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Backcountry bull trout featured in ‘Secrets’
Bull trout are the native char of the inland Northwest. They live in the coldest, cleanest water and thrive in the most far-flung places. They get big and surly. They chase gaudy streamers, prey on smaller fish and can be very challenging to pursue. They're also a vital indicator species when it comes to a…
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‘A Nation’s River’ highlights TU’s efforts in the Potomac headwaters
Dustin Wichterman lives trout. By day he manages Trout Unlimited’s restoration and protection work in the Potomac headwaters. Most of the rest of the time he’s either fishing for trout or dreaming about fishing for trout. And a big part of that dream is that one day the Potomac headwaters will again regularly churn out native brook trout pushing…
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Spring on Jack Creek
Beyond its confluence with Cow Creek near the village of San Ysidro, the Pecos River’s southward crawl is rarely supplemented by significant inputs other than random flash floods. Deriving its existence from how much snow falls on a mere six percent of its watershed, the Pecos flows most of its length through a desert, which is why I’ve always had difficulty believing that it’s the sixteenth longest river…
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Hope for Idaho’s Salmon
“I have concluded that I am going to stay alive long enough to see salmon return to healthy populations in Idaho.” Those words by U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) at a conference at the Andrus Center last week may do more to project the recovery of the imperiled Snake River salmon and steelhead than multiple…
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Pebble is trying to buy its friends
An early-morning scroll through my twitter feed woke me up much faster than the first couple sips I’d had of my coffee. “Pebble project hires the man Politico calls, ‘the most powerful lobbyist in Trump’s Washington.’” (from @DylanBrown26, an industry reporter for Energy and Environment news). Sure enough, within hours, the E&E story broke after…
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Wrapping soft hackle
Soft-hackle patterns have earned a spot in my fly box. Over the last half-decade or so, they have gone from seldom-use curiosities from some hidden corner of a rarely opened fly box to my first choice on many waters here in the West. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsP43A2fr84 The sparser the better when it comes to soft hackles. Why?…
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Four-quarter fly fishing
For years and years, fly fishing for trout, for me, was a three-period game, not a four-quarter contest. It was hockey, not football (even though I’m not much of a hockey guy). Depending on the season, the time of day or the weather, I’d go to my fly boxes and choose a fly from one…
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