Video spotlight: Chasing Brook Trout

Here’s one for the romantics in fly fishing—a teaser video to larger project to come about chasing native brook trout. I grew up in Colorado, fishing for introduced brookies in small headwater streams in the Rocky Mountain high country. As a kid, I had no idea that the fish I caught didn’t belong in the…

Short casts: Fish ladders don’t work, public lands support in CO, whirling disease in the Bow

John Day Dam on the Columbia River. A new Yale University study provides some daunting news for water and dam managers across the country: fish ladders aren’t the “fix-it” solution to fish migration over irrigation or hydroelectric dams. The study, which took place on three East Coast rivers—the Connecticut, the Susquehanna and the Merrimack—showed that…

Voices from the River: Who’s your hero?

TU’s own Tom Reed casts to native Colorado River cutthroat trout in the Wyoming Range. by Chris Hunt I got a note today from someone who read a piece by my fellow Trout Unlimited communicator, Brett Prettyman, on John Weis, a late TU volunteer from Utah who was involved in his local chapter in the…

Traditions: Fishing the High Uintas

By Brett Prettyman Among the many thoughts running through my mind while traipsing though the wilds is one that does more than the others to clear out the chaos and clutter of every day life. “Am I the first human to stand in this place?” The fact I am even pondering the possibility means I…

Fly tying: Koga’s Bonefish Shrimp

My first trip to chase bonefish several years back was a disaster. The Atlantic gales blew through the southern Bahamas, and bones were few and far between. I saw a few, got to cast to one or two and came home after a week without landing a single boneffish. It was horrible. But it steeled…

Video spotlight: Down and Across

Spey casting is becoming a much more mainstream angling method for big-river fishing, and not just for steelhead and salmon. I’m starting to see spey casters on the South Fork and the Henry’s Fork of the Snake with regularity, chasing rainbows, cutthroats and browns in sweeping runs and throwing 100-foot casts with so little effort…