Native Trout of Mexico: Treasures of the Sierra Madre

American theatergoers are familiar with director John Huston’s classic movie of 1948, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, based on a novel written by B. Traven and starring Humphrey Bogart as Fred C. Dobbs. At least north of the border, Traven’s tale of loco gringos prospecting for gold made Mexico’s rugged mountains famous, and many cinephiles still recognize the famous quote by Gold Hat the bandito: “Badges! We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges! I don’t have to show you any stinking badges.” Huston filmed most of his mountain scenes on location in Mexico, and some 50 years later, we found ourselves in the Sierra Madre Occidental (henceforth, SMO) of northwest Mexico with our own saga of prospecting for “gold” beginning to unfold. Always without badges but often stinking after days of back-country camping and hiking, our binational and otherwise diverse cast of academic, government, and nonprofit biologists and fly fishers came to call itself Truchas Mexicanas (Mexican trout), after the different, but also gilded, treasure we were chasing.