New Mexico Trout Challenge

Five fish, one email, no fee

The New Mexico Trout Challenge asks you to catch the five species of trout that swim in New Mexico water, photograph each one, and send the set to the Department of Wildlife.

Rio Grande cutthroat. Gila trout. Rainbow. Brown. Brook.

There is no fee, no registration, no deadline, and nobody checks up on you. Catches from January 1, 2020 onward count, which means for a lot of anglers the first two or three species are already sitting in a camera roll.

It is the least administered program of its kind in the West. Wyoming, Utah and California all run comparable challenges with online submission. New Mexico has an email address and a person who reads it.

What makes it harder than five fish

Two of the five are native and two of the five are the difficulty.

The Rio Grande cutthroat is a northern headwater fish, in small, cold, high water in the Rio Grande, Canadian and Pecos basins. The Gila trout is a southwestern wilderness fish in tight, high-gradient creeks in the Gila and San Francisco drainages, and it requires a free permit from the state that covers a specific published list of waters. Their ranges have never overlapped. You cannot pick both up on one trip, and you probably cannot pick either up on the way to something else.

The other three are more forgiving. Rainbows are effectively statewide and heavily stocked. Browns are wild and widespread. Brook trout live high and cold, generally above about 9,000 feet, and are the easiest identification of the five once you know that they are not actually trout.

So the challenge is a map. Finishing it means having fished the southwest corner, the northern mountains, a tailwater, a wild river and a high creek. That is most of what New Mexico trout water can be.

Identification is the part that decides it

The submission is a photograph, and it is judged as one.

Two confusions do the damage. A cutbow, the fertile hybrid of a rainbow and a cutthroat, can look mostly like a rainbow while carrying a faint red slash. And a Gila trout and a rainbow are both Oncorhynchus and can both look gold in the right light, in country where rainbows were stocked for a century.

Neither is exotic knowledge, and both are visible in a photograph if you know what to look at. The species pages here lead with exactly those marks, and the short version is: get a clean side view with the jaw visible, and get it before the fish is tired.

What to actually send

The program asks for seven things: your name, email, mailing address, New Mexico fishing license number, Customer Identification Number, the body of water for each fish, and a photo of each fish.

Named water is all it asks for. No coordinates, no GPS, no map pin. The program has never asked for finer than that, and this site does not publish finer than that either.

The mailing address is not optional in practice, because the award is a physical object. A coin and a certificate arrive by mail.

⚠ Your Customer Identification Number is derived from your date of birth. It is a personal identifier. Send it to the department because they ask for it, and do not post it anywhere else.

What one accepted submission looked like

This is worth describing plainly, because the program publishes no template and the format is otherwise guesswork.

One submission is documented here in full: the site's own. It was sent on a Monday morning in August 2026 as a single plain-text email with the five species listed one per line, six photographs embedded in the body below the signature, and the seven fields typed out by hand. It was accepted the following morning with a short note from a person, and the coin and certificate were promised by mail.

Some of what it got away with is instructive:

• Six photos for five fish, unlabeled, with no stated mapping between image and species.
• Wildly mixed images: 670 × 670 up to 4032 × 3024, a quarter of a megabyte up to four and a half. The angler is not in two of them.
• One photograph from a previous calendar year, which is consistent with the 2020 floor.
• An extra field the rules never asked for: the fly pattern for each fish, written as "Rainbow Trout: San Juan River on a Bunny Leech." Accepted without comment.

⚠ That is one submission, not a rule. Nothing was left out of it, so nothing was tested. It does not establish that any field is optional, that six photos are fine, or how anything would be handled if a species were misidentified. Treat it as evidence that the program is forgiving in practice, and treat the official rules as the thing that governs.

What comes back

An email, and then a coin and a certificate by mail.

No timeline is published for either, there is no confirmation number, no receipt, and no automated acknowledgement at any point. The one submission recorded here came back in about a day, which is not a promise. Silence is not a bad sign.

There is no portal at the other end. It is an email to a shared departmental mailbox, and the reply arrives from the same place.

When you think you have all five

The submission goes in one message, with all five species together. There is no partial credit and no running tally held on the department's side, which is exactly why keeping your own record matters: months later you will need the water and the date for a fish you caught on a Tuesday in April.

And when your log shows five species, that is your count, not the state's. They make the call.