This may come as a shock to a lot of anglers out there, but the state with the most miles of trout water isn’t Montana or Colorado. It’s not Idaho or Wyoming or California.
It’s Pennsylvania. And in Pennsylvania, folks are serious about their trout water, so much so that state Fish and Boat Commission spends a lot of time working to identify wild trout waters by electro-shocking streams and taking inventory.
Since 2010, Trout Unlimited has helped the state shock and classify some 32,000 miles of streams in the Keystone State, often finding wild trout that haven’t yet been documented. The video above features TU field coordinator Kathleen Lavelle and shows how crews take to Pennsylvania’s small waters and look for brook trout. Here, in the Pinchot State Forest, the only fish documented by the shocking crew in the small stream being inventoried were native brook trout. By the way, this is exactly the kind of small, headwater stream protected under the Clean Water Rule that has been proposed for repeal by the EPA. Without protection, it and others like it could be subjected to development and eventual degradation. You can comment on the plan to repeal the Clean Water Rule and help protect small streams all over America.
The fish shocked from the stream are weighed, measured and released back to the water, in hopes of continuing to produce more native trout.
— Chris Hunt