Last Known Stocking

[Phil Lilley]

Gosh- I want to go back to Flaming Gorge and the Green River. What a wonderful place!

Sorry... the article mentioned it.

[FishinCricket]

Gosh- I want to go back to Flaming Gorge and the Green River. What a wonderful place!

Sorry... the article mentioned it.

That was totally off topic, I'm notifying the administra.... Oh, never mind.

[Wayne SW/MO]

Gosh- I want to go back to Flaming Gorge and the Green River. What a wonderful place!

Sorry... the article mentioned it.

The Metolius and the Deschutes rivers in central Oregon are well managed producers of beautiful wild Redbands. They are fisheries, especially the Deschutes, that are worth the trip.

[Chief Grey Bear]

Gosh- I want to go back to Flaming Gorge and the Green River. What a wonderful place!

Sorry... the article mentioned it.

No apology necessary. I haven't yet but, I would love to do some fishing in Utah. That would just rock!

[Nighthawk]

Hargrove told me once that there was nothing to keep the trout stocked in Brown Spring creek from mating with Crane's rainbows, and he believed that had, in fact, happened. all the speculation and opinions expressed here doesn't mean the trout there are any less fun to catch, thankfully.

[Wayne SW/MO]

and opinions expressed here doesn't mean the trout there are any less fun to catch, thankfully.

Or wild.

[Cstreet Flshing production]

I have this book in my possession but don't have a scanner so i found it online and thought everyone should read it. Are these fish in Crane Creek Pure strain NO they are not. The fish and eggs that were shipped out from Cali in the late 1800s were a mixture of Sea Trout and river trout. I have personally seen fish that have the coloring of a steelhead. But there is one thing for sure is these are wild self sustaining fish that need to stay that way

Read This

[Al Agnew]

Guys, I've been reading all this with much interest. Perhaps anything I have to add has already been covered, but according to Benke, the first propagated rainbow trout were hatched in 1870, and were the San Francisco Bay form of coastal rainbows. (Note that San Francisco Bay is the same drainage as the McCloud River.) From 1870 to 1877, the coastal rainbows were all that were used. In 1877, eggs taken from McCloud River trout were added to the program. From 1880 to 1888, the U.S. Fish Commission mixed McClouds and "steelhead", which were probably those same coastal rainbows. After 1888 they added steelhead from northern CA and southern OR.

Now...if you look at time lines, the original stocking of trout in Crane was probably that mixture of McClouds and coastal rainbows. Stockings after 1888 were probably even more mixed. And then you have the diversity even within the McCloud River drainage. Below the upper McCloud falls, the fish were probably always a mixture of "McClouds" and coastal rainbows. And in one headwater tributary of the McCloud, Sheepheaven Creek, which is isolated from the McCloud by a falls, the fish are different enough to warrant their own name, and are probably the true ancestral form of the McCloud. So the genetics even of fish from the McCloud River would vary depending upon where in the McCloud they originally came from.

However. Genetics works in somewhat odd ways sometimes. What if the McCloud genetics were more suited to survival in Crane Creek than the coastal genes? What would then happen is that throughout preceding generations, the trout that survived would get closer and closer to pure McClouds, as the fish that had more genetic material based upon the coastal rainbows wouldn't survive as well and wouldn't pass on those coastal genes. Would they even become "pure" McClouds? Probably not, but you'd end up with fish that were pretty close to pure by this time. I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss the possibility that these fish are essentially pure McClouds. The only way you could know for sure would be to compare their genetics to genetics of McClouds that are known to be pure.

On the other other hand...that many generations could probably change the genetics from any of the "ancestral" fish. In a hundred generations you could end up with genetics that were somewhat different from anything else. Maybe these fish are simply "Crane Creek rainbows".

I've only fished Crane once, a couple years ago. Caught a couple fish under six inches and one nice one, about 13 inches as I remember. What I noticed in the appearance of these fish was that they were greatly different than obviously wild fish from the North Fork, but VERY similar to fish from Mill Creek. The smaller ones were almost exactly like Mill Creek fish. Mill Creek is pretty similar to Crane Creek, and has had wild fish for a great many years. Perhaps the original stockings in Mill Creek had McCloud genetics as well. And maybe those genes survived throughout the years Mill Creek was stocked with hatchery strains. Just because a bunch of hatchery fish are stocked in a creek with a few wild fish doesn't mean the hatchery genes automatically swamp the wild genes. The naturally reproducing wild fish will continue to reproduce naturally, and the hatchery fish probably won't. Eventually, when you stop stocking hatchery fish, the hatchery genes might simply disappear, and meanwhile the wild fish genes are surviving AND perhaps changing to make those fish even more suited to those particular waters. Given the similarity of Crane and Mill, I'd think it's highly possible that the fish in them have similar genetics at this point, and those genetics could be something close to McClouds, altered by more than a hundred years of surviving and reproducing in Ozark spring creeks. So maybe both creeks are populated now by a particular strain that should be known as "Missouri-McCloud".

Edit to add...I forgot to mention it, but somebody above said that at one point Crane Creek was suffering such a drought that nothing was left in it but minnows and crawdads. If that was true, then whatever trout are in there now obviously had to have been stocked later, and would not have much, if any, McCloud genetics. But personally I would doubt that even a severe drought would totally kill all the trout in the creek. Having spent some time on Mill Creek now and then, I am continually surprised at the way these fish can survive and remain completely hidden in tiny little pools where you'd swear they couldn't be. As long as the springs were flowing at all, there would be a few sanctuaries near them where enough trout could survive the drought to repopulate once conditions improved.

[RSBreth]

Edit to add...I forgot to mention it, but somebody above said that at one point Crane Creek was suffering such a drought that nothing was left in it but minnows and crawdads. If that was true, then whatever trout are in there now obviously had to have been stocked later, and would not have much, if any, McCloud genetics. But personally I would doubt that even a severe drought would totally kill all the trout in the creek. Having spent some time on Mill Creek now and then, I am continually surprised at the way these fish can survive and remain completely hidden in tiny little pools where you'd swear they couldn't be. As long as the springs were flowing at all, there would be a few sanctuaries near them where enough trout could survive the drought to repopulate once conditions improved.

There's a "losing section" of the creek up in the Wire Road Wildlife area where most people first access the creek - and so it looks bone dry to some people who don't poke around there as much as those of us who do. There's always plenty of water up by the spring, and further downstream through town and down to the confluence with the James.

[ChadO]

Excellent comments Siverside! I, like you am in higher educationand really, really, really value the sources/references that you cited. Very professional, and reliable. But, just like how many licks it really takes to get to the center of a tootsie pop, the world may never know about the Crane "McClouds". Beautiful fish though, no matter how you fell about it.