Category Outdoors

I’ll leave it to my readers to determine the cause, whether our changing climate is the result of a cycle or human activities. There is no doubt, however, that our climate is warming. The warming has become so acute that according to climatologists the number…

I concluded my most recent column for The Chronicle with what I had hoped would be a specious rumor.  Unfortunately, that is not the case. The Corps of Engineers that provides funding for hatchery trout and summer steelhead in the upper Willamette River Basin, under…

It’s been a mixed bag of good and some not-so-good news for local anglers during the past few weeks. Work at the Junction City Pond has wrapped up after a major overhaul to the parking surface, fishing dock, and improved general access to the banks…

It was a tough start for winter steelhead season this year in the Northwest. Snow and ice swept over large parts of the Willamette Valley, followed by a series of warm Pacific storms that accelerated the melt of much of the low-level frozen precipitation. The…

The recent heavy rain that swept across the state brought moderate flooding to many coastal rivers and streams. But nowhere in Oregon was the flooding critical.  It was a good flushing, and as the waters began to recede, anglers were delighted to find the first…

Way back in the day, it was pretty easy.   With your fishing license in hand, you’d head out, park anywhere you wanted, and recreate on public lands that, for the most part, were free of fees and access restrictions.   Unfortunately, all of us…

In decades past, it was about Thanksgiving of each year that hatchery winter steelhead would begin to quietly slip into our coastal rivers and by the middle of December we would be well into a season that still runs into the spring of each year.…