The Editor’s Note

Author Dylan Tomine is among those anglers who are using their platform to raise awareness about the declining runs of salmon and steelhead throughout the Western

U.S. (CAMERON KARSTEN)

EDITOR’S NOTE

Idrove down to California in early April to visit family and take a week’s vacation with friends. The trip south on Interstate 5 from the Seattle area, where our company is headquartered, to my childhood home just outside San Francisco, can be equally boring and spectacular.

But what I always try to do during the trip is take a look at the countless rivers the freeway crosses – from Washington’s Cowlitz, to Oregon’s Willamette and to California’s Klamath and Sacramento. I marvel at how many of those fisheries have supported salmon and steelhead runs for generations long before my own.

But now, I fear that the generations following my own might never get the chance to fish those waters, whether for recreation or subsistence. It’s sobering to realize that once-plentiful runs of fish are now enduring declines for various reasons, including some that have reached critical levels.

Author and angler Dylan Tomine, who also hails from the state of Washington and spent many years guiding in Alaska’s still plentiful but also vulnerable Bristol Bay for salmon, is among those advocates warning that our anadromous fish are under fire. In an excerpt (page 22) from his new book, Headwaters: The Adventures, Obsession, and Evolution of a Fly Fisherman, Tomine focused on steelhead numbers dropping throughout the West Coast. He notes that even on one of the Last Frontier’s most productive steelhead fisheries, the Panhandle’s Situk, the once endless procession of sea-run trout has sharply dropped since the river’s heyday. So know that there is potential for Alaska steelhead streams to decline too, perhaps even to the point where the situation is as dire as some of the fisheries along that I-5 corridor I’ve driven often in recent years.

During my recent trip down, I stopped to pick up a sandwich in Grants Pass, Oregon. A few miles later I exited the interstate and ate a riverside lunch along the Rogue, another popular fishery. After eating, I walked my dog Emma along the banks of the Rogue and I couldn’t help but wonder about the future of this and so many other waterways.

But thankfully, we have Tomine and so many others fighting to save the remarkable fish on those rivers and streams. Keep up the battle, everyone! -Chris Cocoles