When Curtis Kautzer couldn’t find much fall color in the trees along the Tioga Road in Yosemite National Park, he found it in the park’s subalpine waters where brightly colored spawning Brook Trout swim and along streambanks among the willows.
Undiscovered-Yosemite.com reports that brook trout are “one of Yosemite’s most popular game fish. Together with related species such as the Dolly Varden and lake trout, the brook trout is often referred to as a ‘charr.’
“The mottled olive markings of the brook trout with their dark background, are distributed over the back, dorsal and tail fins and are a distinctive feature of theirs. The light spots on the sides are either cream-colored or red. Often the red spots are encircled with a blue halo. The lower fins are reddish orange, margined with bands of black and white.
“This fish is especially colorful during the spawning season when the underside of the male become brilliantly red or sometimes orange.
Brook trout are “most commonly found in higher elevations above 7,000 feet in Yosemite (it) seldom does well at lower elevations where waters are too warm. The brook trout was widely planted in the (park’s) early days throughout the headwaters of the Merced and Tuolumne Rivers and can still be found there today,” the site describes.
- Tioga Road, Yosemite NP (9,514′) – Patchy (10-50%)
