Oregon’s Fall River Comeback

Photo: Bureau of Land Management/Flickr

Back in 2002, Oregon’s Fall River was accidentally damaged by a drop of fire retardant. The chemical spill killed all the trout within a four-mile stretch of water, some 22,000 rainbows.

Thankfully, that retardant cleared relatively quickly, according to Scott Linden over at Game and Fish Magazine, but that’s when the real work began of restoring the river.

The Fall is a tributary of the Deschutes, and is home to hard-fighting native rainbows. While Linden says the wild fish are smaller now than they were in the Fall’s heyday, the river is fishing as well as it ever has.

Linden’s story about the Fall is worth your time to read, so you can fully appreciate the state the river is currently in. You can find that story here.