At one time in the past Texas held a decent freshwater native trout fishery.
Okay, it was limited to a handful of cold-water creeks in the mountains of far west Texas — places such as Limpia Creek near Fort Davis and little streams in the Guadalupe Mountains.
There are old, sepia photos of soldiers at the cavalry post in Fort Davis holding long strings of cutthroat trout caught from Limpia Creek.
Those trout
fisheries disappeared long ago, victims of groundwater pumping that turned the trout-friendly,
spring-fed, freestone waterways into the dry, rocky ditches we see today.
Actually, there are still a few trout in the Guadalupes, but they’re not the same fish as the native cutthroats once found there. They’re rainbow trout, that were stocked in the 1930s. Recreational fishing for those little rainbows is prohibited in the streams in Guadalupe Mountains National Park. The stream and the stream side vegetation along the little fishery are too fragile to take very much human use.
Freshwater trout require cool water — anything over about 70 degrees will stress and eventually kill them.
Texas’ only year-round freshwater trout fishery lies in a short section of the Guadalupe River immediately downstream from Canyon Lake Dam.
Trout aren’t native to the Guadalupe River. The story of how they came to be there has a lot to do with why Texans will, over the next couple of months, get the opportunity to try catching a few hatchery-produced rainbows from a public pond near them.
In the 1960s,
following construction of Canyon Lake, the stretch of Guadalupe River
immediately downstream from the dam was ruined for native fish. The
water was too cold and too infertile to support the native aquatic
plants, animals and fish. however the cold, clear water looked a lot like some of the waters in which freshwater trout might live. They were stocked with rainbows and will be available for catching this spring. Get your fishing reel ready and start dreaming of grilled in butter rainbow trout. As the man in the Wahtaburger commercial says "Now that's some mighty fine eating."