About - Junesucker.com - An outdoor index for Utah

Fishing has been a part of my life since as long as I could remember. As a kid I often wished that I lived in the mountains so I could fish everyday. I later found out Salt Lake City had irrigation canals all over the valley that were full of fish. Growing up I was always told the water in those ditches didn't have fish in them.

After college I followed my dream of creating video games for a living. My dream come true turned into a stressful nightmare of working 70+ hour weeks. On the rare weekends that I had a day off I would unwind by going fishing. Being in the outdoors recharged my tired soul and wiped my stress away. I loved exploring the outdoors and turned to the Internet to get some tips on places to explore. I was shocked to find that almost every outdoor website was just a direct copy and paste from the Utah DWR website.

I started Junesucker.com because of an overall disgust with Utah fishing web sites. Most of the forums out there have more adds on the page than actual info. Typically when you Google a lake in Utah you get longitude and latitude. Most sites fishing information are often outdated or completely false. I spent so much time sifting through bad information online in order to compile my knowledge. I soon turned to books, I joined fishing clubs and talked to everyone I could about fishing.

I had setup several web servers before and knew a lot about fishing. I knew I could quickly make the most informative and popular fishing website in Utah. I figured after people saw the momentum and direction I was heading they would quickly jump in and help me create this great website.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

Creating the front end of the website was quite the learning curve compared to setting up a server. Getting the content from my brain onto a digestible format online turned out to be way harder then I imagined. My blew past every project timeline I had set for the site.

An idea for a fishing website 10 years ago has turned into thousands of more hours then I imagined. In that time I have had exactly eight people reach out to me and say they enjoyed the site. So I might not have created the most popular site but at least I helped eight people find a new fishing spot and gave them a history of location so they could tell a story. I'm going to keep documenting this great state so folks will know that ditch does have fish in it. If they want to fish a really far away ditch well hopefully I can help with that too.

-Josh Vandermeyden