THE DATA COLLECTOR
Old Habits in Northern Idaho
The motel was fisherman-shabby, with no accompanying chic. Two beds in a room, ruts in the carpet courtesy of years of men wearing boots indoors, and a tangerine-scented air freshener on a nightstand that I quickly relocated to the patio.
I didn’t care. I wouldn’t be there much. This was just a place to park my body when I wasn’t fishing. I’d come to North Idaho to cash in on the promise of large and plentiful westslope cutthroat feeding in clear water on terrestrials that drop from the trees and rocky shoreline. This place, and these fish, had reached mythical status in my brain since late summer, when Gregg Mauser had invited me to fish with him.
As a regional fisheries biologist for Idaho Fish and Game, Gregg spent 30 years stewarding native westslope populations in the Idaho Panhandle. In the mid-’70s, he spearheaded his hallmark project: reviving a cutthroat fishery in Hayden Lake with 300,000 westslope fingerlings originating from Kings Lake, WA. These fingerlings were descendants of fish from Kalispell Creek and Granite Creek, dating back to the World War II era.
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