Drake Magazine Back Issue Content Fall 2011
I STOOD IN THE NEAR DARK AT THE TOP OF THE TRAIL THAT LED DOWN a series of switchbacks to the river. A neighbor had told me that for several days there’d been grizzly tracks all down the trail. I thought that grizzlies probably liked these low light levels and could see well enough to…
There was a Western Governor’s Association annual meeting held on June 29, 2011, in Coeur d’ Alene, Idaho. And among the various sessions was one called “Restoring and Managing the Health of Forests in the West.” A worthwhile topic, right? I mean, who’s not for healthy forests? So I checked in via YouTube to see…
We’re miles from the truck and 600 feet below the canyon rim when the first raindrops dimple Trout Creek. Charlie Card has spent his entire life in this country and guided it professionally since he was seventeen. I figure that makes pulling the plug his call. “What do you think, Charlie?”
Sunday, May 29, 2011 began as an ordinary day in the White Mountains of eastern Arizona. Memorial Day weekend draws large crowds from hot deserts to the high country to camp and fish. But at approximately 2 p.m. that afternoon, smoke began to rise from an abandoned campfire in the Bear Wallow Wilderness Area on…
The water’s surface is oily and shiny and silver and orange. The outgoing tide is tepid, with the current passing between your legs being the only indication that you’re wading, because the water is the same temperature as your shaking, nervous body. “Remember to breathe.” Vision drifting in and out, eyes straining for focus. Legs…
It isn’t those first, crisp, mahogany-spinner mornings that get me, the ones ending with a warm afternoon and a few straggler hoppers still clicking. It’s the days that come a couple weeks later, after the onset of frost, when the first nasty cold front under low-lying clouds makes you hustle through the wadering process because…
Members of the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe will tell you that 100-pound Chinook salmon once returned to their namesake river on the northeastern tip of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. While no one can substantiate the existence of these behemoths, one thing is certain: The construction of the Elwha and Glines Canyon dams between 1913 and 1927 cut…