For a week or two in any given valley, a wild brook trout and the hillside above it wear the same colors. The males get bright ahead of the fall spawn, testosterone shifting their flanks to orange and red. Plan your trip to see the full color palette for late September and early October.

Before moving any further, it’s worth mentioning that Salvelinus fontinalis, the brook trout, is in fact, a char. It’s the only salmonid native to the southern Appalachians, ranging from Canada and Maine down the Appalachian spine to northern Georgia and west to Minnesota. Everywhere in that range, it needs cold, clean, well-oxygenated water. The “brookie”, as it is affectionately referred to, is also a declining native. The range-wide numbers come from the Eastern Brook Trout Joint Venture’s assessment of roughly 5,300 native subwatersheds: self-sustaining populations are gone from about 28%, another third or so are down by more than half, about 31% still hold fish across most of their historical habitat, and only around 5% remain fully intact at better than 90% of it. The South is worse off: brook trout hold less than 30% of their historical southern range, and North Carolina alone counts 116 “severely reduced” and 95 “extirpated” subwatersheds. Wild brookies are a clean-water indicator species, and their decline is driven by logging, competition from non-native trout, acid deposition, and warming.