Fly Fishing

joey · Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2008 4:36 pm Post subject: Alaska Brown Trout

I was wondering if there are any brown trout in alaska? May seem like a funny question but I don't think I have ever seen one come out of there.

jeremy · Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2008 6:29 pm Post subject: Good question

Joey,

Good question .. I have often wondered that too .. It seems that the Salmon and the Rainbow trout and steelhead get all the press .. I would imagine that there had to be a brown trout or two somewhere getting a little bit greedy on some eggs .. maybe not?

chuckgear · Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2008 6:32 pm Post subject:

never heard of them there

KodiakCommando · Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2008 7:53 pm Post subject:

No brown trout in Alaska.

They just never made it up here. Remember brownies are not native to North America, i'm guessing that when a lot of the planting of browns from Europe was goin on centuries ago Alaska was unknown to many and wasn't a priority.

That being said i'm surprised no tried it when they were getting bows from up here. One fact many people even die hard trout fisherman don't know is that exept for a few places along the west coast Rainbow trout are not native to the lower 48 All those famous Rocky mountain rainbows in utah or Montana as well as all rainbows not in cali, oregon or washington are not native to the area. Before u.s.settlers the only are with large concentrations of native rainbows were in Alaska and B.C. Many Wild Rainbow in The rocky mountain area are decentands of alaskan trout that were brought there a long time ago.

I would think some of the people that were bringing rainbows down from up her may have tried planting browns up here especially since there was no such thing as fish and game.

However No one knows and it's probably good because introducing species is always risky and there are lots of native species up here that may suffer from a new species.

I'm not even really sure that brown trout would make it up here, one would think they could but it's no guarentee. All of our freshwater gamefish are native to the state so they have had thousands of years to adapt to alaskas unique watersheds and condtions such as much longer winters and extremey long or short days.

One thing that would be intersting to see would be how the browns dealt with other trout and char. In most rivers in the lower 48 browns can be top predators because they get bigger than the rainbows of cutts in the area. But up here ther 4 biggest competitors get as big as they do, Rainbows routinely get to 10 pounds in most rivers and in some get up to slighty over 20 pounds, Char routinely get over 8 pounds and further north can average 14 pounds, Pike routinely get over 40 inches and even over 50 and lakers get very large as well.