Approximately 9,000 of TU's more than 125,000 members live and fish here in California. This website will keep everyone informed about what TU grassroots members, and TU staff, are doing to further our mission in the Golden State. California is blessed with an extraordinary abundance of trout and salmon fisheries. An angler can fish the brawling tailwaters of the lower Sacramento, hike miles into a remote Sierra Nevada wilderness lake, fish for steelhead on the incoming tide of a Mendocino County estuary, or catch diminutive and rare native rainbows in a tiny southern creek, all without ever leaving the state's expansive boundaries. The California Department of Fish and Game lists no fewer than 22 native salmonids in California.
Few states can even begin to rival the wealth of trout and salmon that California enjoys.
Unfortunately, that precious resource is under constant threat. All of the others are threatened in some part of their historic range, and many are the subjects of state or federal emergency protection measures. In addition, some of California's finest wild trout fisheries, particularly on the east slope of the Sierra, exist thanks to naturalized populations of non-native salmonids. The quality of these fisheries is often in as much jeopardy as that of the integrity of the native salmonid species. All over our state there is much work to be done.