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

Thinking big, starting small

Herman Garcia (L) of CHEER and Matt Clifford, California Water Attorney for Trout Unlimited, at an off-stream storage project site along Little Arthur Creek. In 2006, the Pajaro River on California’s central coast came out of obscurity to make national headline—for the wrong reason: it was named the most endangered river in America. Historically, the

Leave it to the beavers

Editor’s note: TU sent a handful of college students to the Pacific Northwest for this year’s TU Costa 5 Rivers Odyssey to study and fish in the Columbia River basin. With misty morning breaths, the Odyssey crew circled up at the entrance of Black Pine Lake in the mountains of Winthrop, Wash. Already dressed in our

The cannabis conundrum

This graphic of a tributary to the Eel River shows the intense marijuana cultivation typical of many drainages in California’s Emerald Triangle. The large red circles indicate outdoor grows of more than 100 plants and the pot farms in this drainage alone require more than 15 million gallons of water per growing season. By Matt

Let the water do the work

Editor’s note: TU sent a handful of college students to the Pacific Northwest for this year’s TU Costa 5 Rivers Odyssey to study and fish in the Columbia River basin. On the road to Cougar Dam in Blue River, Ore., there is a dirt road in Willamette National Forest that leads you to a squiggly hand-drawn “Road