Currently browsing… Conservation
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Umpqua Feather Merchants: a company with steelhead in its DNA
"Removing the Lower Snake River dams is a move to make sure that steelhead and salmon can reach their native waters and continue to inspire generations to come. They are simply too important not to remove a giant thorn in their side."
Umpqua's Russ Miller watches a wild steelhead put on a show. - Photo by Noah Thompson When a company is named after one of the most iconic steelhead rivers in the Pacific Northwest, it’s probably a safe bet that the folks working there have some connection to those magnificent fish. As evidenced by the above…
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Low water, big problems
Refresh. Refresh. Refresh. You’d think I was checking the score for game seven of the World Series, but I wasn’t. Obsessively, I hit refresh on my trusty Riverbrain app no less than 50 times the day before our trip hoping to see the spike go up on our beloved Colorado River. But the flows didn’t…
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Barbless Flies for happier fish and happier anglers
A big cicada fly prompted me to become an advocate for barbless hooks. It was a great fly, tied by a friend and proven effective over and over on a host of different waters. Like many of us, I was conscious of the importance of pinching down the barb on my flies to make releasing…
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Is catch-and-release angling all it’s cracked up to be?
Releasing a nice brown trout back into the river. Kirk Deeter photo. Is catch-and-release angling overrated? It is if the only thing that matters is numbers of fish caught… In 1936, the late, great Lee Wulff said, “game fish are too valuable to be caught only once,” and the “catch-and-release” movement was born. I’m a…
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Keystone Fund helps Pennsylvania’s famous Brodhead Creek
Pennsylvania's famous Brodhead Creek is featured in a new video from Trout Unlimited and the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. The short video — the first in a series — highlights the crucial role the Keystone Fund played in helping to preserve and promote this historic public fishery. Stay tuned for more videos highlighting why the…
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Sighs of relief
Do you make your sighs of relief audible? I sure have been lately. Snow is currently falling in Southwest Colorado and it is piling up. Ahhhh. I can breathe a cautious sigh of relief for the trout in our watersheds. I can nearly hear the trees and plants sigh for the water nourishing their roots. On a personal note, I’m…
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How conservation can save our politics and save America
Wednesday afternoon, a day that America won’t soon forget, I was on a phone call just across the river in Trout Unlimited's Arlington, Va., headquarters. A group of us at TU were talking about recovering Snake River salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest when my phone began blaring with a message from the mayor of Washington, D.C. In response to the attacks on the Capitol, she was ordering a city-wide curfew in three hours. TU staff and volunteers regularly go…