STORY BY KAREN BOSSICK

PHOTO BY ED NORTHEN

Greg Loomis’ biggest fish tale, as they like to say at Silver Creek Outfitters, is a big fish tale.

That would be the tale of how he once landed a 20-pound permit, a game fish of the western Atlantic Ocean, on a pencil popper.

A fisherman since the age of 9, he came across his first steelhead in a creek as narrow and shallow as Trail Creek and caught it on a fly he tied himself only to discover the season wasn’t open. He did not keep the fish but got in trouble with his father, anyway.

Loomis is now the executive director of the Silver Creek Alliance, a non-profit he created dedicated to the preservation of the Silver Creek watershed.

And he will discuss the current status of Silver Creek and the challenges it faces this year, what with the low snow pack and reduced levels of groundwater in the aquifer, at tonight’s meeting of the Hemingway Chapter of Trout Unlimited.

The meeting, open to the public, will be held from 5 to 7 p.m. tonight--Thursday, March 12--upstairs at Whiskey Jacques Restaurant in Ketchum.

Loomis, who graduated from an aircraft maintenance school and moved to Sun Valley from Seattle in 1979, says that the mission of the Silver Creek Alliance is to monitor the health of Silver Creek, providing non-biased information to the public.

The Hemingway Chapter of Trout Unlimited usually meets the first Thursday of each month but pushed back its meeting this month because the meeting room was being used that night.