Gitche Gumee Chapter
Serving Northeast Minnesota, the Gitche Gumee Chapter is active along Minnesota’s North Shore and works to protect, preserve and enhance our local trout, steelhead and salmon resources. There are lots of opportunities to get involved in our upcoming habitat work, and some great meetings open to the public yet this season. Come on out, get in contact with us and we hope to see you at the meetings and on the water.
Summer 2022 Chapter Update
Winter held on way too long this year here in the Northland. As I talked to family and friends who lived across the state, winter held on WAY too long for everyone. As the calendar turned to early April, here I was set to hit the rivers in anticipation of finding some steelhead. Little did I know, this would be a year of relentless cold and miserable weather. But like every year, warmer weather returns and it happened to be the end of April before reports arrived of steelhead starting their annual run. I moved back to the area eight years ago and this is one of the latest winters I’ve experienced. Let’s hope, for yours and mine sake, we don’t have another winter like that for a few years!
A HUGE thank you to Root River Rod Company for their generous support and donation to Gitche Gumee Trout Unlimited. Rod maker Steve Sobieniak built a beautiful rod for our chapter to auction and help raise funds to further habitat improvements along the North Shore. Thank you to everyone that helped support us and bought a ticket. We are excited to put our funds into several projects later this year.
What is the chapter up to this spring and summer? We are currently working through securing trees and developing plans to offer a few tree planting events this spring. I anticipate our planting events will be held on a Saturday morning or afternoon as well as a week day evening. As we finalize plans, we will be sure to get information out in our chapter email newsletter and on our Facebook page. Later this summer, we will be partnering with the City of Duluth to offer fly casting clinics. We offered these clinics last year and are excited to have the opportunity to provide them again. If you know of anyone interested in learning how to fly fish, have them contact us to participate. Then later in August, we plan to be on Keene Creek in Hermantown to help finish up a habitat improvement project. I’m most excited for this work as I’ve not spent much time on Keene Creek and it’s a project that has great public access with a good brook trout population. I’ll be packing gloves and the fly rod.
If you end up on the Kadunce River this year either fishing or on a hiking adventure, keep your eye out for caged trees throughout the lower section of the river. There are newly planted cedar and white pines scattered along the riverside. If you happen to see any damage to them, please send me a note at brandon.kime@gmail.com. The Grand Marais area received significant snowfall this year, which may have damaged some of these caged trees.
Brandon Kime
Join us on our next project!
Contact the Gitche Gumee Chapter
Brandon Kime, Chapter President
brandon.kime@gmail.com