Trout Magazine

  • Conservation

    Living with the new normal

    By Chris Wood Take an undersized culvert and add eight inches of rain in a few hours and you have the makings of a major problem for the creek and the adjacent road into “the holler”—the name of our place in West Virginia. A neighbor called me. “Chris, your road. It’s just gone.” The irony…

  • Gear test: The Sage DART

    This time of year, it's all about small water for me. With summer in full gear, lower-elevation waters are simply too hot to fish, and the tailwater refuges for big trout are crowded with drift boats. But up high, where night-time temperatures dip into the 40s or even the upper 30s, trout waters stay nice…

  • TU and the Forest Service continue Tincup Creek restoration on the Caribou

    Trout Unlimited and the Caribou-Targhee National Forest announced today that the Tincup Creek Stream Restoration Project’s second phase is currently under way in eastern Idaho. The project is a large-scale, multi-phased project begun in 2017 to improve ecosystem function and habitat for native cutthroat trout and other native fish species on four miles of degraded…

  • TU responds to lapse of Chetco River mineral withdrawal

    The Chetco River, one of the finest salmon and steelhead fisheries in the West. For more than a decade TU has worked with other fishing and conservation groups to protect coastal salmon and steelhead streams in southwest Oregon from mining and o ther types of resource development that could harm legendary fisheries such as the…

  • Video spotlight

    Video spotlight: How to drift a soft hackle

    Soft-hackle fishing can be absolutely deadly, particularly for trout that are feeding higher in the water column, but not quite on top. These are the fish that are after emerging bugs, and soft-hackle flies very often draw strikes from these dialed-in fish. Video of How To Drift A Soft Hackle - Fly Fishing Video -…

  • Fishing Fly tying

    Fly tying: The GFA Hopper

    For me and other dry-fly enthusiasts (and that's putting it mildly, at least in my opinion), this month is the month. It's "hopper time." Here in Idaho, our backcountry streams are in great shape–runoff is well past done, night-time temperatures are a bit chilly, whcih serves to keep our high-country streams cold. The warm summer…