Fish: Rainbow trout
Moungtain: Vestal and Arrow Peaks
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The earliest recorded mention of fish stocking in the Upper Animas basin around Silverton is 1885 when Francis Snowden stocked nearly 14,000 brook trout using canvas sacks and a hiking stick. The goal was a food source for the mining communities around Silverton as well as some recreation on the side. Four years later ichthyologist David Starr Jordan set out to survey the fish in nearly every river basin in Utah and Colorado. He was at least four years too late to know what fish (if any) had inhabited the mineral rich streams of the Silverton Caldera prior to an industrial sized fish stocking operation that pumped rainbow and brook trout populations into the Alpine.
(History lesson provided by Jonathan Thompson’s ‘River of Lost Souls’: great quarantine read for inhabitants and lovers of the 4 Corners)