David Diaz

I made my way south in the spring, nursing my old Ford down Baja 1 to the Meling Ranch turn-off near the mouth of the Rio San Telmo. Four hours and sixty miles later, with the Ford’s temperature gauge flirting with H, the dirt road leveled off among pines.

The hitchhiker appeared, as hitchhikers often will, out of nowhere. He wasn’t young — at least not as young as a fellow alongside a dusty road in the desolate Baja foothills ought to be. Nor was he particularly well equipped. Granted, his hat was new, a cowboy model with a brim stiff as cardboard, and his boots looked reasonably sound. Yet he stood there without evidence of grip, food, or water, sticking out his thumb on a road miles from nowhere, waiting for a ride to God knows where.

I pulled over. The fellow thanked me and immediately introduced himself, an eloquent string of Spanish surnames. I eased my truck back into gear, and as the road grew suddenly steeper, Don René Vásquez Bueno took out his wallet and showed me the full extent of his finances, $10.00 U.S. and his diploma from a medical school in Guadalajara. Apparently, the profession hadn’t agreed with him. While we climbed up the abrupt escarpment of the Sierra San Pedro Mártir, the ex-medico explained that he was currently something of a traveler, between stints as a clam shucker in Guerrero Negro.

His destination this trip was a glimpse of Halley’s Comet. In some respects, it was a goal right up there with my own. I was looking for trout, a species that swims in the remote, elfin streams of the wilderness reaches of Baja’s highest mountains and that swims there and no place else in the world.

There can be no exaggerating the wildness of the Sierra San Pedro Mártir. Once you leave the road, trails — where they exist — are nothing more than byways for vaqueros herding cattle to lonely, subalpine meadows. Peaks, which appear so prominent within the contour lines of topographic maps, are swallowed up by entangled ridges of profound granite geology. The etchings of watersheds, crisscrossing what is in fact an enormous plateau, rather than a discernible mountain range, fan out at angles that undermine one’s instinctual notions as to which way lies the sea. And even if you know how to get around by compass, there’s a certain savagery to every step that makes even the most experienced outdoorsmen attend to the breadth of their wanderings.

At my turn-off two hours later, I gave the ex-medico the remains of my breakfast — an apple, half a loaf of date bread, and two hard-boiled eggs. I also reminded him of a tiny creek we’d just crossed. He thanked me again; then he turned and made his own way up higher into the blue.

I suppose any person heading alone into the mountains is looking for something. And it is quite probable that a middle-aged former doctor from Mexico would have actually been seeking something more than a blurry dot in the clear, midnight skies. Psychology in the wilderness is never very subtle. In the wilds, the mind becomes emphatic about emptiness, space, and silence. You are searching less for something concrete than for a kind of quiet understanding.

Which may well be what finding trout in Baja is really all about.

In 1905, while conducting widespread explorations on the lower California peninsula for the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey, Edward W. Nelson collected a few specimens of fish. Two years later, the contents of that small collection were presented for identification into the hands of Barton Warren Evermann, who, along with David Starr Jordan, had recently affirmed his reputation in ichthyology with publication of the definitive work American Food and Game Fishes. Nine of the thirty-seven specimens were obviously trout. Yet they proved to be a previously undescribed species, and it gave Evermann great pleasure to name the trout after his friend Edward Nelson, in recognition of his valuable studies of the fauna and flora of Mexico.

At the time of their discovery by the scientific world, Salmo nelsoni existed in a stretch of stream no more than fifteen miles long. Their range included the sandy shallows of the Río San Ramón near Rancho San Antonio, some 2000 feet above sea level, and extended up a narrow canyon lined with willows and cottonwoods and live oaks. The canyon ended at a high waterfall at the base of the escarpment rising steeply into the Sierra San Pedro Mártir. The falls were such that fish could not possibly ascend them. No trout existed above the falls.

There was some debate as to the origin of the species. Because the trout were located on the western slope of the Baja peninsula, Evermann argued it was inconceivable that the fishery had been stocked originally from ancient cutthroat trout populations of either the Colorado River or the Río Grande. He pointed to the geographic barriers prohibiting such a migration even in remote times, the fact that the trout were physically much more closely related to the typical rainbow trout, and most important, that no trout lived in the headwaters of the Río San Ramón. For similar reasons, Evermann considered it entirely improbable that the species owed its origins to the trout of the southern High Sierra. Nor could he accept the theory that trout had been introduced into the Río San Ramón by early Spanish padres traveling between Mexico and California. It was a feat, Evermann contended, that would have been extremely difficult for even contemporary scientists, and the trout themselves possessed characteristics that precluded the possibility of identifying them with any known species in any of the streams of California, Arizona, mainland Mexico, or elsewhere.

