The Kigluaik Mountains stretch across the Seward Peninsula of western Alaska like a spine, their jagged ridges keeping a record of time. The Inupiaq have long read these ridges and valleys as a living story: Fire and fracture have marked the rock, and glaciers’ slow grind polished it. The talus slopes gleam in the low fall sun, meltwater from the snowfields spilling into streams that thread across the map of caribou trails on the tundra below.

To the average interested trout angler, the last half century of taxonomic gymnastics in identifying distinct subspecies of cutthroat trout in what’s left of their native ranges has been mind-boggling. When I was a kid, the mere presence of “natives” swimming in some of the tiniest mountain creeks on the slopes of the Colorado Rockies was a closely held secret.