Nice work Scott, been thinking you’ve been a bit quiet of late. RE: monthly vs 3 times/week: I for one would miss your regular postings, kinda like a daily fix ya know?

Pretty nice Scott. I think it would be something you might want to do on an occasion. I’m kind of like Mike on this on the regular postings thing. But, it would be a nice place to do essays and longer articles that you want to take some time with.

Scott,
Looks pretty good, but I don’t have time to sit down and read a whole ezine at once. I prefer the daily posts although it could be cool to do a mix of both.

Looks great. I too have a problem reading ezines, as I don’t like reading on a computer.

Now that I just bought a laserjet printer I print out articles I want to read, so maybe I’ll start to feel differently about ezines.

Randy

I think it’s a very nice stab at the format Scott.

Tom Bie’s comments on the topic are interesting:

http://drakemag.com/component/content/article/11-bies-blog-jam/254-print-is-dead

I have heard rumblings that The Drake itself may be moving to an e-zine format in the near future.

Ultimately e-Zines are a different and relatively new medium. In print, you can have very involved articles and readers will often kick back, relax, and bite them off.

Electronically you need to grab the reader’s attention with appealing media, and tell a much bigger part of the story visually. I think the e-Zines that figure out the formula for engaging content will be very successful.

I like the ezine format for what it is…. but I don’t think it would translate well to an EPUB for kindle/nook etc. You would lose the rich color photography that seems to have spawned the entire format in the first place… at least in the fly fishing world. It would be fine for the actual articles or text heavy ezines, but you would definitely lose something without the great photography present in these types of pubs.

Scott-
Enjoyed the Enzine, I think its a cool idea.

Good lookin’ Scott! The ezine format suits you well, photo’s are top notch as well. Thanks for giving me something to read over lunch today.

Beautiful work Scott, it looks great on my Apple MacBook with Acer LED monitor… and it was easy to read at my desk!

For another example of an Ezine that also is available as a hardcopy, check out Western Art & Architecture at: http://sgsdigital.com/pubs/waa/sample/ shows an example of their magazine with different software than you are using. I knew about this one because my wife writes for them as a freelance contributor. I think you can register on their site and look at the magazines online for free. Might give you some additional ideas. The same publisher has a magazine that is entirely online and not in hard copy – Wildlife Art Journal.

I also really enjoyed your article on the size of native fish. Lot’s of folks just assume that wapiti (or elk) as well as cutthroat trout subspecies always occurred in the headwaters and mountains of the American West. Just as the grizzly bear, grey wolf, and elk used to be a Plains animal before being pushed to the remaining, relatively isolated higher elevation habitats with shorter growing seasons, more extreme weather, and much lower productivity, cutthroat trout such as the Rio Grande cutthroat trout that I used to study and help restore in Colorado used to be found in some of Colorado’s “Blue-Ribbon” trout waters like the mainstem Rio Grande, Conejos River, and the Rio Chama, which now feature non-native, but wild brown trout and rainbow trout that excite many fly anglers.

Likewise, the beloved South Platte River near Denver used to feature native greenback cutthroat trout, as did the Arkansas River, instead of introduced brown trout, rainbow trout, and brook trout. On the other side of the divide, some of the legendary trophy trout waters that used to sustain wild trout fisheries like the Gunnison River (much of it inundated by Federal reservoirs and blocked by dams), upper Colorado River, Upper Green River, and some of their larger tributaries like Aspen’s Roaring Fork, used to feature robust populations of Colorado River cutthroat trout.

Closer to my home, in the Big Hole River Basin of Montana as well as the other fly-fishing “Meccas” of the Upper Missouri River Basin (Madison River, Jefferson River, Beaverhead River, Gallatin River, Missouri River) used to only feature large Westslope cutthroat trout, rather than the behemoth brown trout and rainbow trout that anglers worldwide seek. The rivers and streams of Yellowstone National Park and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem were the home of trophy Yellowstone cutthroat trout, not brown trout and rainbows, while the Snake River and its tributaries featured beautiful fine-spotted Snake River cutthroat trout.

Most notable on the size issue are the monsterous cutthroat trout that used to haunt Colorado’s Twin Lakes (the extinct Yellowfin cutthroat trout) and of course, the once thought extinct pure Lahontan cutthroat trout that used to ply the waters of Pyramid Lake and Lake Tahoe as well as other water bodies within the basin of Ancient Lake Lahontan.

When Lahontan cutthroat trout were rediscovered in a tiny, overgrazed stream in Nevada, they were finger-sized, like your photograph shows, not the size of Pacific salmon (up to 4 feet in length) that greatly excited anglers as well as fish culturists. Some caught as late as 1913 weighed almost 62 lbs! and of course, acted as the top fish predators in these desert and mountain lakes.

Once I found a small tributary with deep holes and undercut banks that had not been fished and was isolated because the stream it flowed into was a Superfund Site full of heavy metal wastes from mining. No one probably wanted to cross the orange and green fluorescent waters nor did they suspect any life in or near this heavily polluted stream. I spied a green twig across the river, indicating spring flows and life and chanced my health and the well-being of my chest waders. Lo and behold, I found pure Rio Grande cutthroat trout in this tiny little tributary, but because the habitat was intact, including hiding cover and over-wintering cover in the form of large woody debris, undercut banks and deep pools, the pure cutthroat trout found there were not the typical 4-6″ variety, but rather 16-18″ with some weight to them.

The bottom line message to you is that habitat size matters for determining what size the native cutthroat trout are, but does not really limit their genetic potential. The little Lahontan cutthroat trout found in that Nevada desert stream have the capability of becoming maybe 40 or 60 pounders!

In my neck of the woods, Interior redband trout that have been isolated for 100 years or so because of irrigation diversions and tributary disconnects by dewatering, if given the opportunity to migrate to the Pacific Ocean would be predictably as large as any Snake River Basin steelhead of the Upper Salmon River. Perhaps, even larger, since they probably lack the hatchery influence of stocked and released cultured fishes.

So remember, when you catch-and-release a small, native, genetically pure cutthroat trout in the American West, that it might not be necessarily young, but actually might be reproducing earlier and at a smaller size (just another life history strategy in native trouts’ bag of survival tricks) than some of its ancestors that used to swim in the larger, downstream waters like the Madison River, South Platte River, Pyramid Lake, the Salmon River and had the benefits of larger habitat with more food and the opportunity to grow to their potentials.

thanks for stimulating my thoughts today, hope I did not go on in a tangent too long and thanks for indulging me!

cheers

Larry Zuckerman, Central Idaho Director, Western Watersheds Project, Salmon, Idaho