The IDFG quit stocking rainbows in the St. Joe a few years ago after officials decided costs to continue the program were prohibitive and that the transplanted rainbows bred with the West Slope cutts, diminishing the pure strain of native stock.

The state of wild West Slope cutthroat trout in waterways, where they once were as common as caddis, has become a regional priority, with several organizations calling for tighter regulations to assure the survival of the native fish.

A more migratory variety of cutthroat begins moving upstream from the lower reaches of the river and Coeur d' Alene Lake to spawn in spring and early summer before moving back downriver. And other cutthroat subspecies move from the upper river to the lower river. "Up there the river freezes from the bottom up," and the lower river usually stays open, says Wolfe.

Biologists agree that many of the river's cutts move upstream as the water warms in spring, and most anglers follow the fish from the slower water near St. Joe City to Avery, about 45 miles east of St. Maries, and farther upstream by midsummer.

The river east of Avery toward Montana's Bitterroot Range has been designated as catch-and-release waters. Live bait is prohibited here as well. Fish and Game adopted the catch-and-release status after many years of prodding by Wolfe.

In a treatise written by Wolfe in the 1970s while he was a night watchman at the local sawmill (his credentials include a lifetime of actual study of fish and their habits in the St. Joe and St. Maries River drainages -- a seasoned graduate of what he calls the Practical School of Experience and Common Sense) he laid out a simple plan for managing the river's population of cutthroat that included allowing only single, barbless hooks on the most heavily fished sections of river and enforcing size and take limits on trout. He also proposed a catch-and-release fishery before the term was popular in the West, and admonished the game department for its continual stocking of rainbow trout in the river system.

"The planting of hatchery rainbows must be abandoned," he wrote almost 30 years ago. "This 'put-and-take' method is not only bankrupting our fisheries program, but has an adverse effect and reaction on our pure strain cutthroat trout and their natural reproduction."

The department was slow to quit stocking. It was quicker to adopt the catch-and-release rule on the upper St. Joe River. Catch-and-release became law on the river upstream of Avery in 1989.

When he proposed the rule years earlier, he says, the notion of letting trout go instead of stuffing them into a creel didn't appeal to many traditionalist northern Idaho fishermen who were accustomed to catching and eating their share of any trout.

Even his best fishing pals admonished him, but, he maintained, "a dead fish . . . does not contribute to better fishing in our rivers."

By high summer the upper Joe hops in more way than one, thanks in part to the catch-and-release fishery. When the less ethereal trout hobbyists fish the river's abundant pools with a variety of nymphs, Wolfe turns to hoppers.