New Mexico

Desert tailwater. Native cutthroat. Big trout above 6,000 feet.

New Mexico holds one of the most productive trout tailwaters in the country — the San Juan below Navajo Dam — and one of the most important remaining native-cutthroat strongholds in the Southwest, the Rio Grande cutthroat in the Sangre de Cristo and Jemez headwaters.

It is high-elevation water in a desert state. The trout fisheries that exist do so because cold high-country springs or cold bottom-draw releases buffer the heat. Where that buffering breaks, the fishery breaks.