Barton Evermann, a practical thinking scientist, proposed a theory for the origin of Salmo nelsoni by looking at the facts. The Río San Ramón was the only stream in northern Baja California that always flowed to the sea. Other streams of the region reached the sea only at times of flood and for irregular periods following rainy seasons. Yet trout were known to exist in the coastal streams of Southern California as far south as northern San Diego County, and some of those trout were known to spend part of their lives in the sea, like the steelhead trout of the coast range streams farther north. Evermann argued that trout could have once succeeded in extending their range southward to the mouth of the Rio San Ramón, a distance of approximately one hundred miles. This migration might have been accomplished in a single advance or by utilizing intervening streams that, during exceptionally favorable years, were better suited to trout. It was his conclusion that the Río San Ramón was stocked with trout by natural extension from trout waters of the coast region of Southern California, at a period sufficiently remote to have allowed for precise speciation.

Some thirty years after Evermann’s theory, the range of Salmo nelsoni was dramatically increased. Three men — Charles Utt of California, and Phil and Tom Meling of the Meling Ranch on Baja's Río San Jos6 — carried trout fingerlings from the Río San Ramón to the backcountry wilds of the Sierra San Pedro Mártir. The trout were transported by muleback in five-gallon milk cans, the men stopping every thirty minutes, day and night, to pump air into the cans. By the end of the journey, trout had been placed in the upper reaches of the Río San Ramón (by then also referred to as both the Río San Antonio and Río Santo Domingo), as well as the headwaters of three other streams, the San Jose, the San Pedro, and the San Rafael. The San Jose later dried up during a period of severe drought. The trout in it were lost.

Today Salmo nelsoni exists in a number of small streams deep within the wilderness of the Sierra San Pedro Mártir. The welfare of the trout is subjected regularly to the hardships of low water. Less frequent, though more severe, are the cataclysmic consequences of tropical storms and extended periods of heavy winter rains. As both Edward Nelson and Barton Evermann were first to note, the species is a fragile one. Yet the trout survive, and their whereabouts remain as remote today as when they were first discovered. To imagine wilder trout is difficult. To imagine trout waters more uniquely endowed, and more perilously secret, is nearly impossible indeed.

Two years ago, when I first began my search for Salmo nelsoni, the Baja rainbow trout, I contacted Don Albright, a longtime Baja aficionado who regularly leads friends and members of the San Diego Natural History Museum on field expeditions into the San Pedro Mártir National Park. Albright is also something of a fisherman. Hiking in the Sierra San Pedro Mártir, he packs in tackle in a 35mm film canister. The entirety of his gear consists of a few treble hooks, a bit of leader, and a couple of split-shot sinkers. Once on the water, he cuts himself a willow branch, rigs it up, and baits his hook with a grasshopper. A first fish is always shortly forthcoming. Then he baits up with an eye of that fish, and he catches trout after trout an eye at a time, until he doesn’t want to catch trout anymore.

Don Albright has done much of what little trail improvement is performed in the San Pedro Mártir National Park, and a few years ago,, he led in a group of Mexican and American fishery biologists who wished to study the status of S. nelsoni, with regard to future management. At the time, there was some question whether or not to continue to allow the taking of trout in Baja. In 1977 the population had suffered a severe setback, the sort of drastic reduction in numbers that is the cyclical history of the species.

It was the work of tropical storm Kathleen, which had moved up the peninsula and into the mountains, where trout habitat was laid to waste. Gravel spawning beds were either washed away or silted over. Boulders and debris choked off pools. Stream-side vegetation was left in shambles. But the trout population was found to have rebounded spectacularly, just as it always has since being introduced to the mountain streams of the Sierra San Pedro Mártir and just as it must have rebounded following similar cataclysms in the foothill canyon at the head of the coastal reach of the Río San Ramón. Given only natural disasters, S. nelsoni has proved itself to be a tougher species than first believed. If the trout didn’t belong in Baja, they would have never been found there in the first place.

