Author

Christine Peterson

Christine Peterson has written about wildlife, the environment and outdoor recreation as a journalist in Wyoming and across the West for more than a decade.…

  • Fishing Women Youth

    Joy and Wonder

    I caught my first fish with a fine, mesh net in the creek behind my childhood home. The silver minnow measured no more than a couple inches, but your uncle and I placed it and a couple others in a bucket and carried them into our house like treasures pulled from the deep. We kept…

  • Conservation Community Science

    Every Bit Counts

    Cowboys along a fence line with cows and mountains in the background

    On a controversial river in a drying landscape, ranchers look to science, technology and the law to send just a little more water downstream. Jesse Kruthaupt’s dad found the family’s future ranch stretching along a place called Tomichi Creek nestled in a valley on the Western Slope of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. It was the late…

  • Gear reviews Trout Talk

    Cool Fishing Shirts, Custom Designed for TU…

    Oshki turns recycled Great Lakes plastic into fashion.

    Oshki turns recycled Great Lakes plastic into fashion. Jackson Riegler wanted to be a marine biologist. Or maybe a scuba diver. He was a kid from small-town Michigan in love with the Great Lakes. Now as a newly-minted University of Michigan graduate, he’s swimming in fashion-industry waters poised to make an even bigger difference on…

  • TROUT Magazine Fishing

    A letter to my daughter

    When the world feels on the brink, can a child bring us back?

    By Christine Peterson Our feet fall a little to the right on the smooth, gray stones. We sit where glaciers once pulsated slowly over thousands of years. They grew and shrank, grew and shrank, slicing into the rock and earth with each movement, creating this valley and leaving behind a clear, rocky river.  All I…

  • Climate Change

    Cooling off coldwater streams

    Cooling off coldwater streams BY CHRISTINE PETERSON In an ever-warming West, hydrologists and anglers place hope in Mother Nature's refrigerator The creek running through Pam and Brian Robertson’s property wasn’t actually a creek. It was a ditch. A really, really deep ditch that funneled rushing runoff from the mountain to the Clearwater River each spring.…

  • Snake River dams

    Mike Simpson – Conserving the future

    Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson champions removing four dams on the Lower Snake River to save salmon, not because he fishes for them, but because he says it’s the right thing to do.  Since Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson’s dad died about 20 years ago, he’s been meeting his mom and two uncles occasionally at restaurants around…

  • Did the pandemic spark a fishing renaissance?

    Photo by Christine Peterson The brother and sister—ages 8 and 11—fired off one question after another. “What’s a sinker for?”  “What’s a bottom bouncer?”  “How does it work?” “What are we going to catch?” They’d never been fishing before. They wanted to know everything. Their instructor that day, my husband, put on his middle-school-science-teacher face,…