As part of HFF’s 40th Anniversary edition of the Summer Seminar Series, Dr. Rob Van Kirk sat down with founders Mick Mickelson and Mike Lawson in mid-June to ask about the 1980s and what prompted the formation of the Henry’s Fork Foundation in 1984.
Mike recalls floating senior Senator Jim McClure and his wife down the river to show them the beautiful resource that would be hurt if the multiple proposed hydro developments dewatered Mesa Falls. Mick also added that a $750k Forest Service appropriation to build the LogJam parking lot and restroom may have occurred shortly after Mrs. McClure needed to use the facilities during the visit, but none existed! Then there was the time Mike Lawson, a man from a town of 600 people, had to testify in front of Congress! As he’ll tell you, he felt like a fish out of water to say the least.
Plus, hydropower including Fall River Rural Electric and PacfiCorp, and Aquatic Resource Coordinator Matt Hively join the conversation to talk about how the sometimes challenging relationship between fish and hydro has developed and improved over the years.
This, and many other great stories from the early days, made this a wonderful event on a sunny day in Harriman. If you missed it, you can watch the video by clicking below.
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
