Fish of the National Parks
Meet the 12 fish we've written up, like the Arctic grayling, and the national parks where you'll find them.
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Fish Arctic grayling
Thymallus arcticus
A native trout relative with a tall, sail-like dorsal fin, gone from Yellowstone's rivers for 80 years and only now being put back.
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Fish Brook trout
Salvelinus fontinalis
A small, wormy-patterned native fish with red spots ringed in blue, the only trout that truly belongs in the cold high streams of the Smokies and Shenandoah.
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Fish Bull trout
Salvelinus confluentus
A char, not a true trout, that needs the coldest, cleanest water in the mountains, so finding one is itself a kind of water-quality report.
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Fish Chinook salmon
Oncorhynchus tshawytscha
The biggest Pacific salmon, called king salmon, whose Elwha River run climbed back over a hundred-year-old dam site within a few years of its removal.
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Fish Coho salmon
Oncorhynchus kisutch
A silver ocean salmon that comes home each winter to the small creeks under the redwoods, turning brick-red and hook-jawed to spawn once and die.
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Fish Devils Hole pupfish
Cyprinodon diabolis
A tiny blue fish that lives in one warm, deep desert pool at Death Valley and nowhere else on Earth, one of the rarest fish in the world.
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Fish Greenback cutthroat trout
Oncorhynchus clarkii stomias
Colorado's state fish, one of two native cutthroat trout in Rocky Mountain's streams, nearly wiped out by a century of stocking other fish.
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Fish Kokanee salmon
Oncorhynchus nerka
A landlocked sockeye salmon that spends its whole life inside Crater Lake, turning bright red to spawn without ever swimming a mile toward the ocean.
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Fish Lake trout
Salvelinus namaycush
A large, deep-water char with a forked tail, native at Glacier but an invasive species anglers must kill on sight in Yellowstone and Grand Teton lakes.
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Fish Steelhead
Oncorhynchus mykiss
A rainbow trout that swims to the ocean and back, the one salmon-family fish here that can spawn more than once instead of dying after a single trip.
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Fish Westslope cutthroat trout
Oncorhynchus clarkii lewisi
Montana's state fish, a headwater trout with a red jaw slash, restored to Yellowstone and Glacier streams after nonnative stocking nearly wiped it out.
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Fish Yellowstone cutthroat trout
Oncorhynchus clarkii bouvieri
A native trout with a red-orange slash under its jaw, the fish that fed the whole web of life around Yellowstone Lake for thousands of years.