This summer has been spent donning my daily uniform of waders, pockets full of batteries and tools, and a layer of dirt and sweat. On some days, I’m also equipped with a five-pound sonde for measuring water quality or a six-foot pole for finding temperature loggers. My equipment makes me feel like a true scientist, but it often makes the public think I’m something else: an angler.
At first, when I passed curious river users who asked me what I was fishing for, I felt like I was letting them down by not being able to reply with “rainbows” or “whatever will bite.” But as the weeks went on, I began to grow proud of my response: “We’re hoping to catch some data!”
In the past ten weeks as an aquatic ecology technician with the Henry’s Fork Foundation, I’ve done just that. It’s been an honor to share my “catch” with you all, whether that’s through our live river conditions, swapping stories on the water, or here on the blog. Please enjoy the video below as I share what I’ve spent my summer fishing for one last time.
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
