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Finding hope in a hellish year
Amid the choking fumes of this hellish year, I found hope recently in an unlikely place. I found it walking a concrete path in a city of over 100,000 souls. Aimless I walked, and aimlessly stopped serendipitously next to a thread of a creek trickling over riprap and steppingstones, as the onset of autumn burnished…
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Restoring the Lower Snake
The final sign-off of a plan that would maintain the status quo for the Lower Snake River was no surprise last week. However, a letter from the Nez Perce Tribe declining a memorandum of understanding between the tribe, the Bonneville Power Administration, Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation reminded us what strong leadership…
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Remembering Oak Brook’s fly-fishing Pied Piper, Fred Hodge
I first met Fred Hodge over a decade ago, when I was still new at TU and was on the road all the time, meeting chapter and council leaders and listening to their stories of teaching and mentoring kids. Fred and other Oak Brook TU members had a booth at a huge outdoor show in…
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Plan and then plan again
The year 2020 has been a year of wrecked plans
The year 2020 has been a year of wrecked plans. Any sort of travel – cancelled. Celebrations with friends and family – done through Zoom. Even the regular trip to the grocery store or out to eat – reimagined with a mask and attempts at social distancing. This is even truer for me dealing with the ravages…
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These hips don’t lie
Crawling around small creeks was an exercise in bad yoga, as I dragged myself to standing by grabbing branches and logs. When I finally had the hip examined, I was told what I already knew
Two summers ago, I agreed to join a backpacking trek with some friends I hadn’t seen since college. Our mission -- honoring the life of a mutual friend who’d passed away -- took us deep into the Sierra Nevada range, a 54-mile journey filled with golden trout and jaw-dropping views of ice-etched peaks and verdant hanging valleys. As…
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Senate bills protect our rivers, address drought
Editor's note: This piece first appeared in the Albuquerque Journal. Often referred to as the hardest-working river in America, the Colorado River provides drinking water to 40 million people and irrigation water to 5.5 million acres of farm and ranch land across the Southwestern United States. According to the Washington Post, the upper reaches of…
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TU Mayfly Stations help anglers and guides with real-time data
By Jake Lemon Perhaps no bug is more significant to anglers than the mayfly. We chase them, imitate them, even tattoo their visage on our skin. Now a new type of mayfly is emerging on rivers and streams in the US. The Mayfly Sensor Station is an autonomous, low-cost water monitoring station that uploads water quality and quantity…
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