President's Beat

Welcome back to our new 2006-07 season!

Greg Evans

With a great lineup of speakers for the year, ongoing conservation projects, and an enthusiastic board of directors I couldn't be more excited for the year.

We started off our first meeting Sept 13 with long time friend to TU, Heather Knight, lead biologist for The Nature Conservancy's Phantom Canyon and North Fork of the Poudre. Her talk, without a single fish picture, blew our chapter away with its river history, conservation efforts to date, and her hope of future water projects bringing together our communities for a win-win in terms of water usage and enhancement of our unique mountains to prairie corridor. Her work and challenge to our chapter inspired us.

Next month, it's back to fish pictures. Make sure to attend our Oct 11 meeting to hear Ken Eis, veteran fisherman, talk on off-the-beaten-path fishing destinations in Northern Colorado. He is an excellent photographer and gifted speaker. And since he doesn't work for anyone, his unbiased information will be worth taking notes on! We start every meeting at 6:30 with a fly tying demo, announcements promptly at 7pm and our speaker immediately follows. Bring your loose change and a buddy too, we also have a raffle table with great stuff and a rod to close the meetings.

Having just returned from our Fall Picnic at Sylvan Dale Guest Ranch, I'm flying high. We had great weather, a great turn out with lots of new members, and my 4 yr. old caught two "hunormous!" fish on a bubble and fly. Thanks for Sylvan Dale for donating the space and Greg and Ron Sheets for hosting the event; they always take care of us! (See pictures.)

This Summer, your Board of Directors met for a retreat to map out the coming year and form some goals. One the big items was to fully commit to our website as our main information media and even pay our webmaster for the work he has been doing for free for the last couple of years. We hope to expand this site in the future to include web addresses and a forum—it all depends on member usage, so bookmark the site and log on often. You will be rewarded by up to date calendars, river reports and speaker bios among other features.

Another thing our chapter discussed was conservation and education. With ongoing projects like Eagle's Nest led by Bob Streeter and our negotiation with the USFS over Long Draw Mitigation, we are in the big leagues. One thing you can do for conservation right now is save the date of Oct. 21. This is our River Clean Up day. We will meet that morning at Picnic Rock on the Poudre, come rain or shine, to be assigned our clean up beats. Sierra Club, Jax, CSU fishing Club have all shown interest, so it will be quite a project! DOT will supply trash bags and pick up our findings, so all we need is you and your gloves! The first 50 or so volunteers will receive CTU T-shirts for their efforts. We hope to see you, and please call me directly for information.

Lots more is going on in your backyard and state. I invite you to check us out, or if you know us, go to the next level in helping us out. Coldwater conservation is our game, and having fun doing it is our middle name! See you soon and bring a friend.

September 2006