By Ben Tayloe A spoiled, seven year-old yellow lab named Chester and a six-week stay in Germany for my wife’s job made the drive across the country a necessity. The only family member who volunteered to watch our dog happened to live on the central coast of California, a great place to visit but nearly…
By Toner Mitchell The boy is back in school, the trees around his soccer field the same blazing gold as the cottonwoods alon g the Rio Grande and the flanks of the brown trout bucks I’m hoping to catch there. The aspens, now bare, were equally stunning a month ago when I hiked up in…
We’ll always have to fight for our public lands, but we should be grateful we have them in the first place. Photo by Chris Hunt. By Scott Willoughby It has been said that the hardest math to master is the ability to count our blessings. Funny enough, I’ve never been particularly good at math. That’s…
By Toner Mitchell I spent Halloween this year in the company of ghosts. They weren’t the bed-sheet kind, but the long-gone n ative residents of Frijoles Canyon, in the Bandelier National Monument on New Mexico’s Pajarito Plateau. Established around 1150 AD by ancestral Puebloans fleeing drought and social strife in the Four Corners region, Bandelier…
By Scott Willoughby An enlightened sage once suggested that those who choose not to find joy in snow will have much less joy in life. But still the same amount of snow. Said savant was undoubtedly a skier. And a trout fisher. I honestly don’t recall which I learned to do first, ski or fish.…
By Toner Mitchell Your best arguments are the simplest ones. Water, including anything you dump into it, flows downhill. Katrina, Sandy, Harvey and Maria comprise a trend. California and the burning mountain west comprise a trend. God didn’t create all these species so we could destroy his good work. You are sincere, yet careful about…
Nick Halle, TU’s volunteer operations coordinator, kept at it even after falling in over his head and was rewarded with this nice buck steelhead from Ohio’s Conneaut Creek during a recent TU staff steelhead outing. By Mark Taylor “I’ve lost all faith.” The admission came from Keith Curley as we stood in the snow on…
Goals In 2013 TU partnered with a landowner to remove a 500-foot section of concrete rip-rap on a popular recreational stretch of the Gunnison River. The armored bank was causing channel incision, and depositing sediment in undesirable locations downstream. Lack of vegetative cover and in-channel refuge increased trout susceptibility to low flows and increased water…
By Jenny Weis A good peanut butter and jelly sandwich should ooze a little when you squish it. It needs quality ingredients and, this part is often overlooked, equal parts PB to J that both go all the way to the edge of the bread, goshdarnit. I am not personally opposed to the addition of other…
By Mark Taylor As the sun dipped toward the western horizon on a relatively mild early January evening, I sat in what had become a pretty familiar position over the previous few weeks. In a tree. These were the waning days of deer season and I was doing my best to tag a whitetail. Here…
Renowned for their size, the Lewis and Clark River is still home to a remnant population of winter steelhead. But two perched and undersized culverts on private timber land blocked upstream and downstream passage for adult and juvenile native winter steelhead and coastal cutthroat trout to and from intact spawning habitat. One culvert was on…
Southern steelhead country. My son and I wandered into the land of the southern steelhead yesterday. Cactus sprouted like gargoyles from the sandstone outcroppings that lined the creek up which we hiked. This winter has been profligate all across California and yet another massive cumulonimbus cloud reared up over the peaks above us. Then it…
/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/blog/CR-steelhead_Mar-2019.jpg A single fish can mean so much. By Sam Davidson A single fish made me really happy recently, and I wasn’t even fishing. To be sure, this was no ordinary fish. It was a brute of a steelhead, as long as my arm and 12 pounds in heft, easy. So perhaps anyone seeing it…
Trout Unlimited’s efforts with the University of Maine and the Maine Department of Inland and Wildlife to develop eDNA sampling methods for Maine’s rare Arctic char continue. As described in a recent TU story, we’re focused in Maine on the handful of remaining populations of landlocked Arctic char, a glacial relict that’s been slowly losing populations over the last 120 years. Char exist…
Goals Located near the second largest metropolitan area in Michigan, the Rogue River is an extremely important trout fishery in southern Michigan. The lower portion of the river is fabled for its excellent steelhead runs. The eastern tributaries host significant brook and brown trout populations. The river is an important economic engine — based on…
We are in the midst of a once-in-a-generation build-out of major interstate pipelines to move natural gas from the Marcellus shale region to markets, other transmission lines, and export terminals on the East Coast. If not properly managed, this construction boom could have major impacts on the streams and forests of the Delaware River Basin…
For nearly 90 years, the abandoned lower Eklutna Dam blocked salmon migration on the Eklutna River, contributing to the downfall of the salmon fishery. In September of 2018, we, along with many others, rejoiced the successful removal of the lower dam. This dam removal marked a first step in reconnecting 22 miles of salmon habitat and securing a free-flowing future for the Eklutna River.
By Michael Gibson Nothing clears the mind like a good chukar hike. So, when the boss called for a work/chukar retreat in lower Snake River Country, I got excited. Late-season chukar in some of the best, and most rugged, chukar country the planet has to offer. About now, you are probably wondering, what’s this got to do with fish? We’ll get…
Despite a setback, we’re not giving up
For Douglas Outdoors founder David Barclay, growing up on the Salmon River instilled a deep love and passion for the area and provided a reason to follow his dream of creating a local upstate New York business that would offer high quality fishing equipment and could provide jobs for the local communities.
