Gila Trout

The gila trout (Oncorhynchus gilae) is a species of salmonid, related to the rainbow and cutthroat trouts native to the Southwest United States. The Gila trout has been considered endangered with extinction. That changed in July 2006. Finally after much work by the Game and Fish departments in New Mexico and Arizona, the US Forest Service and the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the Gila trout was down-listed to "Threatened", with a special provision called a “4d rule” that will allow limited sport fishing – for the first time in nearly half a century. This possibility is distinct: there may be no one alive today that has legally angled a pure Gila trout from its native waters. By the time the Gila trout was closed to fishing in the 1950s, its numbers and range were so depleted and so reduced this copper-colored trout simply wasn’t all that accessible to anglers. As of 2011 there is fishing in both states for this beautiful fish.