Trout · Oncorhynchus aguabonita
Golden Trout
Also called California golden, Volcano Creek golden.
Short answer
The golden trout is California's state fish, native only to the Kern River drainage of the southern Sierra and introduced to high lakes across the West. It is brilliant gold and red with dark parr marks retained into adulthood, it lives above 10,000 feet, and reaching one usually means walking.
How to identify a golden trout
- Colour
- Deep gold flanks with a bright red-orange lateral band and red on the cheeks and belly.
- Parr marks
- Dark oval marks along the flank, retained into adulthood. No other adult trout keeps them.
- Fins
- Orange to red fins, often with white tips on the pelvic and anal fins.
- Spots
- Sparse, concentrated towards the tail and the back.
What a golden trout is
The golden trout is the most striking freshwater fish in North America and the hardest of the common trout to reach. Its natural range is tiny — the Kern River drainage in the southern Sierra Nevada — but it was carried by bucket and packhorse into high lakes across the Sierra, the Wind Rivers of Wyoming and parts of Montana and Idaho, where it survives in alpine water too cold and sterile for anything else. The fish are small, slow-growing and dazzling: gold flanks, a crimson lateral band, orange fins and the dark oval parr marks most trout lose as juveniles.
- Native to
- Native to the Kern River drainage of California's southern Sierra Nevada, and nowhere else on earth.
- Typical size
- Six to twelve inches is typical and entirely normal. A fish over sixteen inches from a high lake is exceptional.
- What they eat
- Whatever the short alpine summer provides — midges, small mayflies, terrestrials blown onto the lake, and in some waters freshwater shrimp.
Where golden trout live
Native to the Kern drainage in California. Introduced and self-sustaining in the high lakes of the Sierra Nevada, Wyoming's Wind River Range, and scattered alpine waters in Montana, Idaho and Washington.
Fly fishing in California Fly fishing in Wyoming Fly fishing in Montana Fly fishing in Idaho
Conservation status
Of conservation concern in its native range, where hybridisation with introduced rainbow trout and competition from brown trout have reduced genetically pure populations to a handful of headwater streams. The Golden Trout Wilderness exists largely to protect them.
Protected status and the rules that follow from it are set state by state and change. Before you fish, check the current regulations for the water you are standing in — this page is a starting point, not a legal reference.
How to catch golden trout
Walk. This is a backpacking fishery — multi-day trips into the Golden Trout Wilderness or the Wind Rivers, and a season that lasts from the thaw in July to the first snows in September. The fishing itself is easy: these fish see almost nobody and will take a small dry fly readily. Carry a light rod, a box of small attractors, and expect altitude to be the hard part rather than the trout.
- Parr marks on an adult trout means golden. Nothing else keeps them.
- The season is July to September. There is snow on either side of it.
- The fish are easy. The walk is the difficulty, and that is the point.
Flies that work for golden trout
Each of these is a card in the deck, and each has a full page in Our Fly-brary.
Keep reading
- How to release a trout — handling, and why it matters more for some species than others
- How to read water — where each of these fish holds
- Hatches and what trout eat — the food these fish are feeding on
- Fly fishing by state — which species you will meet, state by state
Rainbow Trout Brown Trout Brook Trout Cutthroat Trout Steelhead Bull Trout Lake Trout Arctic Grayling Dolly Varden Tiger Trout Mountain Whitefish