Supporting Rural Communities

In America’s rural communities, Trout Unlimited is cleaning up abandoned mines, reconnecting rivers, restoring degraded fisheries, and working with farmers and ranchers to make their agricultural operations more efficient.

This is work that provides high-paying jobs, supports a growing and increasingly important outdoor recreation sector, and provides clean drinking water for millions of Americans.

Our work recovering fisheries and restoring rivers is helping rural communities that once relied on logging and mining to make the transition to a more sustainable future built on natural resources. In some places, this is a literal transition: We are hiring former loggers and miners and putting them to work restoring watersheds.

In the Clark Fork River basin, we are bringing millions of dollars in investment into rural western Montana. Cleaning up an abandoned mine outside the town of Superior is bringing healthy water to the town, providing jobs for a local small businessman, and recovering a wild trout fishery.

Mine operations around the town of Questa, N.M., degraded the Red River and its population of Rio Grande cutthroat trout. With the mine closed and new national monuments declared at Questa’s doorstep, we saw an opportunity to restore a fishery, build a recreational hub, and bring jobs to a community in the midst of economic transition.

In places like Tillamook County, Ore., and Delaware County, N.Y., we bring in public and private investment to restore failing road-stream crossings that block fish passage but also lead to chronic destructive flooding. On Oregon’s North Coast, the Salmon SuperHwy community partnership is reconnecting some 180 miles on six major salmon and steelhead rivers, providing $53 million in direct economic impacts, creating 400 local jobs, and supporting a $700M tourist economy.