Bill Thorne 

BY DWAIN HEBDA  PHOTOGRAPHY BY NOVO STUDIO

Bill Thorne owes his childhood love of fishing — including an early interest in fly-fishing — to his late grandfather. Then, moving to Arkansas in 1978, he began exploring various fishing holes and lakes and kindling a spark for fly-fishing for trout into a full-on love affair. The more he fished, the more interested he became in conservation.  

He attended his first Trout Unlimited event in Fayetteville in the mid-1990s and the die was struck for a long volunteer career preserving and enhancing the state’s trout fishing. 

“We’ve been very active in a lot of the issues, hog farming on the Buffalo River, dissolved oxygen issues, things like that,” he said. “Minimum flow was probably the biggest thing during my tenure at Trout Unlimited. We didn’t have minimum flow on the White River in Norfork back when I got started. We worked hand-in-hand with Arkansas Game and Fish to achieve minimum flow, which guaranteed a minimum amount of water that would be released from the tailwater through the dams. That guaranteed the survivability and the quality of our trout.” 

Thorne’s activism took him to leadership positions. He served two terms as president of TU Chapter 514 in Northwest Arkansas, then moved to Mountain Home and served three terms as president of TU Chapter 698, a post he holds today. From there, he served five years as Arkansas Council Chair, the liaison between all the chapters and the state, and finally, five years as National Leadership Representative for Arkansas.  

Six years ago, he also co-chaired the state’s Women’s Initiative of Trout Unlimited, now focusing on diversity in general, part of a larger mission to increase access to trout fishing for kids and underserved populations. 

“We’re trying to make Trout Unlimited look more like our population and not just like an old, rich, white guy’s club,” he said. “Diversity to us includes women and families and children and exposing all sorts of folks to the sport that we love.” 

Being involved at the national level has shown Thorne just how good Arkansas’s trout fishing is and how far it’s come. 

“To be honest, we didn’t get much respect among trout fishing purists on the east and west coasts until about 10 years ago,” he said. “The work we started back in the 1980s planting eggs has continued, and now we’re seeing a population of Bonneville cutthroats actually reproduce in the White River.  

“By developing these wild strains of trout in a tailwater, we’re gaining some national respect not only for size, but the quality of our fish. The White River  below Bull Shoals Dam is known throughout the world, at this point, for trophy brown trout. To see that mentality shift has probably been what I take the most pride in, seeing how our sport has changed for the better.”