Channeling my inner A.D. Maddox on behalf of the Kettle River
Thursday, September 26, 2013 at 12:04AM ;)
With apologies to A.D.
Above are the results of various effects applied to images of a Kettle River rainbow taken by my friend Travis Lowe on our recent rendezvous north of the border.
The Kettle is a beautiful 175-mile tributary of the Columbia that flows back and forth between southeastern British Columbia and northeastern Washington. Being a trib of the Columbia the Kettle at one time supported salmon and other anadromous fish but a couple of giant dams forever put the kibosh on that program.
As you can see above what remains are some very beautiful, very wary, rainbow trout. (And rumors of one phantom giant brown trout......perhaps more on that in a future post)
Unfortunately excessive water withdrawals and illegal harvest have consistently landed the Kettle on top of B.C.'s list of most endangered rivers. To make matters worse, in 2007 the Canadian Ministry of fucking up the the Environment granted additional Kettle water rights to the Big White Ski resort. If those rights were ever to be exercised, the Kettle watershed would be subject to the removal of an additional 488 million gallons of water.
Kettle rainbows already suffer from die off in the summer heat, a taste of which I experienced as we had 90 plus (35 celsius) mid September heat. You can kiss the beautiful rainbows of the Kettle goodbye if catch and release laws are not enforced and more water gets siphoned off for golf courses, and ski condo hot tubs.
The good news is there is a very dedicated group of people who are doing the heavy lifting to protect the denizens of the Kettle and their threatened habitat.
Their river is your river.
Reader Comments (2)
Great pictures and video. It would be a shame to see these beautiful fish endangered any further; and I hope your bringing this to light creates outrage that gets the Ministry to do the right thing. Thanks for doing this -- one person CAN make a difference.
This is a real problem for the Washington stretch just down river from the Canada and above the lake. Some friends and I fished this difficult access stretch in August and were blown away by how good the water looked and just how few fish there were. The farther we got from The border the more fish we found. Still, this river has the potential to be a "blue ribbon" stream but only if it gets better attention and protection.