Spring – Silver Tiger Taimen, Shop Dogs, Starting Out, The Lake Trout Issue, Colorado Stoners Go Fishing, I Went Steelheading Today
Summer – Holy Trinity of the Right Coast, What the Smallmouth Tells Us, Brown Drake Bonanza, The Bass Phase, Idaho’s South Fork.
Fall – Hating the Thompson, A Fisherman’s Monument, Black Tar Permit, Insert Trout, Here.
Winter – DIY Dialectic, Meet the Metolius, Pyramid Scheme, Postcards from Playa Blanca
Washington’s Olympic National Park is best known for iconic steelhead rivers such as the Hoh, Bogachiel, and Sol Duc. It’s also home to America’s largest dam removal project, which was completed on the now free-flowing Elwha River in August 2014. Here, contributor Brian Irwin recounts his days pouring drinks in the park and exploring a…
Standing in the Wally Dog parking lot in Greenville, South Carolina, I swear I can hear the ocean. The coast is at least three hours away, yet the sound of surf fills my ears. I glance over my shoulder: nothing but cars and trucks along Poinsett Highway.
The act of walking across a white-sand flat, knee-deep in endless shades of blue, is made much more interesting by bonefish. Especially if you’ve never caught one. After a few days spent searching empty water on the Bahamian island of Exuma, we drove down a twisted dirt road, past rotting cars and abandoned dishwashers, and…
The Alaska Railroad winter train runs 360 miles between Anchorage and Fairbanks on the weekends, and it will drop you off anywhere along the track, much of it otherwise inaccessible wilderness. My fishing partner, Dan, and I used to work for the railroad in Anchorage, me as a PR flack and he as the chief…
Rogelio Velasco has owned Yucatan-based Pesca Maya fishing resort for 19 years, so he knows the challenge of producing off-the-grid electricity, especially for power-hungry air conditioners. Pesca Maya, like all Ascension Bay resorts, sits inside the Sian Ka’an biosphere reserve, where power lines don’t exist and aren’t forthcoming. So instead, most lodges rely on diesel…
MENTION THAT YOU’RE PLANNING A TRIP to Colorado’s Gunnison River, and a likely response will be something like, “Oh, cool—are you fishing Black Canyon or floating the Gorge?” Which makes perfect sense. After all, between the famed salmonfly hatch and national park status of Black Canyon, and the horse-pack/ rafting reputation of Gunny Gorge, it’s…
“As with rush-hour driving or the public use of cell phones, everyone believes we need a code of etiquette, but no one can agree on what it would be, and some couldn’t bring themselves to observe it regardless.” —Ted Leeson, Inventing Montana Friday I’ve seen this before. It starts as a spark, then a faint…
In March and April, depending on where you live on the East Coast, the first broods of monarch butterflies hatch from their chrysalis (a cocoon to you and I) and enjoy a short two- to six-week life span. They do what butterflies are best at: they flit around, eat flowers, look pretty, avoid elementary schoolers…
THE SUMMER OF 1998 was good to Lee Spencer. By fall he’d raised 77 steelhead to his fly on Oregon’s famed North Umpqua River, landing about half of them. (Spencer keeps meticulous notes.) Yet there was a problem. Of the fish he’d landed, three had died—two of them wild. He’d also once brought in a…
I passed the Rock Bottom Brewery on the final mile of my evening bike loop, where more than once I’d stopped for a thick porter to celebrate not being killed riding the second busiest road in Houston. Restaurants come and go quickly around here, but this place had a twist: A lily pad-filled concrete moat…
“It took A.K. to teach me how to make real camp coffee.” —John Gierach, “Camp Coffee,” Trout Bum, 1986 “U.S. military satellite captures footage of A.K. Best and Ed Engle slyly and simultaneously dumping out their cups of John Gierach’s famous camp coffee when John’s not looking. “ —The Drake, Scuddlebutt, Fall 2011 “What are…
You go to florida to fish the salt. But if you also happen to love largemouth, as I do, and you live in a place that’s a mile high, with a nine-week window to fish for them, then you take advantage of every opportunity to chase them elsewhere. Attending this summer’s annual flyfishing trade show…
DURING THE WANING DAYS OF SUMMER 2000, guide Dave Deardorff rowed his drift boat one stroke too far. Idaho’s lower South Fork of the Snake had fished well that afternoon. Cutthroat sipped BWOs under tormented skies, while Deardorff storm-jumped his way downstream. Finally, something angry surrounded him and his two clients. He sunk oar blades…
WHEN MY PARENTS SHIPPED my sister and me off to college, they didn’t expected to receive a craft brewer and a flyfishing writer in return. But we’d both seen enough of corporate America to realize that a lifetime spent living in it might not be worth the paycheck. A collaborative effort between the two worlds…
EVERY TIME A GIRLFRIEND COMPLAINS about her husband or boyfriend going fishing again (insert big sigh), I bite off a small chunk of my tongue. I’d love for my husband to go fishing. A week in Montana? Hmmm- That doesn’t seem far away enough-or long enough. I hear there are big fish in Kamchatka. And…
I WAS A LITTLE SURPRISED when Enrico Puglisi told me that his favorite permit fly was not his EP Crab. Nor was it his lifelike Descendent Crab, or his Palometa Crab, or even the fly he named after the fish itself, the Permit Crab. It’s a shrimp pattern. More precisely, his Spawning Shrimp, #4, in…
THERE WAS A TIME when skateboarder-turnedgraphics- creator Dave Hartman excelled at the art of being aimless. Bucking the law and generally lacking purpose, Hartman bounced from home to home in suburban Arizona and California, rural Alabama, and southern New Hampshire. Until fishing intervened. He found a fly rod and carried it to Montana. And there…
The Belizean coastline stretches along 239 miles of pleasant places to visit. Tourists who come here, even for the first time, often want to help save it. And there’s a lot to save in Belize—jaguars and Scarlet Macaws and lots and lots of fish. There’s also plenty to save the country from, like Jimmy Buffett…
The state fish and game departments for Washington and Oregon both face a major dilemma: how to adequately protect what remains of their wild steelhead, while also continuing to produce hatchery steelhead for the many anglers who like to bring one home for dinner.
I’d planned to fish something new, and was ready for a bold adventure. But then I remembered promising my buddy that I’d do some light mechanical work on his stupid Accord that evening. That guy doesn’t even fish. Anyway, no one likes exploring with a time constraint, so I resigned myself to fishing the same…
Back in January, NOAA meteorologists reported a brilliant haze-like anomaly ascending into the atmosphere high above Colorado’s famed 14ers. Dubbed the “Puffy Grail” it’s since been attributed to a mass exhale sparked by lawmakers legalizing in-state recreational marijuana sales. It’s now kosher to purchase and smoke pot in Colorado—where Johnny Law allows—and as anglers prepare…
127 Hours. An un-edited collection of GoPro footage from my summer spent guiding on the Madison. Nine Pounds of Melted Mono. Art project using 60 spools of Trilene, a campfire, and two bottles of Evan Williams. Book Project: Tuesdays with Cheney: 50 Places You’ll Never Flyfish Before You Die Because Obamacare Pilfered Your Savings and…
Photos by John Sherman On the hundred-and-first cast the first strip felt dull, the second heavy, and the third came tight with a thuggish throb. Silver and pink flashed underwater a split second before the river broke in a shower of water ten feet across. “Taimen! Taimen! Taimen!” yelled Victor Voydilov, who was popping up…