Fishing for Salmo nelsoni is still allowed. Nevertheless, some sort of regulation is probably quite necessary. One can hardly overestimate the destructive potential of modern-day fishermen everywhere. Such is the opinion of Phil Pister, associate fishery biologist of the California Department of Fish and Game, the agency whose involvement with S. nelsoni began on that first trip with Don Albright, when the department of fish and game was asked by the Mexican department of fisheries to provide research assistance. Since that time, he has made several trips to the trout streams of Baja with Mexican biologists.

Phil Pister knows more than most people about the preservation of fragile fish species. He’s had a hand in saving many endangered species and their delicate environments, and it is his contention that any endemic life form demands preservation. Today he views native fishes “as part of a biological scheme and balance created with infinite precision by a power well beyond man’s absolute comprehension.”

When I wrote to Pister, expressing interest in S. nelsoni, he responded immediately, opening his letter with a somewhat pointed anecdote. Some years ago, as Phil was presenting a paper concerning the biology of a fragile species at a professional society, he noticed a fellow in the front row frantically taking notes and changing tapes in his recorder. A few weeks later, Phil received a phone call from a free-lance writer who glowingly told of an article he had written that he hoped to have published in Field and Stream. “I guess he was impressed by my pleading and my offer to buy his article at the same price he had been offered. Happily, I heard nothing further from him.”

In time I won Phil Pister’s confidence regarding my interests in S. nelsoni. Granted, I did want to do a little trout fishing, casting flies in wilderness waters where few flies have been cast before. It is a desire of serious trout anglers everywhere. At the same time, my interest was to encounter a native species of southland trout in that indigenous environment which is Southern California’s alone. I wanted to see trout of that relict species of steelhead, which, at a time I missed by a generation or two, ran from the sea up the coastal streams of my home. I wanted to see that fish today, rising to a fly adrift on a clear mountain stream.

I made my way south in the spring, nursing my old Ford down Baja 1 to the Meling Ranch turn-off near the mouth of the Rio San Telmo. Four hours and sixty miles later, with the Ford’s temperature gauge flirting with H, the dirt road leveled off among pines, a remarkable setting to anyone familiar with the desert milieu of the Baja peninsula. From the smell of the sea to the crisp mountain air, the road had traversed the vegetative gamut of coastal California. Through desert scrub and mesquite, sage and chaparral, canyons of oak and precipitous slopes of pinyon-juniper woodlands, the climb gave display to the riches of California that those of us north of the border will never know again, if we ever knew them at all before. In search of a trout that pioneered south at a time utterly remote from my own, I was shown the California of one hundred years past, all of it highlighted by crescendos of wildflowers in vivid April bloom.

I was glad my wife — at the time merely my beloved — had chosen to join me. I’d been known to go on about the splendors of Southern California, many of which still escaped her. From southern Oregon, her notion of natural beauty included moist green forests, deep blue rivers, rain-washed mountains, and empty beaches carved by treacherous storm surf — all of which were difficult to best against a backdrop of freeways and stuccoed tract housing. It seemed important that the two of us undertake a pack trip alone because we both were fond of such things, yet neither of us knew how the other performed under the strains of backcountry domesticity.

The Ford earned its stripes along a blurred, two-wheel track from the graded road to the trailhead in the La Tasajera meadows. On one of several dead-end detours, we dragged bottom on a boulder that pinched the tail pipe shut, eliciting a fulminating gasp that sounded like a tire giving up the ghost. I wedged open the pipe, and we found our way again and eventually debarked at a campsite favored, apparently, by vaqueros driving cattle into the mountains. Cow manure predominated the air, and near the hitching posts was a pile of empty tin cans, an earmark of Mexicans in the wilds.

But the sky was blue, the meadows lined with incense cedar and lodgepole and Jeffrey pine. We scouted around for our trail, and convinced of our whereabouts on a map marked by Don Albright, we built a fire and got down to some serious carbo-loading. Spaghetti and red wine made us glad to be alive, and we snuggled into our sleeping bags, under stars swinging sweetly in the Baja night.

In the morning, we readied our packs and crossed the meadows and took to trail. Our destination was La Grulla, by map an eight-mile hike to where the headwaters of the Rio San Antonio (Nelson’s Rio San Ramdn) gathered themselves below a series of meadows before plummeting off the San Pedro Mártir plateau. It was my goal to find Salmo nelsoni, the Baja rainbow trout. My beloved, on the other hand, wanted to read and sketch in the gentle sun of spring in a stream-crossed meadow.

