Join St. Vrain Anglers Trout Unlimited for the February edition of Browns and Brews at the Longmont Moose Lodge. This month’s speaker, William Belk, will be presenting on the connection between fly fishing, yoga, and mental health in helicopter EMS crews. He will share insights into an innovative program that teaches flight crews how to manage stress through fly tying, rod building, yoga, and fly fishing. This approach is helping first responders handle the challenges of their high-stress careers while building resilience and community. Come grab a drink, connect with fellow anglers, and learn how fly fishing can make a difference.

Join SVATU and Laughing Grizzly Fly Shop for our annual Fly Tying Expo at the American Legion Post in Longmont. Chat with over 25 tyers as they share their knowledge. Enjoy bucket raffles for the flies tied at the expo and a silent auction.

Join St. Vrain Anglers TU as renowned photographer and author Stephen Collector shares his insights on why individuals feel drawn to the outdoors and why this call is difficult to define. 

Stephen Collector was born in Virginia in 1951. He attended college at George Washington University and earned a degree in English literature from the University of Colorado in 1973. He has lived in Colorado since 1971 and began his career as a freelance photographer in 1975, largely teaching himself. In 1992 the book, Law of the Range: Portraits of Old-Time Brand Inspectors was published by Clark City Press, Livingston, Montana. Collector has freelanced for a number of magazines and periodicals, among them: Esquire, Men’s Journal, German Geo, The New York Times, Outside, Outdoor Life, Field &  Stream, Sports Afield, and TU Magazine.
His feature writing has appeared in The Drake, Anglers Journal, American Angler, The
Big Sky Journal, Tail Fly Fishing, Strung, Southwest Fly Fishing, and Grays Sporting
Journal. Collector is a lifelong sportsman.     

Collector’s work has appeared in the following institutions and galleries:

Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, Arvada, CO
Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, KS
Wyoming State Museum, Cheyenne, WY
John Connor Museum, Kingsville, Texas
Roswell Museum, Roswell, New Mexico
Sun Valley Center for the Arts and Humanities, Sun Valley, Idaho
Custer County Arts Center, Miles City, Montana
Carnegie Arts Center, Alliance, Nebraska
Camera Obscura Gallery, Denver, CO
Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, CO
Complex Heritage Center, Gillette, WY
Teton County Library, Jackson, WY

The impacts of wildfire reach beyond the forests that burn. How can we employ both forest and river restoration to make our watersheds more resilient to fire? Join us to learn about natural watershed process to provide, filter, and clean water, how wildfires affect natural processes, and The Watershed Center’s forest and river planning and projects in your own back yard that are dedicated to wildfire and climate resilience across Left Hand and St. Vrain Watersheds.

Oscar Blues Brewery showing of F3T 2024 at the Taproom. Visit their website for more information.

St Vrain Anglers TU welcomes local guide, educator and renowned tyer Dick Shinton for an informative evening about the St. Vrain watershed and part of RMNP. Dick will cover the types of fish, the flies that catch them and the gear you need to be successful fishing our local watershed. 

St. Vrain Macro Invertebrate Sampling - St. Vrain Tributaries

SVATU will be sampling the 3 tributaries of the St. Vrain on October 2nd from 4-6pm. We will be joined by the City of Longmont. If you are interested please contact us at, Macro Invertebrate Sampling

SVATU is at it again!! Join us for trash cleanup along Hwy 7 outside of Lyons. Click image register!!

Join SVATU Sept. 24th @ GrossenBart for Trivia & Taco Night. Click image for registration!!

Join SVATU as we host the 2024 International Fly Fishing Film Festival at Wibby Brewing. Doors open at 6:15pm with the film starting at 7pm. There will be numerous bucket raffles, a local food truck, and Wibby’s award winning beer available. Look forward to seeing you there!

Tickets available at - IF4 Tickets

Come join St. Vrain Anglers TU for a quick few hours of picking up litter and debris in the South St. Vrain canyon along Hwy 7. We participate by-annually in CDOT’s Adopt-a -Highway program from Mile Markers 22 through 25. This activity is family friendly, with youth under 16 required to be accompanied by an adult.

Registration link will be provided in April for all interested.

Join us to learn about The Mayfly Project - an effort to engage local anglers with children in foster care. This month’s speaker will by SVATU’s own Jane Retherford.

