TU in Action: Defending public lands

The Salmon River and the fabled Sawtooth Mountains of central Idaho. Photo by Chris Hunt. Trout Unlimited members in the West have a message for state legislatures that want to keep trying to “transfer” American public lands to the states: Keep your damn hands off our birthright. As noted in this great High Country News piece…

Getting started: Know your trout

The brook trout is actually char, native to Appalachia, eastern Canada and the upper Midwest. Photo by Chris Hunt. Editor’s note: This the third in a series of posts geared toward new fly fishers. More installments will follow.  A couple of years ago, I was fishing a small, backcountry trout stream on the Island Park…

Ninemile Valley Abandoned Mine Restoration

Perhaps no place in Montana illustrates a more striking juxtaposition between an iconic fishery nestled within an over-exploited landscape than the Clark Fork watershed. The Clark Fork is one of the state’s most popular angling destinations; by the time it flows out of Montana, it has become the state’s largest river. Native westslope cutthroat and…

Snake River Headwaters Home Rivers Initiative

In April 2016, Trout Unlimited – along with a diverse group of community, landowner, and agency partners – launched an ambitious new initiative to restore and protect the headwaters and fishery of the upper Snake River in Wyoming. The Snake River Headwaters Home Rivers Initiative will leverage the capacity of the active Jackson Hole TU…

Yankee Fork Side Channel Habitat Improvement

Yankee Fork Side Channel Habitat Improvement

Goals TU’s goal in the Yankee Fork basin was to create side-channel rearing habitat for juvenile Chinook salmon and steelhead trout and spawning habitat for adult steelhead.  Improved habitat will also benefit cutthroat trout and bull trout. Tactics TU and partners re-graded mounds of dredge tailings to fill remnant dredge ponds and create a functional…

Voices from the River: In the company of ghosts

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…