A critic once told me that a trout habitat restoration project I was working on was destined to have no more lasting effect than creating an artificial "museum" for native species. Although his reasoning was flawed, the phrase is apt. The native trout that live in rare and isolated patches of undisturbed landscape are relicts, and like many objects typically found in museums they have acknowledged value but receive few visitors.

Pyramid Lake is a glorious exception to that rule. The native treasures of this museum's fabulous Lahontan cutthroat trout fishery are easily accessible and available to any fly fisherman.

History
Pyramid Lake, named for a triangular rock formation just off its eastern shore, is a fragment of ancient Lake Lahontan. Over the millenia, most of the vast prehistoric lake's water was succeeded by the parched deserts that persist to this day, but at Pyramid Lake a happy accident of geography ensured that the regenerative flows of the Truckee River, replenished by snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada range, maintained water levels and a relict microcosm of Lake Lahontan's native fish species. In 1844, the explorer John Fremont's Paiute Indian hosts fed him trout "as large as the Columbia salmon." Pyramid's Lahontan cutthroat had the Truckee River watershed at their disposal in which to spawn and rear, and they grew to reported weights in excess of 60 pounds.

As eastern California and western Nevada were settled in the 19th and early 20th centuries, water diversions, dams, commercial fishing, and pollution took their toll. In 1938, the last significant spawning run of Pyramid Lake cutthroat was eliminated in the few moments required to completely divert the Truckee's flow at a Bureau of Reclamation diversion dam a few miles upstream of the lake. Even then, the fish that suffocated in the dry riverbed that day averaged 20 pounds.

Today, thanks to the efforts of the Pyramid Lake Paiute tribe (on whose land the lake rests), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Nevada Division of Wildlife, Lahontan cutthroat trout survive in Pyramid Lake. Legal action by the tribe combined with the Lahontan cutthroat's status as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act has ensured that flows from the oversubscribed Truckee River reach the lake and maintain water quality.

Since the early 1970s, Pyramid Lake's recreational fishery has been managed exclusively for Lahontan cutthroat trout, reintroduced after a 30-year hiatus. Lake-run trout are today captured and artificially spawned at lakeside hatcheries, producing juveniles for release a few months later. An ambitious wild trout restoration effort by resource agencies, the tribe, local stakeholders, and conservation organizations like Trout Unlimited hopes to return the Truckee River to some semblance of its historic incarnation as a nursery for giants.