On a startlingly beautiful day high in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Thomas Champeau waded into Yellowstone Prong hoping to catch the elusive Southern Appalachian brook trout. A pull-off along Blue Ridge Parkway had led him to a short path lined with mountain laurel. He and a smattering of afternoon anglers followed it to a rocky creekbed running cold and clear toward the Pigeon River. Champeau, already in waders, left a cooler on the bank in case of a lucky catch and stepped in. Rod in hand, he treaded lightly from one smooth rock to another, carefully staying out of sight of his quarry. Brook trout are, like Champeau, alert, cautious, and observant, hanging tight in the shaded pools where they make their home.
“Your approach has to be low, quiet, and so it’s a little bit like hunting ‘cause you’re kind of stalking as opposed to just fishing blindly,” Champeau, a former biologist who runs communications for a local chapter of Trout Unlimited, said. After an unsuccessful cast he reeled the line back in and moved upstream.
All around, the landscape was blooming and greening with summer. It still bears the scars left by Hurricane Helene, which tore through the region in September 2024. Trillions of gallons of rain turned placid streams into raging torrents that overran homes and forests. The storm upended streams and radically remade trout habitat. Researchers and anglers looking for the fish have navigated eroded streambanks, downed logs, and debris. “Rocks bigger than a refrigerator have been pushed around,” Champeau said while casting into a calm pool.
The upheaval was particularly hard on the Southern Appalachian brook trout, a fragile, cold-water native that has endured more than a century of logging, development, and competition from introduced species. Once abundant across the region for which it is named, the fish has lost roughly 80 percent of its range since 1900. Because the animal is so sensitive to pollution and temperature changes, biologists consider it a bellwether for the region’s forests and streams. They find its rapid decline alarming — not only because they care about trout, but because trout can only survive in healthy waterways. Helene’s damage raises the larger question of whether one of Appalachia’s most iconic fish — and the ecologies, economies, and traditions tied to it — can adapt to a rapidly changing climate…