Originally Posted by
Shaggy Hiker
I have no desire to do this. I'm not sure where you live, but you seem to have some kind of Disney view of deserts, too. Trout are pretty common throughout the west. You can look up the distribution of the redband trout (a resident form of the rainbow), and will find that they are located in plenty of desert areas (and plenty of non-desert areas, too). A few varieties of cutthroat are also found in desert streams, and green trout may be, as well. Some of the cutthroat may not be native, others are. If you find brook or brown trout, those are not native, so they were planted. Some varieties of rainbows are not native, either, and have been planted widely. The redbands have never been planted anywhere, to the best of my knowledge, probably because they don't grow large enough to make good sport fish (though brook trout can also reproduce at a tiny size).
One point that you will come across, if you search enough, is that there are lots of streams out here that don't connect to anything, but soak into the ground. Many of these streams have populations of cutthroat trout, and many of these fish look distinctly different from each other, since they haven't been able to mingle for millenia. Some people debate whether these are all even the same species.