What's a Sky Island?

Do I need a boat to get to a Sky Island?

Imagine that you're driving across one of the basins of the western desert. It could be the Sonoran, the Great Basin, or the Chihuahuan Desert. You haven't seen a body of water large enough to wash a large dog in for an hour, and the horizon is mostly flat. Suddenly, in the distance, a large shape looms up, darkly colored and a little hazy, almost like a mirage.

As you get closer, you realize it's not a mirage, but a mountain range that sits thousands of feet above the floor of the basin, almost like an island rising from the sea. You are approaching a Sky Island mountain range, an ecological island of a wetter, colder period surrounded by a dry desert environment, leaving unique species, landscapes and experiences floating in an alien environment.

What's on the Island?

Sky Island mountain ranges, like the Sacramento Mountains, hold unique species, like populations of aspen trees that require moisture and cool temperatures not found at lower elevations. They also tend to get more than their share of precipitation, a function of high elevation holding passing storm fronts until they give up some of their precious moisture. This moisture is sometimes even stored in the form of snow, waiting until spring to bless the lowlands with runoff.

That runoff is what makes fisheries like the ones Sky Island Adventures fishes possible! Not every Sky Island range has streams or creeks that hold sport fish, and almost none have natural lakes (though many hold artificial reservoirs). But our Sacramento Mountains hold numerous streams that drain the green mountains. They give trout (both native Rio Grande cutthroat and introduced brook, brown and rainbow trout), and the food sources they live on, like caddis and mayflies, a place to live and grow in cold streams separated by hundreds of miles from the nearest parts of the Rocky Mountains.

Many of these streams are also blessed by flowing through and over limestone that loads its waters with nutrients that make the streambed thrive with vegetation that grows the kinds of bugs that grow big trout! The Rio Peñasco is the textbook case of this phenomenon, and grows trout in a place that feels more like the desert than anywhere you would expect to catch large trout!

The western escarpment of the Sacramento Mountains.

A pool on the Rio Peñasco. Photo credit: Mulcock Ranch.

Come Ashore on our Sky Island

There are many Sky Island ranges across New Mexico, Texas and Arizona, including the Chiricahuas, the Davis Mountains, the Guadalupe Mountains and more. We are unabashedly partial to our Sacramento/Sierra Blanca Island here in the New Mexico desert on the western edge of the Great Plains. If you want to explore our fisheries, see some amazing views, unique plants and animals, and get out of the summer heat, book a trip with us today!

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Want to fish it with us? Book a trip, or get in touch with questions.