Congress seeks reauthorization, funding for GLRI

By Taylor Ridderbusch On Friday, both the House and Senate introduced bills to reauthorize and increase funding for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI).  The identical bills would reauthorize the program for five more years and incrementally increase the funding level from $300 million to $475 million, which was the original funding level for the…

The dead Grande Ronde

Editor’s note: The TU Costa 5 Rivers Program sent a handful of college students to the Columbia River basin to study the challenges facing the drainage’s fisheries. At 4:30 a.m. we stumbled from our tents and into brisk chilly air. We zipped up our jackets, sipped hot coffee and ate warm oatmeal. After packing camp,…

Passion on Sheep Creek

Editor’s note: The TU Costa 5 Rivers Program sent a handful of college students to the Columbia River basin to study the challenges facing the drainage’s fisheries. At 6 a.m. we started driving from La Grande, Oregon to the Grande Ronde River headwaters – Wallowa-Whitman National Forest. Within 20 minutes, the car’s temperature read 40…

Columbia Basin Partnership offers new vision for salmon and steelhead

The Columbia Basin Partnership has been flying mostly under the radar, but it could be the forum with the greatest potential to make a great leap forward in recovering wild salmon and steelhead in the Columbia Basin.  Why, you may ask?  Because it is the one place where all of the major stakeholders in the…

An accidental trophy

Every now and then, I like to explore and find new water, even in parts of the world I’m very familiar with. Earlier this week, I spent some time in the fringe country of Yellowstone National Park, along the Idaho-Montana border. It’s ranch and cabin country here—there’s a lot of private land that borders public…

Northern California summer steelhead could be listed by 2020

We love all steelhead here at Wild Steelheaders United and Trout Unlimited, but some anadromous O. mykiss populations may deserve more love than others. Consider wild summer run steelhead in Northern California. The available data for wild summers between Redwood Creek and the Gualala River (including the legendary Eel River watershed) suggest their numbers are greatly…