Our public lands are the foundation of healthy watersheds and strong communities. From remote trout streams to working forests and rangelands, these places provide clean water, vital trout habitat and public access for all Americans. But pressures like efforts to sell off and privatize public land threaten what makes them so valuable.
This blog series highlights the people and places at the heart of these landscapes—and the practical, local perspectives keeping them accessible, productive and resilient for generations to come.
One of the first things you notice when you meet Christy Fischer, president of Trout Unlimited’s Steinbeck Country Chapter and all-around superwoman, is her hands.
They are…well-used.
Crooked digits. Rugged knuckles. Fingernails that no fancy salon can fix. Christy’s hands reflect a lifetime of whitewater guiding, fishing, hunting and other adventures too numerous to name, mostly on American public lands.
When Christy says she feels at home in the outdoors, you think yeah, like few others. But it’s really the other way around: the outdoors are at home in her.
A life devoted to enjoying, and conserving, public lands
Christy Fischer was born and raised on California’s central coast.
Some of her “earliest and happiest” memories involve public lands. She remembers her family tucking her and her brother into the car in predawn chill for family outings to Yosemite and other public lands in the Sierra Nevada, where they would hike, swim, explore and “mooch gorp from my dad.”
As a young adult, she says, the outdoors seemed to get wider and wilder.
She began stalking golden trout in streams tumbling from the Sierra crest into the Owens River Valley and rafting the technical whitewaters of the great Sierra rivers where they flow through spectacular national forests such as the Tahoe, Stanislaus, Sierra, Sequoia and Inyo.
It wasn’t long before Christy parlayed her love of the outdoors into a livelihood.
She was hired as crew chief with the North Bay Conservation Corp, building trails in Muir Woods National Monument and Golden Gate National Recreation Area. She spent time doing wildlife research with the US Fish & Wildlife Service in the boondocks of interior Alaska. She decided simply wading in rivers wasn’t a full enough immersion into their joys and terrors, so she became a master boatsman and whitewater rafting guide. She worked for a resource conservation district, helping farmers and ranchers sustain and improve their yields while conserving water and soils.
Eventually she dedicated herself full-time to conserving and protecting public lands, open space and undeveloped working lands. For years she was a lead dealmaker for The Nature Conservancy in northern California. She then spent nearly a decade as executive director of the Santa Lucia Conservancy. For the past few years Christy has worked for the Trust for Public Land as conservation director for the Northern California coastal region.
While her love for wild places, and the finny and furry critters that live in those places, has been a driving force in her life, Christy also has the conservation gene. Her father, Michael Fischer, a regional planner by training, became executive director of the Sierra Club in the late 1980s and went on to serve as executive officer with the California Coastal Commission and the California Coastal Conservancy.
He also taught Christy to fish.
Fishing takes you to some of the best wild places
Christy Fischer took to fishing like, well, you get the idea.
She’s fished high country around the West. She’s fished lowland ponds and lakes. She’s fished miles and miles of beaches. She’s fished from kayaks, rafts, and driftboats. She’s fished with flies, spinners, spoons and live bait.
At age seven, she caught her first big rainbow on a bubblegum pink rooster tail on the Truckee River, to the astonishment of the more seasoned anglers around her. She “throws net” for surf smelt in the salt of the Central Coast—so enamored is she of this form of fishing, and to the delicacy of pan-fried smelt, that she spent her daughter Cassie’s due date dropping a well-spread net over the surf at Martins Beach on the San Mateo coast (Cassie postponed her entrance to the world by about a week).
For the past two decades, Christy’s primary fishing partner has been her husband, Tim Frahm. Frahm is an old-school outdoorsman and peerless storyteller, equally adept with rod and shotgun, and a true savant in the art of raising steelhead on a swung fly. The walls of their home are aesthetically adorned with trout and waterfowl mounts and sculptures of steelhead in their element. Decoys bob in the corners of their home office.
In fact, Christy and Tim’s first date was in a duck blind, calling in mallards and wigeons. They found the experience so romantic that some time later they got engaged in one, too.
Public lands provide a multitude of benefits
One of the primary lessons Christy has absorbed from following her personal and professional path is that “people of all walks of life need and benefit from access to nature, and equally importantly, the land needs people too. Our health and well-being is interconnected with the health of our lands and waters, and organizations like Trout Unlimited are critically important for helping people create and maintain these connections.”
In her current job with Trust for Public Land, Christy’s work with tribal and Indigenous communities to restore access to and stewardship of their ancestral lands—and often to better protect and restore trout and salmon streams in the process—has become especially meaningful.
Two former golf courses straddling important steelhead and coho streams, Rancho Canada and San Geronimo (more on TU’s efforts there are also here), provide examples of how Christy’s work in partnership with multiple stakeholders (including TU) to re-wild places with high aquatic and riparian habitat values delivers a broad swath of benefits for people and fish.
While Christy has no bias in her dedication to better conserving our remaining wild lands and waters, and to improving access to these places for fishing, hunting and outdoor recreation, public lands remain a lodestone for her.
“Public lands are a quintessentially American heritage,” she says. “They are literally irreplaceable. Unfortunately, at this moment they are facing multiple threats, including being sold into private ownership. There has never been a more important time for people of all political perspectives to come together to advocate for them.”
The importance of staying connected
In addition to excelling at demanding jobs, raising a family and helming the TU Steinbeck Country Chapter, Christy still makes time every summer for a two-week trip to Yellowstone for a binge of fishing and wildlife watching in the national park and in the constellation of national forests around it.
How does she fit it all in? She starts, she says, by remembering that durable conservation is a marathon, not a sprint.
“To be effective at caring for nature,” Christy says, “you must also find time to care for yourself—to stay connected to friends and family and to spend time in the places you love. Volunteering with Trout Unlimited helps me stay connected to a diverse community of people who care about rivers and support an organization I love. And it’s fun to boot!”
Christy’s heart’s home, she says, is California’s “roaring shores and soaring peaks.” But the landscapes and streams of the Rockies, especially those deep in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, have worked their way into her blood. She says, with no trace of irony or exaggeration, “Hunting wary trout on wild waters while keeping a weather-eye out for grizzlies and wolves is spectacularly fun.”
This Land is Your Land
Keeping public lands in public hands ensures future generations can experience the same outdoor opportunities we cherish today.