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The names we pin on places tell a story of human experience. These autobiographical vignettes, printed on road signs and maps, testify to an experience of being tied to the land.

The local lexicon of the Gila region in southern New Mexico and Arizona speak of conflict and privations and chance encounters.

Names like Raw Meat Canyon, Rainy Mesa, Hells Hole and Turkey Creek embellish the map.

Place names add color to this rugged land. Creeks course though steep-walled canyons, some so deep direct rays of the sun never warm the water. With the hardscrabble roughness of this expanse, you can see how the Apaches were emboldened to not comply with the wishes of the U.S. government for so long.

The word "Gila" itself relates to the shape of the land, corrupted from Spanish derived from the Apache word "zhil," meaning "mountain."

What a fitting name for the region's only native trout. It is here that the Gila trout has hung on in the face of overwhelming odds.

It has stared headlong at 100-plus years of loss of habitat and competition with introduced fishes for food, space and mates. Since the inception of the Endangered Species Act in 1973, the Gila trout has been endangered and on the brink of extinction.

That changed in July. After decades of work by the state Game and Fish departments in New Mexico and Arizona, the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, New Mexico State University and conservation groups, the Gila trout was down-listed to threatened.

It also got a special provision that will allow limited sport fishing - for the first time in nearly a half century.

This possibility is distinct: there may be no one alive today who has legally angled a pure Gila trout from its native waters. By the time the Gila trout was closed to fishing in the 1950s, its numbers and range were so depleted and so reduced that this copper-colored trout simply wasn't all that accessible to anglers.

In 1973, at the time of its listing under the Endangered Species Act, scientists estimated the Gila trout swam in just 20 miles of water in only four streams. That stands in stark contrast to the estimated 600 miles it once occupied in New Mexico as late as the 1890s.

So, it's been a strong current that this trout has had to swim against, bolstered mostly by the ethics of conservation. The Fish and Wildlife Service's Fishery Resources Offices in New Mexico and Arizona have diligently expanded the range of the trout in stream-to-stream transfers with a mind of adding geographic security by widely separating the replicated populations.

These arid mountains of the Gila are prone to forest fires and trout don't do well in ash-laden waters.

Recovery would not have been possible without the Mora National Fish Hatchery and Technology Center in northeastern New Mexico. This facility has been a refuge for wild fish faced with the grim prospects of wild fire.

Three times Gila trout have been brought there from the wild in advance of moving wildfires and held there safely in quarantine.

Gila trout have originated from the Mora facility for supplemental stocking in the wild. These hatchery fish are not far removed from wild stock. That's been by design; a science-based brood stock management plan guides the fish culture work.

Only young Gila trout go out to the wild, and nature selects those fish that might get to breed by the time they reach maturity at 3 years of age.

Science also has helped the Gila trout at Mora. One example is improvements in fish diets, specifically for young Gila trout for whom an optimal diet has been developed to enhance chances for survival.

That technology will be transferable to private manufacturers of fish food to help them produce a better products - not just for Gila trout, but for other species of fish not easy to feed in captivity.

The brood stock at Mora also have provided a means for scientists to conduct a hooking mortality study, which will help the state agencies make sound fishing regulations.

Gila trout are swimming expressions of antiquity, artifacts of epochs past. In their genes they carry a time capsule. Coiled in the double-helix of their DNA lies the lexis of the environment from which they sprung forth.

The success of Gila trout conservation is a swimming expression of human experience, science and the dedication of those that were determined to see what had been this nation's only endangered trout turn upstream from the sweeping current of extinction.