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A fishing cornucopia, thanks to a healthy forest
There’s a place that has 13,000 miles of salmon and steelhead producing streams that flow through 16.7 million acres of pristine forest. That place, of course, is in Alaska. The rivers and streams would take an angler a lifetime to explore and fish, and the forest surrounding these waterways is critical to their health. The Tongass National Forest is the world’s largest…
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A lot on the line for America’s most prolific Salmon Forest
For many Americans, Southeast Alaska’s Inside Passage and Tongass National Forest is a dream destination. Nearly 3 million visitors come every year to see the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest and its towering old-growth trees, dramatic mountains rising from the sea and tidewater glaciers. The Tongass has 13000 miles of salmon streams Right now, there’s an incredible opportunity to help maintain the prolific…
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BLM proposes safeguards for Arctic fish and wildlife habitat
The opportunity to protect a vast swath of public land does not come around often. This September, the Biden Administration announced a rulemaking to protect 13 million acres of public land from oil and gas leasing within the National Petroleum Reserve – Alaska (NPR-A). Northeast National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. Photo by Bob Wick (BLM) Protection of…
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Beers, backcountry, e-bikes: Angler scientists at work
A volunteer chapter in Washington State is going the distance to collect trout and salmon eDNA samples in their home water Fed by glaciers and deep snowpack, the Nooksack River joins the Pacific Ocean near Bellingham, Washington, a half-hour drive south of the Canadian border. Upstream, the basin’s cold headwaters originate high in the Cascade…
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Fooling Dollies with dancing streamers
All trout and char, to some extent, are predators — even the little fish that swim in small water and eat virtually nothing but insects. But there are true predators in the salmonid world, and these are the fish that make fly fishers tremble. They're big browns that feed on smaller fish and, during the…
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Fishing the pegged bead
It's the pegged bead — the target of much derision from the purist crowd, but an oft-used technique to catch big trout and char when salmon eggs are in the water
A nice Dolly Varden that fell for a pegged bead. Chris Hunt photo. The ethics and the logic examined Fly fishing is a craft that appeals to the purist in all of us — the notion that fooling a fish by casting something that resembles that animal's natural food source without resorting to bait is…
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One salmonid for the rest of my life? I choose Dolly
You can try to time the silver run or the king run, and maybe you'll get lucky and hit it just right. Odds are, you'll time your date with Dolly perfectly — she's rarely a no-show
I made an off-hand comment on a friend's Facebook post this morning — he uploaded a great photo of a Dolly Varden in Southeast Alaska and I quickly opined that, should some higher power ever dictate to me that I could only catch one salmonid for the rest of my life, it very well might…
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