Every spring, West Virginia anglers head out on their own “Gold Rush.” The special two-week event revolves around golden rainbow trout, a unique strain of gold-colored rainbows that are produced in state hatcheries. This year, the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources stocked 50,000 of these trout in 69 lakes and streams. One hundred trout were tagged and worth special prizes.
Fifteen-year-old Hunter Rohr was one of the anglers looking for gold this month. On April 2, during his spring break, he and his high high-school buddy Bryar Sandy were searching for fish in streams near Rohr’s home in Buckhannon.
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Rohr and Sandy had started fishing at 7 a.m. that morning. They’d each caught a few smaller golden rainbows and released them all as they usually do. Around noon, they found a pile of fish in a deep hole on the South Branch of the Potomac River.
“We call it the South Branch of the Smoke Hole, and we fish it a good bit,” Rohr tells Outdoor Life. “That day we were using light spinning tackle, four-pound test line and floats to try and catch a golden. We wanted one with a tag.”
The water was deep but clear, and there were some other anglers working the same stretch of water. Using a pair of quality polarized sunglasses, he spotted an especially large fish holding near a log on the bottom.
“I tried a lot of lures to try and catch that fish, but nothing worked,” says the freshman and a member of his high-school bass-fishing team. “Finally, I used a single pink steelhead egg for bait. I [had kept] and cured some eggs last year from a steelhead I caught out of a stream near Lake Erie.’”
He threaded the pink egg onto a small hook and sent it drifting to the holding trout. Rohr had a split shot above the baited hook and a float, which kept the bait off bottom as it headed toward the big golden rainbow. The trout took the egg, Rohr hooked the fish, and a wild two-minute battle began.
“It came up and got its head out of the water, sloshing and fighting a lot – but it was too fat to jump,” says Rohr. “Everybody around me was going crazy as I fought that fish, and Bryar came over to help me and netted the trout.”
Rohr said that when he lifted the fish, he knew it was big enough to become a new West Virginia record. While he almost always releases the fish he catches, he put the huge trout in a cooler. The young anglers then drove to nearby Shreves Country Store, where an employee weighed the fish at over 12 pounds.
After a few more phone calls, they met up with Jim Walker, a state fisheries biologist who officially weighed the fish on certified scales at 11.84 pounds, with a 28-inch length and 19-inch girth. Rohr says he filleted the fish later and gave it to a friend who was glad to have the meat.
Walker helped Rohr fill out state paperwork for Rohr’s 11.84-pound golden rainbow trout record, and it’s currently under review by the West Virginia DNR. Although it’s not official yet, Rohr’s fish should replace the current record, a 9.72-pounder caught in April 2023.
“The fish didn’t have a tag, so I didn’t win anything in the ‘Gold Rush,’” Rohr says. “But I’d much rather have a state record than win a prize for a tagged fish.”
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Golden rainbow trout are a mutated strain of hatchery rainbows that the West Virginia DNR has been rearing and releasing since the 1960s. While technically the same species as a rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss), they are selectively bred for their unmistakable, bright-yellow coloration. They are unrelated to golden trout (Onchorhynchus agabonita), a species native to the Sierra Nevada mountains that is also stocked in other high-elevation streams and lakes across the West.
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