Big Piney — There’s a hunting and trapping side of the fish hatchery business. 

The brood fish for Wyoming’s stocking are not always raised right outside in the raceway. So, Kris Holmes and Jake Brown went hunting for Colorado River cutthroat trout at North Piney Lake 25 miles west of the town of Big Piney in June and bagged their limit. 

The pair hiked 7 miles to reach the lake and its genetically pure Colorado River cutthroats on June 13, immediately after the ice came off the lake. Most of their required gear — trap nets, tubs, tables, fish cages, thermos jugs to store eggs, tents and a week’s worth of food plus some — were ferried in by helicopter.      

Instead of swimming up a creek, North Piney cutthroats are shoal spawners, building their nests or redds in 2 to 6 feet of water just out from the shore. With snow still surrounding the lake, the pair worked through some rain and strung two netting fences from the shore out to about 5 feet of water. At the end of the fence is a swim-in netted trap. Cruising fish hit the fence, turn to the deeper water and swim into the trap. The engineering worked and the back-country spawning crew handled the needed 100 mature trout — 50 females and 50 males averaging 14 inches long. 
 
“We pretty much hit the peak of the spawn,” said Holmes, the Game and Fish’s spawning coordinator. “The operation went well.”

Assisted by spawning technician Brown, Holmes checked the trap at least twice a day and, on June 20, reached the goal of 100 fish. Only one tablespoon of eggs per female was collected so the impact to natural spawning is minimal. 

On June 20, the helicopter returned for the eggs and delivered them to a hatchery colleague waiting about 7 miles away on a Forest Service road. The eggs were then trucked to the Boulder Isolation Hatchery.  The final product will both be stocked to continue re-establishing the sub-species and become brood stock at the Daniel Hatchery. 
 
Already this spawning season, the field team collected grayling eggs at Meadow Lake near Pinedale and sauger eggs on the Little Wind River near Lander. September and October will have them collecting kokanee salmon eggs at New Fork Lake near Pinedale and Sheep Creek at Flaming Gorge Reservoir. The crew will also be setting traps and potentially taking kokanee eggs at Louis Lake above Lander, at Flume Creek below Fontenelle Dam and on Henry’s Fork at Flaming Gorge.   

 —Jeff Obrecht and Guy Campbell