Cutthroat Trout Stocking: Native Conservation Meets Trophy Fishing

Montana has recorded more cutthroat trout stockings than any other state here — 25,327 stockings across 1,942 waters since 1924 — but it's Utah's two biggest cutthroat waters, Strawberry Reservoir and Bear Lake, that post the largest single-water totals anywhere in this dataset. Washington runs a smaller cutthroat program of its own.

Key takeaways

• Montana leads with 25,327 recorded cutthroat stockings across 1,942 waters since 1924 — more than any other state this site tracks.
• Utah has recorded 10,227 cutthroat stockings across 700 waters, but two waters alone — Strawberry Reservoir (2,292 records) and Bear Lake (1,160 records) — account for roughly a third of the state's total.
• Washington has recorded 7,012 cutthroat stockings across 924 waters since 1995, led by Lake Chelan and Goose Lake in Skamania County.
• Bear Lake's cutthroat program isn't ordinary put-and-take: it centers on Bear River cutthroat trout, a native subspecies once thought extinct in the lake, rebuilt through a hatchery program running since the 1970s.
• Because cutthroat trout are native across all three of these states, stocking them often serves a conservation goal — protecting genetically distinct populations — alongside the sport-fishing one.

Montana: Wide, Not Deep — and That's the Point

Spread 25,327 stockings across 1,942 waters and you get an average of about 13 stockings per water — Montana's cutthroat program is wide rather than concentrated. Its highest-volume waters by total records — Ashley Lake, Flathead Lake, Lake Koocanusa, the Boulder River, Georgetown Lake — are almost all historical, with little or no stocking recorded since the 1980s or 1990s. That means Montana's *active* cutthroat program today runs mostly through large numbers of smaller, more scattered waters rather than a few flagship lakes.

That pattern lines up with how Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks actually manages the fish. Westslope cutthroat trout are native to all of Montana west of the Continental Divide and the upper Missouri drainage, but genetically unaltered populations now survive in less than 10% of that historic range — hybridization with introduced rainbow trout is the main threat. Stocking many small, isolated waters, sometimes behind fish barriers that keep rainbow trout out, is a deliberate strategy to protect genetic purity rather than just a byproduct of geography. See Montana's full list on our Montana cutthroat trout page.

Utah's Two Giants: Strawberry Reservoir and Bear Lake

Strawberry Reservoir alone accounts for 2,292 recorded cutthroat stockings — more than any single water in this dataset — and remains active through the most recent records. It's Utah's flagship cutthroat trophy fishery, the kind of large, road-accessible reservoir where cutthroat stocking is run primarily as a destination sport fishery.

Bear Lake tells a different story. Bear Lake sits in the Bonneville Basin, but genetic research shows its native cutthroat — Bear River cutthroat trout — are their own distinct lineage, more closely related to Yellowstone cutthroat than to the Bonneville cutthroat found elsewhere in the basin. Overfishing was long thought to have driven them extinct in the lake itself; conservation efforts starting in the 1960s and a hatchery program launched in the 1970s brought them back, with Utah's DWR trapping lake fish to propagate eggs and returning juveniles to the lake — a cycle reflected in the 1,160 stockings recorded there through the most recent data. See both waters, and the rest of the state's program, on our Utah cutthroat trout page or the Utah stocking hub.

Washington's Western Cutthroat Waters

Washington's cutthroat program is smaller and more recent, with records starting in 1995. Lake Chelan (90 records) and Goose Lake in Skamania County (89 records) lead the state, followed by Marshall Lake in Pend Oreille County. See the full breakdown on our Washington cutthroat trout page.

Why Cutthroat Stocking Is Different From Rainbow Trout Stocking

Rainbow trout, this site's most-stocked species by far, are typically raised and released purely for anglers to catch — a put-and-take program with little conservation function outside their native range. Cutthroat trout stocking in Montana, Utah, and Washington often carries a second job: because cutthroat are regionally native, a well-run stocking program can rebuild or protect a genetically distinct wild lineage at the same time it supports fishing. We go deeper on how agencies manage that genetic risk in our guide to whether fish stocking is bad for the environment, and on how the three most commonly stocked trout species compare in rainbow, brown, and brook trout stocking.