11/26/2025
California’s state fish didn’t survive 10,000 years in the high Sierra by accident.
Here we share two perspectives on Trout Unlimited’s Golden Trout Project—one zoomed out, one boots-in-the-meadow.
In The Good Fight, Sabrina Sugg traces the golden trout’s story from volcanic isolation and Westward Expansion to today’s urgent need for meadow restoration. And in Golden High, Rebecca Ramirez takes you into the field—hauling gear at 9,000 feet, electrofishing headwater streams, and watching wild goldens return to restored habitat.
These stories are about trout, yes. But they’re also about people—volunteers, biologists, tribal partners, and everyday anglers doing the slow, dirty, necessary work of repairing a landscape.
California may no longer have much gold in its rivers. But we still have something worth fighting for.
Read both stories in our Fall issue & blog at calflyfisher.com
📷 1: TU staff use electrofishing equipment to count golden trout numbers in key locations.
📷 2: Measuring streams before and after restoration work helps track the creation of pools, stream width, and improvements to riparian vegetation.
📷 3: The California golden trout, a species on many an angler’s bucket list.
📷 4: Much of the Golden Trout Project’s restoration work takes place in Wilderness and is done using hand tools.
📷 5: TU's Jessica Strickland drifts a dry fly to rising golden trout far into the Sierra Nevada backcountry.
📷 6: The California Golden Trout’s endemic range is within the Kern River watershed’s tiny headwater streams flowing through high-elevation meadows in the Southern Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Photos by Josh Duplechian
📷 7: Rebecca, Alec, and Sabra minding and mending the block net.
📷 8: Beth and Sabra with a haul between reaches.
📷 9: Golden trout at the processing station. For Science!
Photos by Rebecca Ramirez
