Currently browsing… Idaho
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It’s bull trout time in Idaho
Roger Phillips photo. By Roger Phillips They’re big, they’re hard-fighting, and they’re one of Idaho’s most overlooked trophy fishing opportunities, but many anglers are still confused about whether they can target bull trout for catch-and-release fishing. The short answer is yes. When bull trout were listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act in…
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Reflecting on the Yankee Fork project
Idaho work turns river right side up to help salmon, steelhead and trout It took a floating dredge just a few years between 1940 and 1952 to turn seven miles of Idaho’s Yankee Fork of the Salmon River upside down. In the 68 years since, there has been almost no natural recovery — the valley…
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Wild or hatchery? Idaho fisheries managers want to know
A rainbow trout from the Snake River. Roger Phillips photo. The Idaho Department of Fish and Game wants to know if the rainbow trout that swim in the Snake River between two eastern Idaho impoundments are wild or if they're hatchery fish that have migrated upstream. The rainbows between Gem Lake, just below Idaho Falls…
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The benefits of remote work
This may sound a bit tone deaf, and my sincere apologies if that’s the case -- circumstances impact all of us differently. But working remotely, thanks largely to the coronavirus outbreak, is not without its benefits. I know a lot of us are itching to get back into the office and resume “normal” as soon…
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A time for carp
I just got back from a week in the Bahamas, where I put in long days on the flats stalking wily bonefish. It was good practice, because now, as runoff starts to cloud my local trout rivers, it's a time for carp. Wait. Bonefish? As a practice run for carp? Oh, hell yeah. Particularly if…
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Karmik Outdoors stands with TU on the Lower Snake
Some things just disappear. The rod tube cradling my beloved Winston 5-weight somehow took wing and soared out of my backpack and landed on a county road. Knives have evaporated from my pockets and have never reappeared. Sunglasses vanish like Jimmy Hoffa, never to be seen again. All this is mostly just an annoyance if…
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Do it for the fish that made a river famous
If the determining factor in the effort to save the native Yellowstone cutthroat trout of Idaho’s South Fork of the Snake River is how hard cutthroats fight at the end of a leader … well, then, the fight is already lost. The perception that introduced rainbows—spawned from mongrel strains engineered in hatcheries over decades—offer anglers…
