The following dissertation reveals anecdotal data about the only genus of finned fishes native to the Adirondack Mountains, Salvelinus, which includes S. fontinalis, the brook trout, and its kissing cousin, S. namaycush, the lake trout. The scientific jargon will be kept at a minimum since I don’t know any.  

Salvelinus first appeared in Adirondack lakes and streams after the last Pleistocene glaciers retreated ten thousand years ago. How brookies and lakers arrived inside the Blue Line is a bit of a mystery. Some authorities believe their appearance was the handiwork of the Algonquian deity, Manitou, the all embracing spirit power that fills the world and everything in it. Others, including myself, believe that they were stocked by the same extraterrestrials who then headed south and erected the Teotihuacan pyramids in Mexico.

Brook trout are first in the hearts and stomachs of real Adirondackers. They’re the official New York State fish because they taste good. You know the old adage, the smaller the brookie, the sweeter the meat. On one spring fishing trip years ago, five of us young researchers arrived at the Nick’s Lake boat launch just as the ice was receding. We waded into the freezing lake and cast gold ribbed hare’s ear wet flies so they’d land on the ice, and then drop into the water with a plop on the retrieve. Just as a fly dropped into the water, bam, another starving brookie was there to gobble it up. The five of us each caught our limit of ten. Okay, so the brookies were probably stocked earlier in the day by Manitou and mistook our flies for Purina Trout Chow. We could’ve cared less. We fried those petite six inch beauties crispy like smelt in bacon grease and ate every last one for dinner that night, bones and all. Without getting too technical, baby trout are as sweet as tupelo honey. Manitou now stocks Nick’s Lake with exotic German brown trout. Ach du liebe Zeit!

Brookies are quite civilized when compared to lakers and other so called trout. That’s because they’re actually fresh water char, rather than Salmos like the brown trout, or Oncorhynchuses, like the rainbow trout. The brookie’s species name, fontinalis, springs from the Latin meaning, of or from a spring or fountain. A fountain? Crazy Romans. The laker’s species name was bestowed by the East Cree who call them, kukamesh, which means bupkis to anybody but Crees. Why are brookies so civilized? Well, for one thing, unlike the Old Christians Club rugby team from Montevideo, Uruguay that crashed in the Andes in 1972, lakers and browns, brookies don’t cannibalize their own kind. We pseudo intellectuals call this vulgar intra-species behavior, piscivorous.

It’s funny ironic, that brookies are the more indiscriminate feeders of the Salvelinus genre. Their menu includes crayfish, minnows, snakes, small mammals, insects, aquatic larvae, frogs, amphibians, and their all-time favorite, invasive earthworms. Because of this varied diet, brookies grow very quickly. Lakers, on the other hand, spend the majority of their lives in lake depths between 60 and 200 feet. So what’s down there in the cold, murky abyss for them to eat besides suckers and bullheads? Other lakers of course. What a piscivorous existence it must be. Lakers do ascend from the depths in the spring after ice out to feed voraciously on spawning smelt, shiners, and stocky rainbows and salmon. It’s a wonderful opportunity to snag a big laker on a streamer fly resembling a smelt or baitfish. In early May, lakers sometimes lurk under the dock at Inlet’s Fourth Lake boat launch, waiting for the DEC trucks to dump a load of 6-8 inch rainbows or landlocked Atlantic salmon. Come to poppa, baby.

Since you are what you eat, brookies eat a lot and grow to their maximum size in 5-7 years, if they survive that long. Maximum recorded weight of a brookie is 14.5 pounds and there are reports of a 15 year old relocated brookie who was residing in California at the time of his demise. Must be all those organic fruits and veggies on the left coast. Lakers, conversely, are slow growers, but they grow much larger. They’re the largest chars, the world record weighing 102 pounds. In the North Country, it may take a laker 15 years to reach two pounds, and they may live to the ripe old age of 40.

Now comes the confusing part of this treatise. Brookies and lakers can be hybridized. I’m not kidding and there’s no West Virginia joke to follow, either. Rarely, with and without the help of DEC fisheries biologists, brookies and lakers can wed and have kids. The kids are called splake, which makes them the butt of cruel fish school jokes. However, splake possess the best qualities of their brookie and laker parents. They have high I.Q.’s, swim faster, jump higher, grow faster, mature faster, and fortunately taste more like their brookie parents. Unfortunately, like that Uruguayan rugby team, they do dine on their playmates. But, it’s all in good fun.

Now for the really mystifying part. Although splake can propagate, they don’t like to. Let’s call it a sexual lifestyle preference. Then a splake backcross, called the F1 splake, was developed back in the early 1970’s and refined in the 1980’s in Georgian Bay, Ontario, Canada. F1 splake actually heart each other and will mate and produce young without prompting them with pornographic spawning pictures. Another success story for the Canadian healthcare system.   

Okay, so what have we learned? Brookies and lakers are the essence of the Adirondacks. They’re fun to catch and taste great, especially cooked on a forked stick over a campfire for shore lunch. Oh, sorry. Lakers taste best when they’re undersized and therefore illegal to possess. The smaller the Salvelinus, the sweeter the meat. DEC, lower the legal size on lakers. The big, oily ones are all 100 feet down, dying of old age, i.e., sucker bait. It may also be apparent that due to exigent circumstances, I’ve yet to wet a line this spring and I’m suffering excruciating Salvelinus withdrawal. Woe is me.