By Chris Hunt Last spring, after a lengthy search, I found the perfect rig to haul my little camper up into the hills around home for weekend fishing get-aways. It was old. It guzzled gas, which encouraged shorter trips, and it didn’t leak or burn oil. It had good clearance, ran like a champ and
A fat and happy Snake River fine-spotted cutthroat trout. By Chris Hunt Two summers ago, as I walked along a small alpine creek in the Caribou Range here in eastern Idaho, I spied what may rightly be called the sexiest stretch of trout water I’ve ever seen. The stream—by itself a modest flow—pushes down a
The tale of two Chrises: Chris Wood, above, president and CEO of Trout Unlimited; and Chris Santella, decorated outdoor writer. Both are alums of Vermont’s Middlebury College. By Kirk Deeter There’s always a backstory. Someday, I’m going to write a book, called “Backstory” or “Deep Into the Backing,” or something like that, where I spill
Sam Weis, the author’s late husband. By Jenny Weis My late husband had the fishing bug. He grew up fishing musky, walleye and panfish in the lakes of northern Wisconsin with his dad and grandpa. He eventually expanded his waters to Lake Superior, the Gulf of Mexico, and the driftless region of Wisconsin, picking up
By Corey Fisher What can you do in a roadless area? Just about anything. What is a roadless area? Roadless areas, or Inventoried Roadless Areas, are generally those undeveloped portions of National Forests 5,000 acres or larger that are not designated as Wilderness, but that meet to minimum criteria for for consideration under the Wilderness
JACKSON, Wyoming – Trout Unlimited (TU) and the Wyoming Game and Fish Department (WGFD) are excited to announce that the River Bend Ranch Fish Passage and Irrigation Improvement Project is currently underway and is expected to be completed by the end of November 2018. The collaborative project seeks to improve habitat and passage for Snake
By Toner Mitchell I spent Halloween this year in the company of ghosts. They weren’t the bed-sheet kind, but the long-gone n ative residents of Frijoles Canyon, in the Bandelier National Monument on New Mexico’s Pajarito Plateau. Established around 1150 AD by ancestral Puebloans fleeing drought and social strife in the Four Corners region, Bandelier
By Scott Willoughby An enlightened sage once suggested that those who choose not to find joy in snow will have much less joy in life. But still the same amount of snow. Said savant was undoubtedly a skier. And a trout fisher. I honestly don’t recall which I learned to do first, ski or fish.
By Rachel Kester As a college intern at the Clearfield County Conservation District, I first sampled Potts Run in the summer of 2002 as part of an assessment of Clearfield Creek, a tributary to the West Branch Susquehanna River in northcentral Pennsylvania. Potts Run sticks in my mind because after spending all summer sampling streams degraded
Homeward bound out of Phoenix, I couldn’t believe how much water was on the landscape. More exactly, how much water was in the landscape, for as we all know, water in its physical, palpable form is a rare sight among the rocks and draws of the Sonoran hardscrabble. The water I saw was in the form of plants,
In the natural world, diversity creates resilience. For example, grasslands with a greater variety of native plants are more resistant to drought. They also bounce back faster from disturbance caused by insect infestations and fire. Diversity also makes organizations more resilient. And relevant, too. The more connections to people with different backgrounds that we share,
Photo: USFWS/Joshua Winchell In this age of boundless partisanship, something remarkable happened this summer. A smart, forward-thinking piece of legislation addressing climate change was introduced that is sponsored by two Arizona congressmen from opposite ends of the political spectrum: Republican Paul Gosar, who rode the Tea Party wave into Congress in 2010, and Democrat Raul
The Bureau of Land Management’s Royal Gorge Field Office covers some 666,000 acres of public lands sloping eastward from the Great Divide, through Colorado’s Front Range and into the rolling grasslands of the High Plains. Tucked into the rugged folds of its western shoulder lies one of the state’s richest landscapes, home to trophy trout, bountiful
Several streams draining from the mountains that enhance my urban viewscape snake their way through Anchorage, paralleling urban trails, bordering neighborhoods and sometimes disappearing underground for blocks at a time. While the aesthetics and natural state of the creeks range from non-existent to surprisingly impressive, for an angler it’s difficult not to look at the flowing water, assess the potential lies of hungry fish, and subsequently
Effective partnerships win The 2014 listing of the New Mexico Meadow Jumping Mouse as a federally endangered species caused the closure of an expansive meadow along the Rio Cebolla to all uses – camping, fishing and especially grazing. As a gathering pasture in the spring and fall, the meadow was critical to the operations of
Whether or not they publicly admit it, every angler has a home river or stream — the place they think of first when even the slightest of openings appear on the calendar. The Green River below Flaming Gorge Dam in northeastern Utah is 200 miles from my front door but it is my home river.
September is Public Lands Month, and few places are more important to trout and salmon than our public lands. Half of all the blue-ribbon trout streams in the West, for example, flow across public lands. Our public lands are often the last and best strongholds for many species of native trout and char. My exposure
If you are active in the outdoors, it’s hard to beat living in the American West. That’s because all states west of the Great Plains have big swaths of public lands available for fishing and hunting. Except when big swaths of extraordinary wildfire shut them down. Right smack in the middle of Public Lands Month.
And some rivers … well, after a fashion, their names are pushed from their currents, roared from their rapids or whispered from quiet slicks
Crash and Kiltsman stayed with us for the first day out of town. The year before they had done the Appalachian Trail and they kept telling us it was harder than this trail. Not so much in terms of length but in terms of elevation gain and loss. Kiltsman got his name for the Scottish kilt he wears, no matter the weather.
