Outside of its native range in California, Golden trout are more often found in cirques and creeks in wilderness areas around 10,500–12,000 feet (3,200–3,700 m) elevation, often in higher passes that are not passable without crampons, ice axes, and ropes until after the Fourth of July.

[14] In 1892, the California golden trout was originally described by David Starr Jordan, the first President of Stanford University, as Salmo mykiss agua-bonita.

[15] A century later they were listed as Oncorhynchus mykiss aguabonita in Behnke's Native trout of western North America.

[16] In 1904, Stewart Edward White communicated to his friend President Theodore Roosevelt, that overfishing could lead to extinction of the golden trout.

Fish Commissioner George M. Bowers, dispatched biologist Barton Warren Evermann of the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries to study the situation.

[18] Years of overexploitation, mismanagement and competition with exotic species have brought golden trout to the brink of being designated as "threatened".

[19] In September 2004, the California Department of Fish and Game signed an agreement with federal agencies to work on restoring back-country habitat, heavily damaged by overgrazing from cattle and sheep, as part of a comprehensive conservation strategy.

[14][20][21] For sportfishing, the golden trout underwent many twentieth century translocations into multiple Western states and established populations survive in California, Idaho, Montana, Utah, Washington, Colorado, and Wyoming.

[22] The current status in other states where the California golden trout were planted (Arizona, New Mexico and Oregon) lacks documentation.

However, a former New Mexico population is relatively well known and storied as, when then-Colonel Chuck Yeager introduced one of his commanding officers, General Irving "Twig" Branch, to the Sierra Nevada populations of golden trout, Branch ordered Yeager and Bud Anderson to introduce the species to the mountain streams of New Mexico.