CUTTHROAT MAKING COMEBACK.

Byline: Jim Matthews Special to the Daily News

The Eastern Sierra's past is filled with cutthroats.

A renegade criminal who shot a member of a local posse led to the naming of Convict Lake. There was more than one murder on the streets of Bodie during its golf-rush heyday. And the water barons from Los Angeles were ruthless in securing virtually all of the region's water rights in the region.

But north of Conway Summit, overlooking Mono Lake, there was a cutthroat that preceded even the earliest man in this region - the cutthroat trout. In the Walker River drainage, before a time of irrigation needs and water diversions, these trout grew to great proportions, more than 20 pounds. They dined on tui chubs in Nevada's Walker Lake and surged up the West and East Walker rivers in annual spawning runs.

By the 1960s, it was believed that the Walker River strain of the Lahontan cutthroat trout - the only native trout to the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada mountain range - was extinct.

Through water diversions, the West and East Walker often were left dry before their flows reached Walker Lake. Plants of rainbow trout, which spawned with the endemic cutthroat, diluted the gene pool in the rivers. Other strains of cutthroat were released in Walker Lake. (The Lahontan cutthroat trout also is found in the drainage systems of the Carson and Truckee rivers to the north and Nevada's Humboldt River; no trout of any kind is native to the Eastern Sierra's Mono Basin and Owens Valley.)

Then, in 1975, a small population of cutthroat trout were discovered in By-Day Creek, just west of Bridgeport. They were pure-strain Walker River cutthroats, and the Department of Fish and Game initiated a recovery plan for the species in accordance with federal regulations. Beginning in 1988, the cutthroats from By-Day Creek were introduced into Slinkard Creek and eventually into three other waters in their native range, Mill Creek, Silver Creek and Wolf Creek. The DFG staff had to remove non-native species - mostly brook and brown trout - from the creeks, and all the waters were closed to fishing.

The work has paid off.

``We are very close to complying with all of the requirements of the Lahontan recovery plan and we might be able to delist the species and use these trout for (fishery) management programs in the future,'' said Darrell Wong, a DFG biologist in Bishop who has worked with the Walker River Lahontans since 1975.

Delisting would allow the DFG to open to catch-and-release fishing one or more of the streams that hold the cutts. While that won't happen in time for this year's trout season, it could be reality in a year or two.

Until then, anglers have a unique opportunity to see what it is like to catch Lahontan cutthroats in their native habitat, to see what fishing might have been like here 50 or 100 years ago. Last year, 40,000 fingerling Lahontan cutts from Heenan Lake were released into the West Walker River. While these are not the exact strain of cutts that originally lived here, they are indistinguishable from an angler's standpoint. By the end of the season last year, many of these fish had grown into 6- to 12-inchers and were readily taking angler's offerings, especially dry flies.

DFG officials are so pleased with the success of the cutthroat plant, Wong said, that another 40,000 fingerlings were going into the river again early this summer to get anglers accustomed to seeing the region's native trout. You can catch these trout in the West Walker River from Pickel Meadows (see related story) to the town of Walker.

If the success of these cutthroats in area lakes is any indication, they could live a decade and grow to more than 6 pounds. It could be a snapshot of the future, when the Walker River strain of cutthroats are restored to the river that bears the same name.