TU's CAST Campaign

Trout Unlimited’s Campaign for America’s Salmon and Trout (CAST) is nearing completion, and we need help to meet our goal by September 30, 2014.

The CAST effort started in 2009 with a goal of reaching $175 million over five years—we’re close, and, with your help, we’ll get there.

Making fishing better

Since the campaign started, TU has made some incredible on-the-ground conservation progress in the effort to protect, reconnect, restore and sustain our trout, salmon and fishing resources. We’ve protected millions of acres of public land from future industrial development, helped remove several dams, repaired or replaced dozens and dozens culverts, reconnected scores of tributaries with their mainstem rivers and engaged thousands of young people in both conservation and fishing. Additionally, we’ve launched significant efforts to introduce women to TU via fishing, and we’ve taken scores of America’s veterans under our wing and introduced them to fly fishing as therapy for the physical and emotional wounds inflicted in conflicts abroad.

With every dam we’ve helped remove… with every acre we’ve helped permanently protect, TU continues to make fishing better all across America. By introducing new anglers to the craft, we’ve increased our grassroots presence, giving us unprecedented capacity on the ground to take on just about every threat to trout and salmon habitat there is.

And in Alaska, after years of effort, we are much closer to stopping the construction of Pebble Mine in the headwaters of Bristol Bay, home to world’s most prolific run of sockeye salmon and perhaps the best rainbow trout fishing on earth. We’ve engaged everyone involved in this effort, from local natives to Washington politicians and from commercial fishermen to lodge owners and recreational anglers. We’ve toiled against a big-money machine that—until very recently—seemed determined to construct what would likely become the world’s largest open-pit mine in the heart of wild Alaska.

Working across the country

• We helped removed two dams on the Penobscot River in Maine, eventually restoring up to 1,000 miles of habitat for Atlantic salmon
• We protected 1.2 million acres in the Wyoming Range from future oil and gas drilling
• We protected nearly 9 million acres of intact backcountry habitat in Idaho in perpetuity
• We helped protect almost 4 million acres of roadless backcountry habitat in Colorado
• We were instrumental in the creation of the locally-driven effort to make the Rio Grande del Norte in New Mexico a national monument
• We helped remove the dam on Washington’s Elwha River and watched as both steelhead and salmon have started to use the river’s upper reaches once again
• Through our Trout in the Classroom program, we’ve engaged thousands of students through science and conservation
• We helped create a new wilderness area in southwest Oregon, protecting the headwaters of the Elk River forever
• We’re in the midst of several major protection campaigns in Colorado, Montana and Nevada that use a collaborative process to protect the best remaining trout habitat for generations to come
• TU’s staff has doubled in size, giving more capacity both on the ground and in the halls of government than we’ve ever had before

Work to protect America’s coldwater fish — and the opportunity to fish for them — isn’t cheap, and we’ve come a long way in the effort to raise money to accomplish our goals. Now, we need your help to meet our campaign fundraising goal by September 30, 2014 and continue our important work to make fishing better all across the country.