Dave -

On one small spring creek down in the Central Mountains of Idaho, I used to see a fair number of very dark, purplish rainbows, even darker than the one you caught.

There were stocked rainbows in that creek, but way downstream from where I fished. I'm pretty sure the ones I saw and caught were wild fish. I usually saw them around spawning time, but since that is the time of year that I usually fished that creek, that might just be a coincidence. They might have been there year round.

Rainbow trout do have quite the extraordinary range of colors and spot patterns.

John