How to Say Gila

In the last gasp of darkness, we see elk. Big steaming ghosts under the stars. The bulls dropped antlers a few months ago, and the cows will drop calves a few weeks after we’ve gone. In their tight haunches they carry the steepness of the land and in their tungsten eyes a knowledge of the world that can’t be shared, stolen, or lent. They study us a moment and then bolt into the trees, and New Mexico’s Gila Wilderness accepts them like children.

The UFO-green of the dashboard clock shows just past 5 a.m. Dawn creeps in and with it the shadows. We watch them pass and grow longer, and we consider the incongruence of morning. How everything is busy yet time crawls slow like a reptile.

When I say “we,” I mean myself and the seven high-school students smushed into the back seats of a rented Suburban. They blink like owls, not saying much, each of them stuck in the thousand-and-one-yard stare of fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old. One of them spins music on the car stereo. They’d get detention for the lyrics if this was at school—I’d probably get a slap on the wrist as the teacher for letting it happen—but it’s not, and they don’t. We’ve got an unspoken agreement. They woke when I called them at 3 a.m. and they didn’t complain and they did it all for trout. In my book they can listen to whatever the hell they want.

The Gila is a gargantuan blot due east out the passenger windows. We shuttle past arroyos and fence lines but the blot stays put. Mountains rising like heaving spines, a dark wizened land that doesn’t so much tell stories as it does suggest them: all of the lifetimes spent up there looking hard for gold, for elk, for trout, sometimes for nothing at all. Two and a half million acres, give or take. That’s a lot of lifetimes. We roll through a sleepy ranching town and take the mountain road east, our bellies tickled by the tight curves as we climb, climb, climb.

The day before, I’d wandered with the students down a trout stream apparently devoid of trout. Wildfires’ll do that. We fished it hard and we fished it well and we relearned the truth that sometimes neither matter. We ran into a stranger who saw my fly rod and deduced what we were after.

Gila trout.

“You’ll want to try this stream,” he said, almost at once, referring to a place ambiguously north from where we stood. Something about a sleepy ranching town. Take the mountain road east, he said. Climb.

“Turn onto the Forest Service track and follow it ’til it ends,” he went on, “then hike all the way to the bottom of the canyon. Watch out—it’s snake country.”

By that point I’d have rollerbladed into Dante’s “Inferno” if that’s where the Gila trout were, so something about a death-march hike and the potential rattlesnake was trivial. My students and I huddled up that night, our campfire puking sparks that turned to stars. I’ll be shaking your tent at the owl’s hour, I told them. Back out now if you’re not serious about it. They all nodded solemnly and went to bed, each of them accepting the terms and conditions, each of them a burgeoning addiction.

Gila.

It’s a Spanish word that literally translates to “flowing water which is salty.” Spanish means you pronounce it Hee-luh. Say Gee-luh and you ought to be dragged behind a horse. Some of the students said it that way at first, but there in the dawn as we rig up fly rods, they say it right. We followed the mountain road and found the Forest Service track and we took it ’til it ended, up in some gnarly country where the rocks made good candidates for tire poppers and the cliffs dropped a hundred feet. We hiked into a canyon where the sun hadn’t reached. We plunged through centuries.

The Mogollon people were the first ones here; nearly two thousand years ago they climbed from the surrounding deserts and scraped together a living in the mountains. They left petroglyphs and cliff dwellings in the towering chasms, and they whispered into the pinyons. Most of what they said is lost now, but some of it comes back thrumming through the wind.

Next came the Apache. Chiricahua. They called themselves Nde (say it right and it sounds a little like knee) and they made wickiups and mastered Spanish horses. Did it better than just about anyone else. They speak a little, too, as the students and I crackle down past an old gold mine. They lyricize about the Mexican–American War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ushered settlers into the desert and the mountains, where those same settlers found game and gold and ranchland and squeezed the Apache out. Most of them, anyway. The warrior Geronimo held out and haunted the land and he ran the U.S. Army up and down and in and out of it like a cottontail runs dogs.

