KMZs and other files showing the distribution of wild trout in NV are available from the download system.

Who'd have thought that 25 miles from downtown Las Vegas you can find trout habitat in a National Forest?  Not me, or I might have packed my fly rod when I journeyed to Comdex every year during the 1990s.

Nevada, like the rest of the desert Southwest, has limited trout habitat.  The majority is actually in the northern part of the state.   However, anywhere the elevation climbs above 5,500 feet or so, there's a shot at cold water that can support wild trout.  The native fish, Lahontan Cutts, Redband Trout, and a few isolated pockets of Bonneville Cutts are miracles of survival.

We've struggled to find a decent, state-wide dataset for Nevada, and still haven't succeded.  However, we have found a reasonably robust set of individual datasets that provide a  picture of what's going on in Nevada, which you see illustrated in the image on the left.

The rust-red basins areas draped over the northern and western borders of the state show the historic range of redband trout, native-strain rainbows that are the genetic link between the coastal rainbow that is stocked everywhere and the cutthroat.  The red stream lines in the NE corner of the state represent the known current range of redband trout (not clear if redband in the NW have been extirpated, or if the survey work is just yet to be done. (Download these datasets from the "redband" category of the download system).

The magenta streams are the current range of Lahontan Cutthroats as depicted in the most recent recovery plan. (Download from the Lahontan Cutthroat category of the download system).

The blueish streams are within the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, the largest in the United States, and one of the principal land managers in Nevada (where the Federal Government owns 96% of the land mass).  The Cyan streams are those which the forest biologists designated as "trout habitat" and the steel blue as "Lahontan Cutthroat habitat".  It's not obvious what they meant by this, as the dataset metadata doesn't say, and since most of the so-called Lahontan streams don't hold Lahontans.  I suspectt this dataset was generated to survey potential streams for restoration.  Nevertheless, they provide a reasonably good set of places where you might find wild trout. (Nevada downloads).  Unfortunately, BLM, the biggest land manager in Nevada, managing 56% of the state, doesn't provide a comparable dataset.

Not depicted here, since they'd be nearly invisible at this scale, are a few streams on the Utah border that support isolated populations of Bonneville Cutthroat.  Also not shown is a layer which links you to the 305b assessment reports for Nevada.  Unusually, Nevada DOES NOT distringuish coldwater streams from warm or coolwater streams the way virtually every other state with trout habitat does.  So the assessment reports aren't nearly as useful as they might be. (Nevada downloads).

If you'd like more information about Nevada, please register and post a comment.  The areas which get the most interest from our users tend to receive the highest priority when we decide what to do next.  Registering will also put you on our email list, and updates on what's new 4-6 times a year. We share our list with no one else.