New water is always exciting, and, while I’ve fished Idaho’s Salmon River a lot for steelhead over the years, I’d never poked into the river’s extreme upper reaches at the base of Galena Summit, where the Sawtooths spread out to the northwest. My thought—and, frankly, my hope—was to get into some native west slope cutthroats…
Eighteen species in two months across 10 states is one of the more challenging feats I have attempted to accomplish in my lifetime; and Utah posed as quite the challenge. But it’s OK, because the challenge is what keeps us fisherman coming back for more. We arrived in Utah in search of the Utah Cutthroat…
The head of a tiger trout. Paul Burnett/Trout Unlimited. By Brett Prettyman This is the tale of two fish. The take was similar. The tug was not. One easily provided more thrill than the other, but it was not the fish you would expect. I recently had the chance to visit the family ranch of…
Photo by Rachel Andona By Chris Hunt A year ago, I was well into the British Columbian interior, motoring north toward my eventual destination at Deadhorse on the Arctic Ocean, a new camper in tow, many miles to go and about six weeks to get there and back. It was a marathon pocked by dozens…
Photo by Helen H. Richardson, The Denver Post Colorado’s state fish, the imperiled greenback cutthroat trout, got a boost this week when nearly 1,000 year-old fish were released into a small stream high along the Continental Divide above the famed Eisenhower Tunnel that cuts through the mountains that divide the state in two. The fish,…
It’s that time of year … runoff is over, for the most part. High-country streams are cold and clear and accessible. The bugs aren’t as bad as they were a month ago. It’s cutthroat time. These magical weeks of summer and into the fall are the best time of year to catch native cutthroat trout.…
Tom Reed with a nice Firehole River brown trout. We’d walked maybe a mile away from the bike trail that crosses the Firehole River, just upstream of the Fountain Flat parking area, putting a bit of distance between us and the last couple of anglers we wandered past that early June day several years back.…