WNYTU Spring Film Fest Event: Tuesday, March 18th 2025
Join us at The Ridge on Orchard Park Rd. in West Seneca on Tuesday, March 18th to celebrate the coming spring and raise needed funds for the conservation and education projects of Western New York Trout Unlimited.
We’ll be showcasing a slate of films produced by TU telling the stories of people and places impacted by the work we do.
We’ll have prize and 50/50 raffles all night, incredible food and drink available for purchase and the second to none hospitality of the Ridge staff.
The Tickets:
Purchase Pre-Sale Tickets for $10 HERE or at the following retail locations:
The Ridge, 555 Orchard Park Rd in West Seneca
Orvis, 4545 Transit Rd. in Clarence at The Eastern Hills Mall
The Hairy Trout, 3891 Seneca St. in West Seneca
The Prizes:
We're amassing an impressive selection of gear, gift certificates and trips as you read this as well as 50/50s all night. We'll post the list when we feel it has reached sufficient impressiveness. But trust us... it'll be great!
The Films:
We Are Trout Unlimited
Fishing. Conservation. Community.We bring together diverse interests to care for and recover rivers and streams, so our children can experience the joy of wild and native trout and salmon.
The Studio
The small caddis fly pattern bobbed in the waves, eventually floating directly in front of them both and, as if on cue for the camera, a tiny brown, from somewhere deep in the run, rose for and ate it.
Neither father, nor son, could contain their excitement.
Scot Simmons reminded his son, Cooper, to keep the line tight. Cooper did everything just right. He landed the fish. And both father and son soon admire a trout this young man landed on a dry fly… all by himself.
“That moment on the creek filled my soul in a way that completely overwhelmed me,” said Scot Simmons, some weeks later, as he recollected that moment.
There is a video of all this, which has rightly been shared thousands of times across the Instagram platform. The outpouring of positivity, support and the direct messages that spawned only served to strengthen the elder Simmons’ bond with the greater fly-fishing community.
Scot Simmons has dealt with various forms of anxiety, PTSD and depression for most of his adult life. He admits he hasn’t always made the best choices in life. More recently, considering the tragic murder of George Floyd in his hometown of Minneapolis, Simmons has wondered if “that could have been me.”
He is committed to creating a better life for himself and others, and he strives to be a better role model for his own family. Fly fishing has helped him find this equilibrium.
Lifeblood
For decades, TU and partners such as Wyoming Game and Fish, and the Bureau of Land Management, have been restoring vital habitat for Colorado River cutthroat trout in Muddy Creek, Wyoming. The basin is home to four native fish species and is a focus area for TU. Through a feat of Western water engineering, this Basin serves as both a headwater for the Upper Colorado River Basin and provides source water for the city of Cheyenne, which is outside the watershed.
There is a video of all this, which has rightly been shared thousands of times across the Instagram platform. The outpouring of positivity, support and the direct messages that spawned only served to strengthen the elder Simmons’ bond with the greater fly-fishing community.
Scot Simmons has dealt with various forms of anxiety, PTSD and depression for most of his adult life. He admits he hasn’t always made the best choices in life. More recently, considering the tragic murder of George Floyd in his hometown of Minneapolis, Simmons has wondered if “that could have been me.”
He is committed to creating a better life for himself and others, and he strives to be a better role model for his own family. Fly fishing has helped him find this equilibrium.
Lifeblood
Lifeblood is a story about how we are all connected to our water supply in the West – even in the most unlikely of places.
On the wild coastal rivers of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, Trout Unlimited is removing migration
barriers, reconnecting floodplains and restoring critical spawning and rearing habitat for struggling populations of wild salmon and steelhead.
Building on top of state and private funding, extensive federal investments provided through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) are allowing TU to expand the scale and impact of our restoration work in the coming years. For anglers and coastal tribes, this work is critical to rebuilding wild steelhead and salmon runs. For local communities, these investments mean good jobs and durable road systems designed to withstand the impacts of climate change.
In our new film, join TU’s Luke Kelly as he travels along iconic rainforest rivers visiting our partners and projects to celebrate the incredible restoration and reconnection work underway on the Olympic Peninsula.
Pennsylvania’s Beech Creek winds its way through rugged hills that echo with the bugles of wild elk in the fall and thunder with the gobbles of turkeys in the spring. A mid-sized freestone stream lined with
hemlock, rhododendron, and mixed hardwoods, Beech Creek has nearly everything you might hope to find in a trout stream: long riffles, deep pools, cold water, and plenty of in-stream cover.
The only thing Beech Creek lacks as a fishery is, well… fish.
The Beech Creek watershed covers approximately 171 square miles in Pennsylvania’s Centre and Clinton Counties. Located in the bituminous coal fields of central Pennsylvania, much of the watershed was mined long before modern reclamation practices were commonplace. As a result, Beech Creek and many of its tributaries are impaired by abandoned mine drainage (AMD).
Why are Trout Unlimited sawyer crews felling trees into streams across the country? The woody
structure is helping streams recover from long ago logging practices that cleared forests and drastically reduced needed cover for fish, as well as streams' ability to be resilient to flooding and droughts.
Anadromous Waters
At nearly 17 million acres, the Tongass National Forest in Southeast Alaska is the country’s largest national forest. The Tongass includes more than 15,700 miles of clean, undammed streams and 4,100 lakes and ponds that provide optimal spawning and rearing conditions for the region’s abundant wild steelhead and salmon. Steelhead are “officially” found in over 300 Tongass streams, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) Anadromous Waters Catalog (AWC), a database of the extant institutional observations concerning anadromous fish populations in Alaska. Learn more about what @troutunlimited is doing to help protect those populations by watching our latest film Anadromous Waters.
Rising from the Ashes
Less than six years ago, the second of two dams on the Elwha River, on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, was taken out to provide access for fish to the upper river located in the Olympic National Park. Since then, we have witnessed a remarkable transformation of the river – and of the wildlife that depend on it. Before the dams were installed in the early 1900s, the Elwha produced consistent and robust runs of salmon and steelhead and was a productive fishery. Afterwards, these runs dwindled almost to nothing. In fact, the river’s summer run of steelhead was almost extirpated. But taking out the dams paid immediate dividends for salmon and steelhead, which are now being found throughout the watershed. And summer steelhead, in particular, have staged an amazing comeback. Like the Phoenix rising from the ashes, summer steelhead have repopulated the Elwha in numbers unthinkable a few years ago. This film, from renowned filmmaker Shane Anderson, documents the return of summer steelhead to the Elwha, some of the key players who are studying the recovery of salmon and steelhead in this river, and what the Elwha’s recovery can tell us about large-scale river restoration projects in other places.
Resilient Waters
Resilient Waters covers the story of four passionate college anglers as they traveled the Columbia River basin during the summer of 2019. Follow the journey as these students form a lasting bond through wild places, native fish, and diverse friendships that establishes a broader appreciation for our nation’s public lands.
The Apache trout is one of only two trout native to Arizona. The Apache trout was historically found
only in the nearly 700 miles of headwaters of the White, Black and Little Colorado rivers above 5,900 feet. At one point, nearing extinction, Apache trout occupied only 30 miles of their historic range. Now, Apache occupy approximately 25 percent of their native habitat.
“Resilience,“ a film produced by Trout Unlimited, showcases how the Apache Trout has made a remarkable recovery due in large part to the White Mountain Apache Tribe over the course of more than 50 years in northern Arizona.