Suddenly a dull washout of a fishing season is enlivened by a great mystery story: the revelation that, for a decade at least, anglers have been catching brown trout in the Crowsnest River upstream of Lundbreck Falls, and who dunnit?
There is an indifferent brown trout fishery in the Crow below the falls as a result of the introduction of many thousands of fry down there in 1967, ‘68 and ‘69.
The reasons for the introductions were never clear, but may have had something to do with mitigating the effects of the Three Rivers Dam which would not be built until 1992.
Whatever the reason, the introduction was totally in violation of long-standing policy in Alberta that we do not stock waters in which there is already a self-sustaining trout population.
In the early ‘70’s I recall trying to find and catch a lower Crow brown with my erstwhile brother in law, the late Morgan Johnson, on a trip to the spread of our friend the legendary and late outfitter and rancher, Bill Mihalsky, between the falls and where the river now runs into the dam reservoir.
We each caught one puny, pale brown of about 25 cm., but were amazed at the number we caught of native bull and cutthroat trout which were largely extirpated in the river by the introduction of the non-native rainbow trout, several large specimens of which we also caught that day.
Fast-forward 40 years, and reader and rancher friend, Todd Irwin of Patricia, suddenly asks: “Were there always brown trout above Lundbreck Falls in the Crowsnest River?
Have you or anyone you know ever caught any up there? My short answer was no; I have fished hundreds of times up there and caught thousands of trout, but never a brown.
Even the 2012 Alberta Fishing Guide, regarded by many as the last word on where to go fishing in Alberta and what you might catch when you get there, still preaches the accepted gospel about the Crow and brown trout: “the odd Brown below Lundbreck Falls.
But Irwin recently caught a brown trout in my favorite Crow stretch above the falls, and at dinner that evening talked to another angler who had taken a brown two days earlier in the Leitch Colleries section of the river.
Todd is always curious about the wild stuff, and started asking around.
Vic Bergman, fishing guide and proprietor of the Crowsnest Angler at Bellevue knows the river as well as anyone and talks with hundreds of Crow anglers every year.
Vic says anglers started catching brown trout above the falls 10 to 12 years ago and that he has taken browns above the falls ranging from 15 to 50 cm.
Bergman confirms there has never been any “official” stocking of browns above the falls and everyone agrees that there is no way a brown trout could “jump” the sheer eight to 10- metre drop of the falls. Could “bucket biologists” be catching browns below the falls and “portaging” them up and over?
That seems unlikely to me, because it would be hard to catch enough browns down there to make that much difference in little more than a decade.
Besides, Alberta’s outlaw bucket biologists tend to plant perch and walleye in stocked trout lakes and ponds because they are easier to catch and they love to eat them.
Why would they stock a notoriously hard to catch species in a river full of big, easier to catch rainbows?
There are no Crow tributaries known to have brown trout in them, but some people, and I am one, suspect the browns escaped from the Allison Creek Brood Trout Station and down Allison, which enters the Crow just below what I call the “Moose Wallow” at the Sentinal Industrial complex, near where the river flows out of Crowsnest Lake.
Todd inquired at the station, and they are betting on bucket biologists, because they get their water from wells and believe that an escape is theoretically possible, but highly unlikely, even in the torrential floods of 2000 and 2005.
Well maybe, but at least three times in the last 50 years that I know of, rainbow trout have escaped the Raven Rearing Station and down Beaver Creek into the brown trout waters of the South Raven River.
So, the question of the origin of the growing population of brown trout in the upper Crowsnest River remains open to debate, as does the vexed question of what effect the introduction of brown trout will have on the river’s trophy rainbow trout fishery.
“It’s anyone’s guess how they got there,” Vic Bergman says, “interesting, though.”
In the absence of any definitive answer, we might even fall back on that common and hoary old Alberta fish tale that this or that river got stocked with such and such a species way back when the hatchery truck broke down, always fortuitously within a bucket brigade of the bank of the lucky river or stream.
Bob Scammell is an award-winning columnist who lives in Red Deer. He can be reached at bscam@telusplanet.net.