Photo credit: Charlie Lansche and Devan Ence
The Henry’s Fork Foundation is honored to receive a $1 million federal grant from the US Bureau of Reclamation’s WaterSMART program to develop the revolutionary DIRTT Plan: Developing Infrastructure to Reduce Temperature and Turbidity.
Water temperatures and changing hatches are at the forefront of anglers’ minds, and for good reason. Average water temperatures are increasing and may be the culprit in changing hatches. Plus, nutrient levels in the river are looking like the next big issue on the horizon.
It’s time to look at massive-scale engineering solutions, as well as grounded, nature-based solutions. We want to reduce the amount of sediment sent into the river, and to reduce water temperatures flowing through Harriman Ranch.
DIRTT aims to improve water temperatures and turbidity to build resilience for the river and the fish and insects that call it home. This might include variable-elevation withdrawal gates at Island Park Dam, tributary restoration, sediment stabilization, and deep-water oxygenation (adding oxygen to the reservoir for trout).
HFF is uniquely positioned – with the expertise, experience, data, and community – to be a leader in answering the difficult questions being asked across the fly-fishing world.
As it is the afternoon of December 31, I am closing the year with my annual fish-of-the-month blog, this one at the end of my 11th year of catching a fish in my home waters in each month of the year. To spare you the math, that’s 132 consecutive months of catching a wild trout or whitefish (and in some years I’ve fair-caught suckers and shiners, too) within a three-hour drive of my home in
In this blog post, we 1) present our turbidity and suspended sediment data, 2) explain our suspended load calculations, and 3) provide some additional information justifying why we think that a substantial amount of bed load was transported into the Henry’s Fork in addition to the suspended load. Since first observing high turbidity in Thurmon Creek and the Henry’s Fork downstream associated with the Silver Lake drawdown in November 2025, HFF’s Science and Technology team
Written by Doris Squeri Tom and I met on our first day of grad school back in 1982. We were both broke and stressed, and we both loved the outdoors, so I decided that an affordable way to relieve some of that stress might be to learn how to fly-fish. We had learned to fish with our dads when we were very small, but it was bait fishing, and we wanted to try something new.
The Henry’s Fork Drought Management Planning Committee (DMPC) met on Monday, November 24 to set this winter’s outflow and reservoir-fill strategy for Island Park Reservoir—an annual decision with implications for winter trout habitat in Box Canyon and the Ranch. Winter Outflow: What’s Coming on December 1 Beginning December 1, outflow from Island Park Dam will increase, bringing winter streamflow through Box Canyon to ~380 cfs from December through February*. That equates to 76% of Box