Registration link will be provided soon…in the meantime, please save the date.

Come join SVATU for the last social of this season, an awesome evening, April 2nd of fly tying instruction with Marty Staab. He is joined by other experienced SVATU tyers helping to teach the art of fly tying at the tables in Shoes and Brews tasting room. All tying levels are welcome with material provided by SVATU. For the beginning tyer a vice and tying tools are provided but in limited quantities, please register early.

Two ticket types are available but in limited quantities so please register.

https://tu.myeventscenter.com/event/Fly-Tying-Social-91017

Come join SVATU on Wednesday, March 20th at Grossen Bart Brewery for an informative night with Cat Toy as she shares with us her knowledge and methods for reading the water to produce a more fishy day on the water.

Tickets are free but please register to let us know you are coming. https://tu.myeventscenter.com/event/Browns-Brews-Speaker-Series-March-2024-90674

Please mark your calendars for the annual Chick Clark fishing event, Longmont’s premier event to introduce children to fishing. More details to come!

Please join us for an evening of friends, food, and fish talk!

This month’s Browns and Brews event features SVATU’s board member (and former TU staffer), Libby Earthman. Libby will detail the restoration efforts underway on the Klamath River and TU’s critical role. When complete, it will be the world’s largest ecosystem restoration project - opening up over 400 miles of salmon and steelhead habitat.

The Klamath River was once home to the 3rd-largest salmon runs on the west coast, but four large dams on the river block upstream migration and spawning grounds. The dams also created water quality problems that killed over 30,000 adult salmon in 2002, then the largest fish kill in west coast history.

Since 2002 Trout Unlimited has been instrumental in negotiations for the removal of the dams, and the restoration of upstream habitats. The rainbow featured on the photo was caught in habitat upstream of the dam—a remote landscape that still produces the largest native rainbows outside of Alaska.

Link to reserve your seat is forthcoming…

Save the date: our annual fly tying expo is coming up! Check back soon for more details, how to sponsor the event, and where to buy tickets.

Due to the remarkable turnout for this series, we've moved to a slightly larger venue for an even more fantastic experience.

Starting in January, we will hold Browns and Brews at Grosenbart Brewery, 1025 Delaware Avenue Unit A, Longmont, Colorado

Please register at this link so we can sure there are enough seats—we ran out last month!

The Saint Vrain Chapter of Trout Unlimited is happy to host Ben McGee  on January 16th from 6:30 - 8:00 pm for an educational experience and fly-tying demonstration that you won't want to miss, covering the physics of nymphing and methods for fly selection. Ben is a career scientist in aquatic ecosystems health monitoring and has been one of Colorado's top euro and euro-hybrid fly fishing instructors and innovative tyer for over a decade.

This course and tying demonstration is suitable for all levels of angler experience. For this course, Ben will discuss and demonstrate streamflow types and hydrodynamics, sink rates and resistance, and the control points of various nymphing methods. He will demonstrate the displacement of various leader and tippet materials as well as cover some common misconceptions of the nymphing community. Ben will then transition into a fly-tying demonstration to quickly show you some classics and take a deep dive into some of his newest creations. All while continuing the discussion of "hard flies vs soft flies" fly selection for different streamflow conditions and habitat types. See you January 16th at Grossenbart Brewery!

We are excited to welcome Tom Schultz to this month’s Browns and Brews event, held at Longmont’s Shoes and Brews venue, right next to the St Vrain Greenway.

Tom Schultz is a Professor Emeritus of Biology at Denison University where he taught Animal Behavior and the Biology of Insects as well as conducting research on the ecology of damselflies. He retired in 2019 and moved to Fort Collins to facilitate his passion for pursuing trout with a fly rod. Currently, Tom is a member of the Education Committee in the Rocky Mountain Flycasters TU chapter.

This is the first in a 2-part series on understanding the biology of aquatic insects (this event) and the tied flies that imitate them (next event, in January)

Please (please) register for the event at this link—while it is free we need to know how many people to expect and if we need to re-arrange the room prior to the event.

Join us for the first Browns and Brews speaker of the season as we learn about the sport of competitive fly fishing. For tickets and please click here.