We come upon a gold mine that tells other tales. Miners. 1870s. They tore the land open and extracted that which came from exploding stars long ago. History is not plangent nor is it triumphant, I tell the students. It is what it is. It’s the ledger of what came before. Sometimes you don’t have to judge, all you have to do is think. We think like that until one of the students peels up an old sheet of tin and finds a scorpion underneath. Then we become oglers.

I’m selfish. I’ve wanted to catch a Gila trout for almost a decade. About five years ago I bought a fiberglass 4-weight specifically for the purpose.

Oncorhynchus gilae is unique. He hides in the chiseled shadows of droughts and wildfires, tough like all desert trout, restricted to his stronghold of the Gila watershed. Just like scientists can’t agree how the universe was created, they can’t pin down exactly where the Gila trout came from. Maybe from the stars like gold. Here on Earth they think it more likely that the Gila came from the rainbow trout lineage, along with the Apache trout and the Mexican golden trout. Little ichthyological crystals colored bronze like volcanic rock. Biologists Eric Loudenslager and John Rinne and G. A. E. Gall and Robert David studied their hearts out on this in 1986.

In another slice of history, this one more recent, I was a social studies teacher (still am) in Alaska with the opportunity of a lifetime resting in my lap. My school had the budget for a ten-day field trip pretty much anywhere in the U.S., and the teacher-in-charge had asked me to accompany him. He had no opinions on the destination so he left it for me to decide. Yeah. Okay. We’ll go to Arizona to scout for quail-hunting spots and we’ll loop into New Mexico to catch Gila trout. We’ll tell everyone that it’s a Southwest natural history immersion. Totally educational. This was December 2022 and the trip was gonna happen in May 2023. By January we’d secured plane tickets. It wasn’t until April that someone called me on my scheme.

“Is this just an excuse for you to go fly fishing?”

It was probably a student who said it. Probing like only students can.

I’ve always been known to be honest. “Yep.”

We briefed students and we packed and as the countdown turned from months to weeks to days, I got my 4-weight dusted off and a little box of flies tuned up with Usuals and Copper Johns and Serendipities. We flew out at something just shy of midnight and landed in Phoenix, where the sun burst like a nuclear weapon. We got our rental Suburbans and packed them right to the leather with bags and kids. Fly fishing would have to wait a few days; in the meantime, we chased lizards and counted quail and we hiked through tumultuous volcanic history and 10,000-year-old bat caves. At last we made it into New Mexico’s Gila Wilderness. Elk country. We wound down the blacktop through the mountains in the dark. No stars, just headlights unzipping the night.

It was easier to imagine the Gila trout once we rose the next morning. Crawling from the tent, sipping percolated coffee at a picnic table. When I first heard about the species, it was because they were imperiled. Still are. In the late 1800s, as people swarmed west, these fish were smoked out like Geronimo. They fought back, but what can fish do against fire and water rights and habitat loss and hybridization? By 1950 the species remained in only five streams. They told a story but just barely. Thankfully these streams were closed to angling, and in 1973 Gila trout were officially listed as an endangered species. Up into the 2000s, streams in Gila country were carefully managed to eliminate nonnative trout and to maximize survival for the Gilas. Hatcheries were established to take the strain off wild fish, streambeds were restored or improved or both, and fish were evacuated from the paths of wildfires. People from Arizona and New Mexico’s respective state fisheries agencies, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Forest Service, the Western Native Trout Initiative, and the Arizona chapter of Trout Unlimited, among others, devoted themselves entirely to this tiny fish’s life. Which is why they were downlisted from endangered to threatened in 2006 and why some wayward Alaskan teacher and a bunch of students could chase them in 2023.

