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I grew up in Red Deer. I watched the RDR change over my lifetime. I must admit, however, that I did not fish it when it was in its brown trout prime. As a teenager in the late 80s, it was possible to catch walleye, pike, goldeye, whitefish, and rainbow trout (yes, rainbow trout) in the city section. So, as long as I can remember, unless you were very specific (like bottom bouncing a sz16 fly tipped with a maggot for whitefish or chucking a big red devil for pike), at least to me, it has always been a piscatorial roulette. Oh, the things a kid could catch with a small panther martin spinner! I had not fished the RDR since 1992. I took up fly fishing about 12 years ago. I immediately started fishing the RDR, mostly for whitefish and goldeye, as a homage to my childhood. I remember the first brown trout that I caught. I had a WTF moment. I was expecting to set the hook on a 12" whitefish, but was actually a 24" brown trout. Since then, I have caught a steady 1 or 2 per year in an average of 4 or 5 outings per year. They do not live in your typical brown trout lies---those places are occupied by walleye. They live with the whitefish---kind of like a herd of house cats living with a lion. There is no doubt the brown trout population is in a tenuous balance with all the other species. The brown trout fry have a gulag/gauntlet to run to outsize the walleye, but if they can make it to 12", really, they only have the pike to worry about, and a big brown trout predator has a veritable cornucopia of food sources. They are very wiley; they would have to be to survive in the chaos of the RDR. But if you can catch one, they really are an archetype of the species---very beautiful.

Ya there is a lot of text out there if you spend a couple minutes on google scholar. Here's a couple quick ones, and obviously a lot more out there if you were going to spend some serious time looking into it.. - A framework for evaluating food-web responses to hydrological manipulations in riverine systems - instream flows and the decline of riparian cottonwoods along the St. Mary River, Alberta - Basic Principles and Ecological Consequences of Altered Flow Regimes for Aquatic Biodiversity - Influence of flow regulation on channel dynamics and riparian cottonswoods along the bow river, alberta - review of benthic invertebrates and epiltihic algae at long-term monitoring sites in the bow river (this one specifially speaks to the impact on inverts at Cochrane due to the impacts of Ghost, which is the kind of management we saw for a week.)

I have one and I like it, a 6 wt. I bought mine about 5 years ago and it is a medium action rod so you have to be patient and wait for it to load on your back cast. I find it to be very accurate when trying to place my fly in a specific location. I can't remember what I paid but seem to remember it was a moderately priced rod. not cheap but not super expensive.

^^This.^^

Remember the positive changes when voting comes around next year. Who will work with an admittedly imperfect conservation-regeneration approach, and who will attempt to reverse it to the days of dust, mud, and noise?