It didn’t turn out that way for either of us. Three days into the backcountry, our supplies more than halved, we gave up looking for trout and relaxation and set ourselves to the task of returning to the Ford. There was some question about the route back. We certainly didn’t care to retrace our steps, a wicked march punctuated by long stints of bushwhacking, rock-hopping, ineffectual reconnoitering, and well-founded uncertainties as to where we were and where we were going.

We also didn’t want to find ourselves short of water, but twice we came perilously close. The first time was right out of a grade-B Hollywood Western, but neither one of us was acting. I remember giving my fiancee my canteen and telling her to hold that last swallow as long as she could in her mouth. We did find water eventually, a little spring issuing from beneath rocks in the sort of place that, had we stumbled upon it a few hours later, we might well have associated with the Vii^in Mary. The second time wasn’t nearly so dramatic, although when we did finally find a tiny stream, located where I knew a stream of some sort had to be, the water was flowing in the opposite direction I had confidently predicted from a ridgetop two hours before.

That was during our third day out, and it was as far out as we got. Still, when we decided the next morning to head back and to follow the creek downstream, rather than retrace our limb-breaking route in, I continued to maintain hopes of trout on the horizon. Maybe we had overshot the La Grulla meadows, and somewhere not far ahead, the stream would put us in the wilderness home of Nelson’s little rainbow. I nourished those hopes for a few hours more until it occurred to me, rather sharply, that we were following the same stream on which, two nights before, we’d camped. I spotted our campsite, and I gave up hope once and for all. My wife merely set down her pack and unlashed her sleeping bag. By the time I had brought fresh water from the stream, she was flat on her back, asleep.

The following afternoon, heading west into the sun, we were heading for another little stream, one on which we’d camped our first day out. My wife was anxious to stop, but instead I stepped up the pace. I thought to myself, “If we stop now. I’ll never get her going.” All we had to do was reach the stream, bed down, and in the morning, we’d have an easy half-day hike to the Ford. Those thoughts came to me time and time again as the sun dropped lower toward the tops of the pines. We were heading due west. The stream had to be somewhere right ahead. We’d make camp, eat, sleep, and by noon the next day....

Then, just a hundred yards away, nestled in the pines alongside a meadow green with spring, stood the Ford. My beloved let out a whoop, and for the first time on the trail, she took the lead.

“See,” I called ahead, “I told you I knew where we were going!”

Are there trout anywhere really worth risking one’s neck for? Let’s be frank about this. Trout teach us about streams, seasons, and survival. More than any other fish, trout are indicators of the quality of our environment. Nobody who encounters trout on any level of intimacy can help but hope to encounter them again. It should come as no surprise, then, that there are those among us who would die for trout, if it came to that.

These would not be trout, however, that are raised in hatcheries and periodically dumped into lakes and streams for the benefit of anglers who, like the fish they enjoy killing, are notoriously short-witted. The trout must be wild trout; they must live and reproduce so that their existence requires no padding by man, although the species itself, like brown trout throughout America, may well have been introduced to waters in which it wasn’t actually indigenous.

The notion of “wild” trout is something of a moral attitude. That the trout exist without aid of man indicates a habitat wholly suited to the needs of the fish. Yet one must often overlook the glaring omission, in the Original Scheme, of the trout from qualified waters. Waiving the question of nativeness imposes, therefore, a philosophical balancing act, one that usually ends up, if you are an ardent trout fisherman, on the side of any trout making it in the modem world.

To produce trout, a stream needs clear, cool water (anything warmer than seventy-seven degrees Fahrenheit won’t do), plenty of oxygen, adequate shade and shelter, and lots of insects. Gravel beds are essential for spawning, because female trout use gravel to cover their fertilized eggs. And a swift current is also required, to keep silt from smothering the buried eggs. It may not seem like much. But there are many Southern California streams that, though trout swam in them before, today offer marginal habitat for few things besides crawdads, mosquitoes, and tadpoles ripening into frogs.

Perhaps it is a lack of trout that inspires the greatest desire to know them. Having never known wild trout here at home. I’ve been removed from the question of laying my life on the line for them. Nor have I faced the other alternative, that of quietly thumbing my nose to the whole scene, an alternative apparently much like the one chosen by trout themselves in these parts and a lot of other places besides.

