As featured in the documentary, DamNation (2014).

Every May for 14 years, Lee Spencer and his companion, a herding dog named Sis, have camped next to a deep pool along the North Umpqua’s Steamboat Creek. Their explicit job, until December, is to protect the 400 to 800 cherished wild summer steelhead who come up from the Pacific to spawn in Big Bend Pool, from poachers who had been known to dynamite the pool to create a massive kill. His implicit calling is to observe and record the web of life that nurtures the pool and its surroundings and inhabitants.

A distillation of 14 years of detailed observations, in this surprisingly engaging almanac Spencer has captured natural history teeming with fish, water, vegetation, birds, mammals, insects, reptiles and amphibians, seasonal changes, and interesting events and stories. Spencer is a modern day Thoreau, and the steelhead pool is his Walden Pond. In the grand tradition of The Sand County Almanac, this book will educate, inspire, and activate conservationists and anglers to appreciate and protect the waterways they love.