Please note the new location: Shoes and Brews @ 63 S. Pratt Parkway B

The St. Vrain Trout Unlimited Chapter is proud to announce our Fall trash cleanup event! As owners of an Adopt-A-Highway section of State Highway 7, we are hosting a stream cleanup event on Saturday, 10/7/2023, from 9:00 am to approximately 11:30 am.

Chapter members and other like-minded volunteers will meet to pick up trash and litter on both sides of the highway along STATE HIGHWAY 7, from milepost 22 to 25. We'll meet at Sandstone Park in Lyons and then distribute to highway pull-offs in teams.

We will provide safety vests and trash bags. Please bring gloves and dress for the weather. Sturdy shoes are helpful. All ages are welcome, volunteers under 14 must be accompanied by an adult. We will sign forms for anyone needing service hours.

To participate, please submit your registration at this link.

Join Can’d Aid, Trout Unlimited, the City of Longmont, and the Left Hand Watershed Center in an effort to collect data and monitor the health of the St. Vrain Creek. Volunteers will participate as citizen scientists to collect stream health data for the St. Vrain and its tributaries. Volunteers will work in small teams to collect and identify aquatic macroinvertebrates. If you like nature and attention to detail, this is a fun look at life below the water in our streams. Scientists from the City of Longmont and Trout Unlimited will lead the teams. We will meet at the Longmont Museum north parking lot and disperse from there.

Can’d Aid and Trout Unlimited will provide all necessary supplies– just come ready to dive in and do some good!

Volunteers will be provided a training video link prior to the event to introduce them to the field procedure and principles of basic macroinvertebrate identification

Sign up here to help keep our waterways healthy!

On Sept 16 we will partner with Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS) to provide an afternoon of fishing for families who are grieving the death of a veteran. We anticipate about 25 participants.

We need your help to make this event a success! Because this will be such a big and diverse group, we will break into sub-groups and rotate through stations before heading out on the water. These stations include:

• Setting up their rod (a gift from the National Park Trust)

• Trout biology, habitat, and introduction to fly fishing

• Entomology and Fly Selection

Are you able to help us teach at these stations, and spend an afternoon and evening introducing service families to the joy and delight that fishing brings to you? You will get an entry pass and timed entry pass to get into the park. Please email Libby Earthman if you’d like to volunteer!

Can't volunteer the day of the event? Would you like to donate flies so each participant can bring home a few? If so, please email Libby Earthman. We hope to gather 100-150 flies to give away. Libby can be reached at 720-487-3126 or via the email link above.

The St. Vrain Trout Unlimited Chapter is proud to announce our first trash cleanup event since before the pandemic! As owners of an Adopt-A-Highway section of State Highway 7, we are hosting a stream cleanup event on Saturday, 5/20/2023, from 9:00 am to approximately 11:30 am.

Chapter members and other like-minded volunteers will meet to pick up trash and litter on both sides of the highway along STATE HIGHWAY 7, from milepost 22 to 25.

We will provide safety vests and trash bags. Please bring gloves and dress for the weather. Sturdy shoes are helpful. All ages are welcome, volunteers under 14 must be accompanied by an adult.

We will gladly endorse forms for anyone needing service hours.

To participate, please complete your registration here

Join us for the 2023 screening of IF4 at Wibby Brewing!

Tickets are on sale at Laughing Grizzly and Angles Fly shops for $20, or can be purchased at the door. There will be door prizes, raffles, and fun galore. This is the spring fishing event you absolutely don’t want to miss!

For questions or sponsorship opportunities, please email us at: svatu@gmail.com

Introduction to Fly Fishing

VOLUNTEERS Needed

Trout Behavior and Introduction to Fly Casting

VOLUNTEERS Needed

Featured Speaker: David Papineau, Cutts and Couloirs

Topic: 12 Tactics to Take Pro-level Pictures On and Off the River

Dave Papineau is a self-starting graphic designer and photographer who focuses his creative skills on pursuits related to the outdoors. Dave will present tips for capturing your angling experience keeping fish wet and adding interest to your photos.

Get your tickets HERE

A program for young girls 10-14 to learn fly fishing basics. STREAM Girls 2.0 is recommended for Girl Scouts and other girl that have completed STREAM Girl 1.0. It builds on the introduction to watershed and focuses on the fly fishing skills of knots, rigging, and casting applied to still water fishing. Girls that participate in this program will have a fishing experience.