After my first unsuccessful attempt to track down trout in Baja, it seemed safe to assume that the existence of Salmo nelsoni was under no immediate threat by man. Remoteness is a blessing to a fragile species. At the same time, my desire to find the fish was now keen. Those Baja rainbows took on for me the aspect of a diminutive white whale. I couldn’t get away that summer, but I did retire the Ford in favor of a real Baja vehicle, a GMC pickup nearly as old as the Ford but as good as any new truck you can buy. Come fall, with tropical chubascos moving up the peninsula carrying the threat of dirty weather in the high country, I settled for sport on the venerable fly-fishing waters of Yellowstone and central Idaho. Then in winter, I went to Oregon to be married and spent my honeymoon casting for steelhead on the upper reaches of the illustrious North Umpqua.

Yet throughout the year, what I was really itching for was another shot at S. nelsoni, and by spring, I planned to return to Baja, even if I had to do it alone.

My wife couldn’t see the point — at least not in a light that would inspire her to spend another vacation soldiering about in search of a fish I had no intention of bringing to the frying pan. So I persuaded my best fishing buddy of the spirit of the adventure. We spent a week securing rations and tying flies; and on a Saturday in late April, we put my pickup to work, driving south 200 miles, then turning left and climbing.

With my buddy navigating, we found the camp where I’d left the Ford the year before. I knew that wasn’t the place to start. We backtracked, took a side road, and proceeded to bog down in sand and pine needles. Later, at the end of another two-wheel trail, we climbed out of the pickup and scaled a granite boulder. With map and compass, we located Picacho La Vibora — Rattlesnake Peak — below which was supposed to lie the meadows of La Grulla. For the first time in a long year, I felt confident I was going to find Salmo nelsoni.

After that, there wasn’t much to it. We hiked for half a day, sweating off the wine of the night before and all that ailed us, and we found the meadows and a narrow, deep stream. I remember balancing on a rock and looking down and spotting a trout. So this was it. We hiked downstream, to a high bank lined with columbine and wild roses not yet in bloom, and we took off our packs and walked to the falls above a broad, dark pool. There were trout feeding. Time and again, we saw the sharp concentric circles of fish nosing the surface, trout after hatching bugs or nymphs drifting in the current. We fumbled with our rods.

“It’s a set-up,” I said.

Over the next three days, we caught trout in abundance. Now and then, we found the larger ones, the biggest no more than ten inches long, and we stalked those fish with the heartfelt excitement of big-game hunters in Africa. Some of those trout we fooled. They came to the fly with deliberate purpose, and if we hooked them, they fought to the end. I’ve a photo of one of these “big” Baja rainbows. The fish is shown lying in streamside grass, its pellucid colors reflecting the afternoon sun. Fortunately, we got that trout back into the stream in time, which was a lot longer than we kept any of our other Baja rainbows before freeing them from our barb-less hooks, then slipping them back into their precious wilderness waters.

It was model trout habitat. I was reminded in many ways of the little creeks I’d fished as a youngster on the western slope of the southern High Sierra. There really wasn't much water; along any stretch, you could find a way across the stream without stepping in over the tops of your boots. The narrow runs were edged with aquatic vegetation of the deepest greens, and the sheltered pools lay shaded by boulders, willows, and tangles of streamside pines. Approaching the water was often an exercise in bushwhacking. Fouled back-casts kept us humbled.

In time, though, it wasn’t fishing but the fish themselves that drew us to the water. We’d find ourselves a little pool, quiet our souls with shots from a flask, then settle down in the brush or hang out over the bank on our bellies. The trout seemed always to be feeding, usually on subsurface bugs, invisible from our vantage point. We’d spot a trout holding in midcurrent, and we’d wait for the inevitable rise. The magic moment was that almost imperceptible tensing throughout the length of the trout’s body, then the ever-so-slight rush to intercept the course of an insect adrift in the stream.

It is a sight worth living for. And though don’t suppose I’d have known these were unique trout if I hadn’t done my homework, it was clear they were as wild as the surrounding wildlife itself. Swallows and mountain bluebirds picked off insects above the water. Warblers hung bright as poppies in the willows. Quail waddled down to the edge of the stream, pecking about with the nervous energy of domestic fowl in an abandoned garden.

The last evening, we watched tiny rainbows exploding from the big pool beneath our camp. We had no more reason to cast. Bugs were rising off the water, and at any moment, there were more trout standing on their tails than you could count. It was enough just to watch.

I’ve no doubt that a mere handful of anglers — equipped with flies or worms or anything else — could empty that pool. I suspect, given time, anglers could kill every trout of the Nelson species. I put nothing past fishermen. But I have to believe those Baja rainbows are secure. Is there anyone anywhere who would rid the world of such a remote and fragile trout?

You have to believe in something.