Tom Bie is the founder, editor, and publisher of The Drake. He started the magazine in 1998 as an annual newsprint publication based in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He then moved it to Steamboat, Colorado (1999), Boulder, Colorado (2001), and San Clemente, California (2004), as he took jobs as managing editor at Paddler, Senior Editor at Skiing, and Editor-in-Chief at Powder, respectively. Tom and The Drake are now both based in Denver, Colorado, where The Drake is finally all grows up(Swingers, 1996) to a quarterly magazine.
I saw the man with the machete first. He was leaning on the fat end of a downed mangrove that was blocking the way upstream. He stood on a branch chopping away, but his efforts had produced only a slight notch in the tree. There were three others waiting in the boat, the youngest resting the butt of an automatic rifle on his knee. Their uniforms gave them away as members of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez’s National Guard—as notorious as the waters they patrolled. The State Department estimates that 200 metric tons of cocaine makes its way through the country annually, much of it through this vast river system, which extends into Colombia.
Take any Colorado stream-access battle that has taken place this century, and a small, relatively unknown but politically connected nonprofit has likely played a role. The secretive Creekside Coalition has fought for much of the past thirty years to keep stream-access laws in Colorado from becoming anything like those in Montana, where the public is allowed to recreate in its rivers and streams up to the high-water mark
The press release arrived October 4, 2024: “Cox Enterprises Acquires Loop Tackle.” Atlanta-based Cox Enterprises Inc. is a 127-year-old, privately held, global media and automotive empire worth around $30 billion. Its purchase of a relatively small European flyfishing brand seemed odd. But, free country and all that.
FANS OF THE early-2000s political drama “The West Wing” may recall an episode in the show’s first season where Josh (Bradley Whitford, as Deputy Chief of Staff) tells President Bartlet (Martin Sheen) how he can use the Antiquities Act of 1906 to prevent a mine from being built in Montana: “You’re gonna establish Big Sky National Park!”
In my experience, the best fly shops typically have shop dogs in them. And if the owner is a hockey fan, then that dog will be named Stanley. Such is the case with Littleton, Colorado-based Anglers All fly shop, which owner Chris Keeley, a native North Dakotan, bought in 2009 from Terry and Lori Nicholson.
AFTER ALL THESE YEARS, I finally get to hotspot. Anyone who has ever suffered through the four-hundred-mile godforsaken
slog from Casper, Wyoming, to Echo, Utah, on I-80 knows it to be one of the most desolate drives in America. If you’re not
being run off the freeway by stimulant-powered semi-drivers, it’s only because snowfall or 60-mph crosswinds have forced
them to commandeer all the rest areas.
DAN SOLTAU is owner of the Plano, Texas-based fly shop Dirty Water Fly Company. He also hosts fishing trips, and recently returned from hosting his sixth group at Anglers Inn, located in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. One of the many nice aspects of Anglers Inn is that it has lodges on both Lake El Salto and Lake Picachos, two of the finest largemouth lakes on earth. A typical hosted trip would see all of the guests staying together at one of the two lakes, with maybe a chance for a day trip to the other one. But this would not be a typical hosted trip.
Originally published Feb 18, 2007 You’re a cab driver in New York City in 1971, trying to make a right hand turn at a busy Manhattan intersection but there’s some cocky bike messenger in your way and he won’t move. So you nudge him. Not hard, just enough to let him know that you’re in…
We never found the "water" we were searching for, but it didn't quite much matter when we stumbled upon this view and this stream, full of little wild trout. When we first walked down we saw red flashes - thinking we had stumbled upon native cutties, we began casting, only to catch the char gems we cherish back in the Southeast, somehow slightly dissapointed that we did not find the native fish to this region we were hoping for. Angler: Adam White. Photo: Sammy Chang
ON JUNE FIFTH, the seven members of Colorado’s court of last resort unanimously ruled that 81-year-old flyfisherman Roger Hill “lacks standing” to continue his decade-long legal battle for public access along the Arkansas River (Hill v. Warsewa).
Launch ramp on Idaho’s Middle Fork of the Salmon Questionable Collections Where are our recreation.gov fees actually going? By Tom Bie Type “fly fishing” into the recreation.gov search window, and 260 results appear, allowing bookings for anything from a campsite on Oregon’s Umpqua River ($28) to the “Sunrise House” on Cape Cod ($6,600 for…
The first email arrived on July 14. “Reaching out to pass along some fresh ‘industry happenings’ from the heart of Bolivia’s golden dorado region,” it began. “I figured the Drake might be interested in looking into it, as it seems on par with the prior articles investigating Deneki.”
Late summer over the Patoka River near the Patoka River National Wildlife Refuge (NWR), Indiana, USA. Photo by Brent Waltermire
In the fall of 1993, then-President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 12866, requiring all Federal regulatory agencies to publish a list of anticipated rulemaking actions for the upcoming twelve-month period. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS) is such an agency, and its rulemaking process requires four steps: Publishing a proposed rule in the Federal Register; Inviting public comment; Considering the public comments received, and Publishing a final rule in the Federal Register.
