The fish, also native to Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico, is found in only about 14 percent of its historic habitat, said Clay Kampf, a San Juan National Forest biologist.<\/p>\n
The cutthroat was hurt by competition from non-native brook trout and a tendency to hybridize with rainbow trout.<\/p>\n
Now, there are efforts across Colorado to re-establish it, and the area in the Hermosa Creek drainage will be one of the largest, said Jim White, a Colorado Parks and Wildlife biologist.<\/p>\n
The presence of the fish helped local advocates push through the legislation designating the Hermosa Creek Wilderness and Special Management Area. Both areas encompass more than 100,000 acres north-northwest of Durango.<\/p>\n
In 1991, Hermosa headwaters were home to brook trout, not cutthroat.<\/p>\n
But since then, the cutthroat has been re-established in 17 miles of the east fork and the main stem of the headwaters, Kampf said.<\/p>\n
When the project is complete, the fish will occupy 23 miles of creek upstream from the confluence of the east fork and the main stem.<\/p>\n
In early August, Colorado Parks and Wildlife, Trout Unlimited and the Forest Service will begin establishing the fish in three miles of Sig and Relay creeks. Non-native fish will be removed, and the cutthroats added.<\/p>\n
The Forest Service will build waterfalls to prevent non-native fish from getting into cutthroat habitat, Kampf said.<\/p>\n
Currently, areas designated as cutthroat habitat are catch-and-release.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
fish, also native to Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico, is found in only about 14 percent of its historic habitat, said Clay Kampf, a San Juan National Forest biologist. The cutthroat was hurt by competition from non-native brook trout and a tendency to hybridize with rainbow trout. Now, there are efforts across Colorado to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":110697,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6370],"tags":[885,13,884],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-110696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mt-sports","tag-fishing","tag-frontpage-lead","tag-hermosa"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110696\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110696"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=110696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}