Western Native Trout Challenge

A ladder, not a finish line

The Western Native Trout Challenge covers twelve states and only native fish.

That second constraint is the whole design. Stocked rainbows do not count anywhere. A rainbow trout caught in its own native range in the Pacific Northwest counts; the same species caught out of a hatchery truck in New Mexico does not. The program is built to send anglers to the water where a fish belongs.

It is run by the Western Native Trout Initiative, a partnership of state agencies and the Bureau of Land Management, and it works in levels rather than as a single completion.

• Expert Caster — six species, across at least four states.
• Advanced Caster — twelve species, across at least eight states.
• Master Caster — eighteen species, across all twelve states.

Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.

⚠ On species counts, one thing worth stating carefully. The submission form offers twenty native species to choose from, while the top level requires eighteen across all twelve states. Both numbers circulate and both are right about different quantities. Species offered and species required at the top level are not the same thing, and conflating them is where most of the confusing third-party descriptions come from.

What it costs, and where the money goes

Twenty-five dollars for adults, free under eighteen, and you register before you fish. That is the sharpest practical difference from the New Mexico challenge: a fish caught before you register does not count toward it.

Most of the fee goes to on-the-ground native trout conservation work. Catches from May 1, 2019 onward qualify, and there is no deadline.

If you fish New Mexico

Your Gila trout and your Rio Grande cutthroat already count.

They are New Mexico's only two qualifying species, because they are the only two trout native to the state. Nothing else you catch here will count toward this program, however good a fish it is.

Which means finishing the New Mexico Trout Challenge leaves you two species into a twelve-state ladder, and four short of Expert Caster with the whole rest of the West to work through. That is either a pleasant surprise or the beginning of an expensive habit.

⚠ Register first. If the western program is on your horizon at all, register before your next native trout, because the New Mexico catches you already have will not carry over retroactively into it.

What the form asks for

More than New Mexico's, and the extra fields are interesting.

Alongside the usual name, address, phone, email and chosen level, it asks per fish: the species, the date, the state, the water body name, the gear type (fly, lure or bait), and whether the trout was released.

Two things stand out in that list.

No coordinates. A federal-state native trout partnership asks for a state and a named water and nothing finer. That is the second independent program to land on named-water precision, and it is a large part of why this site publishes at that resolution and no further.

Release is recorded as data. A native trout partnership put a released-yes-or-no checkbox on its own form. The handling guidance on this site is not an ethical layer added on top of these programs. It is what the programs are already tracking.

Photos must be labeled with species, date and location, and can be attached per species or consolidated into a single document.

Worth knowing before you start

This is a long program and it is meant to be. Eighteen species across twelve states is a decade for most people, and the states hold their fish in the same kind of country New Mexico does: small, cold, high, and often a long way from a road.

The Initiative says of its own maps that in some cases they were built "to guide anglers away from sensitive conservation populations or from areas where habitat cannot sustain heavy angling pressure." It also declines to include two cutthroat subspecies in the challenge at all rather than send people at them.

A program that steers anglers away from some of its own fish is telling you something about how to fish the rest of them.