is on the way in a landscape-scale partnership, the Western Native Trout Initiative, which blurs the lines of political boundaries of states and federal and tribal lands and targets conservation resources where they are needed for the benefit of native trout. In the past, trout conservation itself has been fragmented, done piecemeal. The Western Native Trout Initiative sharpens the focus of native trout conservation with multiple partners planning and working together on common needs. The Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s chief of its Fish Division, Mike Stone, chairs the Western Native Trout Initiative. He leads an engaged and enthusiastic team of similarly placed people in the western-state fish and game agencies, as well as biologists from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S.Forest Service, and the Bureau of Land Management.

The Western Native Trout Initiative is only a few years old, but it’s already paying off for native trout and the people who fish for them. A multistate grant from the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies and the National Fish Habitat Plan funded habitat restoration projects from Montana to New Mexico and Alaska to California. Closer to home for me, and the Colorado River cutthroat trout, there’s much to do with our partner, the Colorado Division of Wildlife, like assess the genetics relationships with closely related greenback and Rio Grande cutthroat trouts, the other two trout native to Colorado. We also need to remove barriers to re-connect trout habitats, while at the same time elsewhere, ensure that barriers to non-native trout colonization remain just that.

We’re making strides. But the western landscape has taken 200 years of steady degradation. We must be dedicated to a very long-term commitment to staunch the losses to native trout and turn the decline the other way.

As climate changes and people need more water, western native trout will be the “canaries” showing us that mountain ecosystems are hurting. That will hurt economies, too. Economists estimate that trout anglers in the Rocky Mountains generate $12 billion spent on travel, lodging, tackle and supplies. I don’t think twice about spending the money for a trip to the Frying Pan. The payoff is catching a brassy-green trout, and free physical and mental rejuvenation.

For more information on the Western Native Trout Initiative see: www.westernnativetrout.org.

Mike Stempel is an ardent angler, mountain biker and fiddle player. He’s also the assistant regional director – Fisheries, for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Mountain-Prairie Region, based in Lakewood, Colo.

This story originally appeared in the Winter 2008 edition of Eddies (http://www.fws.gov/eddies/pdfs/EddiesWinter2008.pdf), a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service publication that reflects on fisheries conservation.