We made it to the stranger’s stream right before the sun crested over the canyon rim. Up in the high country, it was hot and dry like a punishment; down here, it’s lush and cool. Freestone water galloping toward the sea and carrying on its shoulders a breeze that fills your lungs. I had given firm instructions—don’t go off on your own, nobody hike downstream of me, meet back here by this U-bend in the trail in exactly three hours—and we’d all trickled into the trees. Some of us looked for trout, others for cool rocks.

Moments later in a bit of pocket water no bigger than a kitchen sink, I do it. Hook a fish. Parachute Adams. The fiberglass jiggles, and I draw the little fellow up and we stare at each other at the water’s edge. Gila. One word, four letters. Encapsulates everything. Hee-luh. Say it right and you’ve said a lot.

Fish come easy after that because humans are good at recognizing patterns and trout that aren’t bothered a lot are boundlessly innocent. My fish of the day, my fish of a lifetime, maybe, becomes a 10-inch rogue that rushed out of a plunge pool to slap a Woolly Bugger. Ten inches ain’t much at home in Alaska, but here it’s everything. A long, uphill battle. The cliff of extinction. Ten inches that refuse to surrender.

The students get tired after a while as you’d expect, except one of them who really wanted to see a Gila trout still hasn’t managed it yet. This is his first time fly fishing. I follow in his shadow, carrying the fiberglass, trading him rods when the stream calls for a change in tactics. He hooks a few, but they shake themselves loose. Then I show him the ol’ bow-and-arrow cast, and he takes a couple of practice tries before slinging the fly under a drapery of willows. If it’s gonna happen, I think, it’s gonna be here. Sure enough.

I was selfish in getting this trip together, but now there’s a kid whooping his head off at the 6-inch trout tugging on the other end of his line. He asked a question and received an answer, a signal as if from another planet. His heart kicks like a wild horse. He’ll forget when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, he’ll forget when the American Revolution ended, but he won’t lose today, not ever.

We head on out of there after that, eyes peeled for rattlesnakes in every shaded spot, breathing the air of a million acres and a million years. It’s all uphill, but we like the soreness in our muscles now. It’s the signature of accomplishment, I tell the students. Life can be sideways, but I hope you’ll always remember that you got up at 3 a.m. and hiked 8 miles for a trout. That means something. I think it means a lot.

The elk are gone from the highway on our way back through. We stop at a little gas station and get cold sodas and strike up a conversation with an old rancher there. His face is worn and lived-in like saddle leather and by the looks of it, he’s got a long day to go. The students tell him about our day, each in their own version.

“Where y’all from?” he says.

“Alaska.”

The old rancher’s eyes grow wide like stock tanks. “Long way to come for a fish.”

I think about him and I think about us. His life is the dusk, a scrawl of days in the big ledger of Gila country. The blot of wilderness is a blot of stories like his. Trout tell them in alleles and in their spots; we do it with petroglyphs and footprints and pens on waterproof notebooks. The land holds it all like a cup holds water. Elk and rattlesnakes and trout. My students are the dawn. And now our stories are stitched there with the rest.

I think about the stranger from the day before. He’s the dusk, too. He limped around with a cane in one hand and a fly rod in the other. Could’ve been me in fifty years: tottering around trout territory and thinking it wouldn’t be the worst place in the world to expire.

“You’ll want to try this stream,” he had said. He’d smiled from beneath a faded ball cap as soon as he saw my fly rod. The sky behind him was as blue as an old Ford, and we all stood there hanging on to his every word, no idea if he was blowing smoke, no idea if he was half senile and describing a place from decades ago that no longer existed.

He doesn’t know it, but he gave us all paradise. Gave us a lot more. And all I’d said to him in exchange was, “Thanks a lot.”

I hope, at least, that he knows I meant it.

Joseph Jackson is a social studies teacher and outdoor writer in Alaska. He is the author of two books of outdoor essays, It’s Only Fishing (2023) and Chasing the Dark (2024), and his writing and photography have appeared in numerous magazines. When he’s not getting up early to chase rainbow trout or hunt ptarmigan with his wife, Emmie, he’s learning how to be a father to the world’s next greatest fly fisherwoman.