Drake Magazine Back Issue Content
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…
Horseshoes & Hand Grenades’ Russell Pedersen releases fishy solo album Deliverance references notwithstanding, a drive to the river is always made better with banjo music. Good banjo tunes, like good trout streams or musky rivers, find just the right pace, yet still flow and wind toward unexpected places. Few people understand that better than Russell…
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…
Lager for good times and good causes On a recent redfishing trip to Louisiana, I was introduced to SweetWater Brewing Company’s newest offering, Guide Beer, which officially launches to the public in May. On our way out of Atlanta, I’d managed to score a six-pack of a promotional run from my friend Andy Bowen, who…
Mystique, mayhem, and the palolo worm hatch Late May, Florida Keys. Four in the afternoon. Skiffs buzz back to docks with tired guides and sun-drunk clients. Thoughts of missed shots and cold beer. A dying easterly rustles palm fronds; thunderheads lurk like massive silver anvils. Oceanside, brown bonefish flats sport crisscrossing prop scars. Between the…
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…
Statuary in the Southern Imagination “What do we do with hundreds of Confederate monuments and related statuary across the United States? Americans face a challenge that might be called the mass curation of our public spaces, in light of contemporary sensibilities, yes, but just as important, in service of what has always been the truth.”…
The wader-repair department at Patagonia is a standalone, self-sustained operation in a hard-to-find corner of a 342,000-square-foot warehouse in Reno, Nevada, just steps from the rainbows, browns, and—as of last summer—native Lahontan cutthroat of the Truckee River. The department is little more than a series of temporary walls erected on the edge of the receiving…
If you linger around a fly shop long enough on a slow day, you’ll eventually hear some crazy and creative fishing plans. My shop—Arbor Anglers in Golden, Colorado—is no exception, and on a recent afternoon in late October, the fishing plans got a little nuts. What started with: “We should find a big-ass shark-mount somewhere…
The last time you wore that coat, campfire stories buried their scent into the seams above the elbow, where embers rose too quickly and charred patchy holes. By looking at the jacket, you taste the bourbon again and your throat burns. You scoured the entire Gunpowder River last fall, ending each weekend with a drink…
Trout fishing in northern Minnesota in the summer is a good way to inhale a lot of bugs. Same for splitting wood, or cutting the grass, or any other sweaty, breathy work. Supposedly, my great-great uncle had a line for this, whenever one of the kids was choking and spitting on a mosquito:
“Plus ca change, plus c’est même chose.” Like most trout fishermen my age, normal procedure is to find a place to get into some river and wade, an approach that confers a granular view of all on offer—details of bottom, hydrology, insect life, and general atmosphere. On balance, there are better ways to catch fish;…
For noted fly tyer and guide Blane Chocklett, it is creativity that has set him apart from the folks throwing the same old patterns at the same old fish. Chocklett has made himself a life and career by searching out new fisheries and new fly patterns. If you have flyfished for a while, especially for…
My annual migrations from Montana to Baja started in the winter of 2009, when the mainstream media first began covering news about the dangers associated with Mexico travel. Friends and family thought I was nuts, but as long as you weren’t searching for blow in Tijuana at 2 a.m., Baja was still safer than many…
Craft beer and flyfishing go together like Jell-O shots and bachelorette parties. In the fishier towns in America you’ll find angling-themed beers of every taste and style, from Trout Slayer Wheat Ale (Big Sky Brewing, Missoula, MT) to Cutthroat Porter (Odell Brewing, Fort Collins, CO) to Steelhead Extra Pale Ale (Mad River Brewing, Humboldt County,…
To the right, is lake Michigan. I can see it through my window. It’s ominous. Nothing can stop it. It’s both life giving and life taking. I can see as far as it will let me and no further than it will allow. It speaks to me with the words of adventure and the sound…
Every year for the past decade the proposed Pebble Mine in Bristol Bay seems to die, only to rise again from its still-warm ashes. Despite lawsuits, a rigorous permitting process, and continued opposition by local organizations, Sam Snyder, campaign manager for the Wild Salmon Center, says the mega-mine isn’t just hanging on, it’s gaining momentum.…
The film opens with a ten-second zoom toward campfire flames that dance and swirl in the darkness. The viewer’s eyes are drawn to the underbelly of the largest log, crosshatched and ashen from the heat. Jump-cut to a small stream, lit by autumn light, shorelines framed by a blaze of fallen leaves. An angler appears,…
Transformations are occurring this time of year. Spartina grass browns and wracks, while the creeks in the marsh fill with shrimp and other nutrients. Redfish take this as a cue, schooling up and feasting hard before winter. As the water begins to clear, my friend Rich Walker and I watch the tides carefully, waiting for…
The last week in September can be one of the finest of the year for flyfishers, but lodge owner Jerry Shults and his daughter Amy Herrig did not look to be enjoying it in 2018, as they spent the week in the Federal courthouse in Dallas facing 17 counts of drug trafficking, conspiracy, and money…
For artist Cody Richardson there’s no more enticing silhouette than the one belonging to a certain fish that he hasn’t yet caught. “To me it’s like the elk hunting of flyfishing,” he says of permit, as he pours us a couple of beers in his Windsor, Colorado workshop. “They’re so smart and you have to…
In late October of 2013, Tom Bie, editor of The Drake, sent me an email: “CLYDE IS PARKED on 2nd floor, row E, space 14, in the garage for American Airlines, right next to an emergency phone. He is gassed and ready to go, but keep in mind he is 40 years old, with almost…
When I opened the car door, a mangy border collie barked and charged at us. Mike Murtha yelled, and the dog backed off. Mike was in his 80s and wore a dusty-brimmed Stetson and tattered Wranglers. He smoked Camels, and his hands resembled the harsh, cracked earth of the surrounding desert. Tin cans filled with…
I’m not sure I want the Miskitos back in camp. Rules are different here. Maybe there are no rules. They want gas this time. They also want weed: “Fuma?” We give it to them. They smoke it in front of our camp. We’ve given them sliced pineapple, five-gallon jugs of water, rice and beans. They…
LAST SUMMER, SITTING QUIETLY on a stump smoking a fine-smelling cigar, no doubt rolled on the thighs of an elderly Cuban woman, I heard one of the greatest lines ever muttered by a fellow brother of the flyfishing fraternity. In many ways it encapsulated subconscious thoughts I would like to think I am capable of,…
The best thing about a nightmare is the split-second you wake up and realize it was only a dream. Author Kirk W. Johnson skipped that moment, when, on December 29, 2005, he sleepwalked out of his second-floor hotel window in what he describes in the prologue of his new book, The Feather Thief, as a…