Desert salmon? No less believable than desert hockey...
 Arizona’s most remarkable fishing isn’t for the native Verde trout or Apache trout—it’s for silver salmon. Haven’t heard about it? That’s not surprising, because there’s only one place in our desert state that harbors a tiny population of salmon, and regulations allow angling on only one day.
If it seems unnatural to think of salmon and the desert with the same neuron, you’re in good mental health. Since no rivers in Arizona reach the Pacific Ocean, how do the salmon get here? It was no great leap to figure out that warm water species like bass and bluegill imported from the east coast would do well here; only a few pioneers believed that some Arizona streams might be suitably cool for trout and salmon. Prescott’s own Bucky O’Neill was one of them, and he was the first to bring in wooden barrels of fertilized salmon eggs by wagon from Oregon in 1888. Today state and federal hatcheries raise and release trout into Arizona waters, but the salmon survive on their own in only one river where Bucky dumped those barrels of eggs almost 110 years ago, the Santa Maria River.
Little more than a trickle coursing through the desert for most of the year, the Santa Maria near Bagdad runs high and cold in spring, fed by rains and snowmelt. The salmon spend most of their lives in Tonto Lake, where the river empties.
The lake is mostly subterranean; though it appears hardly larger than a pond on the surface, like an iceberg showing only its tip, Tonto’s unseen volume is quite large. Sheltered by several feet of granite, it is less susceptible to evaporation in the harsh desert sun and it stays cool enough for the salmon to survive. Every April when the Santa Maria rises, the adult salmon leave the lake to migrate upstream to spawn, giving fly fishermen an opportunity for some of the most remarkable fishing in the country. Nowhere else on the planet do you have to watch out for saguaros on the backcast while throwing salmon flies to spawning silvers!
Because these salmon are unique to Arizona, so are the salmon flies. Alaskan bunny leeches and flesh flies won’t work on the Santa Maria; you have to use flies these fish recognize as desert food. Natural dry fly patterns for Arizona salmon include scorpions, centipedes and tarantulas. The best wet flies are endangered spike dace minnows and imitations of Sonoran sucker fry, though you could also try a sinking version of the centipede as wet fly. These patterns aren’t available for purchase anywhere—you have to tie them yourself. As you may expect, Arizona salmon anglers are a rare breed.
Tonto Lake is too small to support anything more than a tiny population of salmon, so fishing for these silvers is similar to hunting elk in Arizona: you have to get in the lottery to be drawn for a tag. Every spring, 13 lucky anglers who draw an Arizona salmon tag get to keep only one salmon, but they can still catch & release to their heart’s content during the single day that the state allows salmon fishing, April 1—April Fool’s Day.
(Online editor's note: April Fools!)
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