Explore Outdoor Activities: Fishing

Not quite a decade after the Cerro Grande Fire devastated the Jemez Mountains forest surrounding Los Alamos, one of the area’s prettier little fishing holes is being restored.

Los Alamos Reservoir wasn’t and doubtless won’t be classed as destination water. It’s really a pond, and it attracted the kind of angler who rarely had the latest equipment or costume — bait fishers mostly, kids and grandparents and people intent on catching a few fish for supper and not fussy if these were rainbow stalkers.

With the official fish of New Mexico inching toward the “threatened” category under the federal Endangered Species Act, city and state officials are taking measures to increase its population.

About 1,200 Rio Grande cutthroat trout were dumped en masse from a 750-gallon tank into the Nichols Reservoir on Tuesday.

To most people familiar with the cutthroat trout, the fish is the embodiment of the pristine, the quarry that lures us beyond our cities, to the ends of dirt roads, miles upon miles up forested mountain creeks where the likelihood of meeting a hungry bear surpasses our chances of encountering another human being. This jewel of a fish—with color variations of an almost infinite blending of orange, yellow, red, turquoise, maroon, and green—may be the ultimate proof of nature’s superiority as an artist. As though bent on driving this point home, our state fish seems happy to take an angler’s every offering, if only to display its colors to the sunlight.

Our part of New Mexico provides a great variety of fishing opportunities. At different times of the year, you may fish the Rio Grande among prickly pear cacti at 6000 feet elevation or among ponderosa pines at 11,000 feet in mountain lakes of the Pecos Wilderness. We outline just a few here to start your planning...