“The topic of stream access illustrates one of the most perplexing types of legal conflicts that can arise… Indeed, it is difficult to find a legal issue that is more tangled and uncertain.” —A Wildlife Primer (2009), by Eric Freyfogle and Dale Goble
Colorado’s river laws might be in trouble. Roger Hill, the octogenarian trying to fulfill his dream of legally wade-fishing the Arkansas River, was at the Colorado Court of Appeals on January 27 and got good news about his case—Hill v Warsewa.
Bimini guide Ansil Saunders appreciating the Super Bowl I game ball
Mighty Waters, a wonderful movie released last year by Austin-based filmmaker Shannon Vandivier, tells the story of beloved Bimini-based guide and boat-builder Ansil Saunders, in particular how Saunders had taken Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. out for a peaceful day on Bahamian waters just four days before King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968. The fascinating story was part of the 2021 Fly Fishing Film Tour and was broadly shared with the public in early February by two of its sponsors, Simms and Costa.
Memorial Weekend is typically a time to avoid fishing. But Clyde opens doors. And gates, with bass ponds behind them. I’m not a private-water-with-pellet-fed-trout guy, but access to an un-public largemouth lake in Tennessee? That’s another matter.
Let’s Go Bass’nIt’s time to test the warmwaters By Beau Davis and Tom Bie Photo by Jeremiah Watt Want to avoid bumping elbows with ten million new trout-chasers this summer? Then consider a guided day on some warmwater. You’ll surely face a less-pressured fishery, and if the trip includes kicking around in a float-tube, you…
Until January 4, I’d never even heard the term “float-n-fly.” It sounded like a kid’s ride at the fairground, or the street name for some illicit new drug. But I Googled it that day—the same day Oroville, California-based flyfishing guide Ryan Williams, and his partner, Logan McDaniel, won the Shasta Lake Wild West Bass Trail tournament.
Photo Courtesy Rep. Simpson's Office. Idaho's 2nd District G.O.P. Rep. Mike Simpson, at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Stanley-to-Redfish Lake Trail.
In April 2019, Congressman Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, gave a somewhat stunning keynote address at an environmental conference hosted by Boise State’s Andrus Center for Public Policy. His comments were thoughtful, educated, and encouraging. But mostly, they were surprising, particularly his thoughts about what might be necessary to save Idaho salmon. Rep. Simpson and I discussed the topic in mid-December, and his quotes below come from his keynote and our conversation. Can Idaho salmon truly be saved? No one knows. But the Congressman has been down a similarly daunting path. In 2015, Mr. Simpson’s 15-year effort to broker a seemingly impossible deal resulted in the creation of Idaho’s Boulder-White Clouds Wilderness. (Which Mark Menlove covered in his 2014 feature, “A Fisherman’s Monument.”) If wild salmon and steelhead can indeed be saved, then Rep. Simpson is providing these essential fish the best shot they’ve had in decades.
riter and historian David T. Courtwright calls them “limbic capitalists”—people or companies that target our limbic system, the part of our brains primarily responsible for emotion, especially as it relates to pleasure, motivation, and survival. Courtwright is author of The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business. “Biological evolution shaped the limbic system,…
The latest chapter in the Madison River regulations debate unfolded at a Montana Fish and Wildlife Commission meeting held in Helena on Tuesday night. Drake contributor Michael Wright gives an update in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle:
Thomas & Thomas finds a friend in the whiskey business Like many Westerners, I grew up without ever giving much thought to bamboo fly rods or rye whiskey. These things were viewed—like icy ski slopes or Steelers fans—as products of the Northeast, and thus of little concern to us Left Coasters. In college I started…
A winter of discontent in Ennis If your summer plans include a tailwater weekend along Montana’s Madison River, you won’t be alone. In early April 2018, after years of surveys, public meetings, and citizen advisory committees, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks (FWP) released its draft Recreational Management Plan for the Madison, which included some alarming…
The West may experience a lengthy runoff in 2019 While it’s always tricky making May or June runoff predictions in March, Snotel data from around the West indicates that snowpack levels, especially in Southern Colorado, Southern Utah, and parts of California’s Central Sierras, are poised in 2019 to create high flows or a long runoff…
Sowbellies and baseball in the Cornhusker State Dawn comes early to southern Nebraska on the 16th of June. Nautical twilight, second of the earth’s three twilight phases, begins before 5 a.m. in Kearney, a town of some 30,000 sitting just off I-80 about three hours west of Omaha. I stopped in Kearney last summer on…
Facing the Beast with Brian Grossenbacher If you’ve paid even the slightest attention to flyfishing media over the past two decades, then you’ve seen plenty of shots taken by Bozeman, Montana-based photographer Brian Grossenbacher. Whether shooting commercially for clients like Simms, Orvis, and Yeti, or editorially for this magazine and many others, Grossenbacher has made…
This year anglers are staring down the barrel of sacrifice. The worst run of summer steelhead headed up the Columbia River and its tributaries in generations is here.
The Osprey journal teams with US and Canadian conservation groups to expand its wild salmon and steelhead advocacy For more than 30 years, The Osprey journal has dug its talons into wild Pacific salmon and steelhead advocacy by promoting the best science and policies to restore and conserve native fish populations.
