PHOENIX – Five minutes after stepping into a beaver pond on the Little Colorado River, Chase Newlon realized Arizona wasn’t the fishing desert about which he had been warned.
The water was cold, the creek was alive and the first fish he pulled from the shadows was an 8‑inch Apache trout, a native species still listed as threatened at the time.
“It was so dumb that I’m freaking out over an 8‑inch fish,” the Phoenix resident said. “But I thought it was the coolest thing… something so rare.”…