Cutthroat Wage Hoback Comeback

JACKSON—The Hoback River cutthroat fishery is rebounding well since Wyoming Game and Fish stopped stocking it with hatchery-raised fish. For years, the Hoback was run as a put-and-take trout factory jammed with 4- to 6-inch fry that mostly failed to reproduce in the wild. The waterway, along with several other rivers around Wyoming, was slowly weaned off stocked trout during the 1990s and early 2000s. The results are pretty awesome.

Via the Billings Gazette: “From 2000 to 2005, Game and Fish biologists stunned, weighed and measured an average of 565 cutthroat in the section of the river stretching from Hoback Campground to Stinking Springs. Between 2006 and 2011, the average jumped to 834. Data for 2012 from the historically surveyed section are not yet available, but an upstream section of the river produced strong numbers this summer. The Hoback’s cutthroat are not only increasing in number, they are bigger, as well.”

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