When I first moved to Ketchum, ID and the hallowed Wood River Valley, I was drawn like most to the more wide open spaces in the drainage. Multi-million dollar Hollywood alpine retreats, and lodges with over-the-top “great rooms” tended to dot the “up-valley” rivers and detract, I felt, from the experience. Trying to determine the…
I grew up under the roof of a fly fisherman, a well-respected guide whose father – a guide himself – was a pioneer on his native Snake River. I remember him as a skilled caster who could throw a line more that 90 feet and make it seem effortless. I remember him, too, as a…
What to do when a fish morphs from gills and guts into something larger – a memory that splashes across three generations of anglers, alternating between dream and reality? Born to my grandfather, this fish swam through my father Charles and landed with me. Even before I hooked her one cool April morning on Georgia’s…
The ancient Mako 17 lounged beside an Indian River fishing camp. Amid the rusted trailer and decaying leafy interior clutter was her magical and somehow readable stern message merrily announcing, “Reds R Us.” I chuckled at the irony of that sun-bleached clunker’s name as I wheeled a friend’s sleek, carbon-and-fiberglass Maverick down the ramp. Almost…
“A brook trout wouldn’t last five minutes in this water,” I say to Haroldo as he leans over the gunwale and washes the slime off his knife. “Never mind the water temperature he’d be dead before he ever felt the heat.” Haroldo looked up, smiled, and nodded like he understood. “You believe in natural selection?”…
The sun is high overhead as I step out of the trees, drop my pack and flop down on the grass, watching the wind send long ripples across the lake. Bear, my grey-muzzled companion, quenches his thirst in the cool water We’ve been hiking all day and while my legs and lungs feel the mileage,…
See them coming, swimming toward you like ducks across the sky at dawn. It’s hard for a Northern Rockies trout chaser to fathom: no hatch to match, no current seam to aim for, just you and a couple dozen bonefish headed your direction. Throw it too late and you’ll spook ’em. Too early and your…
“It’s been a grand tournament so far – don’t you think?” asked the prideful chairman to the leather-tanned skiff guide approaching the trophy table. “Grand, perhaps, in the sense of fine weather,” the guide scoffed with a sidewise glance toward the competitors gathered on the dock. The chairman set down his Styrofoam cup with the…
I grew up in Detroit, a city whose belching smokestacks and clamoring auto plants preach a relentless contempt for mass transportation. Yet when I moved to Washington, D.C., I fell in love with trains—the grand stations and comforting rhythms of the ride hooked me. I eventually ditched my car completely, relying solely on bike, cab…
–Mike Muri It’s an orgy that would have made caligula jealous. an unusually warm mid-may day filled with frenzied lovemaking, the participants’ bodies locked together coupling with a purpose, oblivious to all that surrounds them. Onlookers are left to gape in wonder as caddisflies in every shape, color, and size procreate with an intoxicating intensity.…
Ephemerella grandis is, like the rest of us, a sex fiend. From the moment he sheds his heavy, heinous body of youth, his thoughts are dominated by mayfly fornication-drake nookie, if you will. He can’t sleep. He can’t eat. He can do nothing but flutter about on the breezes of desire, looking above the river…
The pacific ocean covers 70 million square miles of this planet. A vast network of birthing rivers is needed to fill a biologically meaningful portion of so great a sea with salmon. One of the most crucial of such networks is the Columbia/Snake river system, a single great Y-shaped flow, each wing of the Y…
Flyfishing is a sexy sport. This I know because I’m in awe of good fishermen, which has left me attracted to grubby guys I normally wouldn’t have noticed except maybe to offer them change. I’m not too experienced a flyfisher and I’m a terrible flirt, yet when it comes to mixing the two together I…
Springtime on the Bighorn and the midges are thick, blanketing the water, your dory, and your legs if you let them. They look like ‘skeeters but aren’t, and despite their huge numbers on the surface, many trout will still hold tight to the river bottom, living large on midge larva trying to worm-wiggle their way…
The second time I met R. L. Winston’s Bamboo Guru, Glenn Brackett, he was in the Twin Bridges Post Office. It was my first week in town and I was hot to get a few letters off with the new postmark. I walked in past Glenn and a couple of ranchers who were leaning up…
Ka-plop! Okay, that’s it! The second cartop-to-windshield avalanche at a stop sign is a strong signal: Ditch Jackson winter for somewhere that mosquitoes, sunscreen and T-shirts outnumber gloves, parkas and plug-in car heaters. Evacuation by car is the answer. Unfortunately my ol’ gear room isn’t primed for fast winter getaways. I figure at least two…