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Thinking big, starting small
Herman Garcia (L) of CHEER and Matt Clifford, California Water Attorney for Trout Unlimited, at an off-stream storage project site along Little Arthur Creek. In 2006, the Pajaro River on California's central coast came out of obscurity to make national headline---for the wrong reason: it was named the most endangered river in America. Historically, the…
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The Pecos is fishing great … for now
The lifeblood of the Village of Pecos, the Pecos River flows through public and private lands in a narrow canyon flanked by in aspen, Gambel oak, and mixed conifer. The Pecos boasts a fun salmon fly hatch in early summer, and I love how spooky the fish are in autumn, when elk bugles echo, the banks blaze with yellow cottonwoods, and the water resembles the air above, cold, clear and…
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The cannabis conundrum
This graphic of a tributary to the Eel River shows the intense marijuana cultivation typical of many drainages in California's Emerald Triangle. The large red circles indicate outdoor grows of more than 100 plants and the pot farms in this drainage alone require more than 15 million gallons of water per growing season. By Matt…
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Let the water do the work
Editor’s note: TU sent a handful of college students to the Pacific Northwest for this year’s TU Costa 5 Rivers Odyssey to study and fish in the Columbia River basin. On the road to Cougar Dam in Blue River, Ore., there is a dirt road in Willamette National Forest that leads you to a squiggly hand-drawn “Road…
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Trout in the Texas Hill Country
GRTU president Mark Dillow in his element on the Guadalupe River. Trout Unlimited has 4,000 members in Texas, all part of one Texas-sized chapter: Guadalupe River TU (GRTU). Amazing for a state that has no native trout, and relatively few trout streams. When I lived in Colorado, it was commonly believed that all anglers residing…
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Fathers
Photo: The Steelhead Whisperer and his daughter on California's Big Sur River. I spent Father’s Day this year not fishing. That was fine with me, though. My son was with me and we were at 7,500 feet in the Sierra Nevada range, where winter had not yet gathered up all of her train. And we…
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How to tie flies with foam
Foam flies revolutionized dry-fly angling a couple of decades ago. Flies that absolutely must float—think grasshoppers, big salmon flies and other terrestrial flies, like ants and beetles—got a big boost from the foam incursion into the fly-tying arena years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtXeLjg6i8Q While foam can be really effective to use in any number of patterns, it…
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