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[Standard Parks Canada Intro]

Text:
Banff National Park, Big Fish Lake, Thursday 13:00

[A helicopter takes off while a gopher watches. It flies over lakes and wetlands in the backcountry of Banff National Park and lands near a lake. Parks Canada aquatics specialist, Shelley Humphries, walks along the shoreline wearing hip waders and a studied expression. We see close-ups of streams and alpine plants as Shelley speaks.]

Shelley: This place has been a national park for over 125 years and in that time Parks Canada's ideas about management have really changed. In the early days when people first got here the fishing was amazing.

[A lure drops in the water.]

Shelley: Then we fished really hard and it wasn't so good anymore. The populations of the bull trout and the cutthroat trout were really reduced.

[Fish swimming at night.]

Shelley: So Parks Canada started to stock. We stocked all through '20s and into the 1980's and then we revisited our policy. Since then, I've been spending all my time going back over our fish inventories trying to figure out where we have our native species like bull trout and cutthroat trout and where we have populations of exotic species like brook trout and rainbow trout.

The bad news is, brook trout and rainbow trout now dominate most of the waters in the park but the good news is…

[An aerial view of Big Fish Lake in Banff National Park]

Shelley: … we still have a few places like this one where we've got populations of pure, westslope cutthroat trout.

[A view of Shelley Humphries from under the water.]

Shelley: It's my hope in the next twenty years that we can have more places like this, and fewer locations with brook trout and rainbow trout, for our kids to come and watch and angle and enjoy.

Text:
Music "Ghostwriter Remix", Rjd2

[Standard Parks Canada Outro]