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Sunset over Hungry Trout Resort and the Adirondacks

Hungry Trout, Tasty Flies

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Evan Bottcher grew up in the Hungry Trout Fly Shop located in the heart of the Adirondacks. The Shop is deep in upstate New York about 90 minutes south of Montreal, Canada. “I would get off the school bus at my dad’s fly shop and hang out until my mom got home,” Evan says. “In those days, it felt like it was full of old timers. It was all anglers older than 50.” Evan, who took over the shop from his father in 2011, explains that in the last decade the younger guides and patrons have given the shop a new, cooler spirit. “The industry has evolved. It is more affordable for people to get into the sport now with less expensive packages, new techniques, and new flies,” explains Evan. “But there is so much knowledge from the old timers that will be lost if it isn’t written down.”

Something that looks sort of like a mayfly. PC: A.J. Swentosky

Summer Doldrums

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A sharp sun is pinned overhead, drilling into the back of my neck like a hot desk lamp. I’m alone in a rowboat on a lake, a shallow depression with the sort of soft marl bottom that squelches unpleasantly between the toes. Its shape is the result of glacial waves that once buried northern Michigan in six thousand feet of hard, gray ice. In late June, with a ring of leafy oaks surrounding the lake and the air hanging wet and heavy, the fact that there was even snow here three months ago seems unlikely, and a mile of ice, impossible. When it’s hot here it seems like it’s always been hot, and always will be.

Idaho's world-class smallmouth water. PC: Visit Idaho

Dworshak Dreams

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A float tube is the wrong vessel for Dworshak Reservoir. The lake is more than fifty miles long, nearly twenty thousand acres, in some of the wildest country in Idaho. A friend who hunts elk in the surrounding forest, usually from a boat-in only campsite, refers to the lake as “Big D.”
I knew all of this before I showed up there in early May to search for smallmouth. Yet there I was, shouldering a float tube to a beach a few hundred yards from the launch, trying to avoid hearing the jet-boat crowd laughing when I strapped fins on.

Hilary Hutcheson and Ebon Robinson in Columbia Falls, Montana's Lary's Fly & Supply

Lary’s Fly & Supply

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“Are you Lary?” is a question Ebon Robinson, shop manager, gets asked often. He is not, but you can’t blame folks for asking the question. He is standing behind the counter of Lary’s Fly and Supply in Columbia Falls, Montana. And he is a dude. 

Carpapolooza

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This summer, the Bighorn River Alliance is celebrating the thirty sixth year of its Carp Tourney, the oldest of its kind in the country. But the title for longest running non-competitive carp flyfishing event may belong to Nebraska’s Cornhuskers Fly Fishers and their annual CarpFest. Since the club’s founding in the 1970s, anglers have gotten together on what always turned out to be the summer’s hottest day to throw flies at carp and dip battered bottom feeders into a vat of boiling oil. In Omaha, carp are regarded as a delicacy and are regularly available at Friday night fish fries. But as former club president Larry Dostal remembers it, “The carp fishing was usually an afterthought.” So much so that when Dostal got involved in the 2010s, no one could remember anyone having actually caught a carp at CarpFest.

Scanning Sudan's legendary flats for triggerfish, permit, bones, barracuda, GTs and whatever else decides to show up.

The DrakeCast #65: A Flyfishing Trip Derailed by War

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Alex Gonsiewski is a flyfishing guide in Oregon, where he targets trout and summer steelhead on the Deschutes River, summer steelhead on the John Day, and winter steelhead on the North Oregon coast. Between rainbow runs, Alex hosts angling trips around the world. He’s taken clients to Mexico, Belize, Bolivia, Alaska, Christmas Island, and Puerto Rico.

In 2023, Alex and a group of clients flew to Sudan for nine days of fishing on the Red Sea’s Nubian Flats. Unfortunately, while Alex and company were on the water, the country fell into a vicious civil war that has since claimed the lives of 150,000 people and displaced more than thirteen million.

Deschutes Angler Fly Shop

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Amy and John Hazel, owners of Deschutes Angler Fly Shop in Maupin, Oregon, are committed to consistency. “I’ve never had anybody fish a single-handed rod, and we’ve never had anyone nymph fish for steelhead,” says Amy. “It’s always been swinging, it’s always been a floating line, and it’s always been small surface-flies that are no deeper than a couple inches.” For more than twenty-five years the couple has guided the Deschutes the way they wanted to, mainly because they feel it’s the most effective way to target the river’s summer-run steelhead. 

Worth Protecting. Photo By: Steve Bly

Monumental Decision

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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!”

Worth Protecting

The Big “Beautiful” Bill threatens a massive three-million-acre sell-off of public lands

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With every victory comes new challenges to public lands. After concerted pressure from conservation groups, the House of Representatives dropped any public land sales from President Trump’s budget reconciliation bill. But the Senate is trying to sneak it back in… in a big way. 

Illustration by Paul Puckett

Ode to a Dabbler

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When it came to hobbies, my dad was an accomplished dabbler. He’d go all in on a hobby, whatever it was, yet inevitably he’d lose interest in it. The shelf life varied for any one of Dad’s many recreational pursuits, but it was usually a matter of months rather than years. Take running, for example. Dad got the running bug following the 1977 publication of Jim Fixx’s The Complete Book of Running. I can still picture its monochromatic jacket cover with a runner in stride wearing red running shorts, matching red running shoes, against a red background. Dad read the book and then went about buying all the necessary gear: Brooks running shoes, colorful running shorts with vented slits nearly to the waistband, close-fitting nylon tank tops, terry cloth wristbands, and a usually red bandana. That was his kit. And like so many of my dad’s avocations, there was usually one idiosyncratic item associated with the new hobby that especially stood out. Here it was Gator Gum (lemon-lime flavor), which Dad chewed before a run and claimed that it staved off dehydration. As for the actual running, Dad did put in some miles. “Got in a 10-miler this morning,” he’d say. “Got my second wind around mile six,” he’d add, or “Felt great today.” Then, several months would go by and he simply didn’t run anymore.

Beats a Flying J

I-80 Interlude

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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.

There must be some five-inchers in here. Photo by Hansi Johnson

Moby Dicking Around

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AHAB WAS AN AMATEUR. If you want real obsession, you need to cast farther. You need to climb down root-ladders and weave through briar bushes to the river just as spring melt is ebbing, then low-crawl under massive logs and scamper over wet river- stones more slippery than a candidate’s promise.

Dawn on Lake El Salto By Dan Soltau

Sinaloa Largemouth

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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.

This is your brain on musky. Photo by Lee Church

First Step

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LIKE MANY FIRST-TIME ATTENDEES, he sat in the back for several nights, drinking coffee and working up the nerve. I noticed him, but I’ve seen plenty of his type come and go. Some have hit rock bottom and are ready to deal with their problem. Others know the truth but aren’t ready to accept their dependency until it destroys everything they once held dear. When you’ve been to as many meetings as I have, you learn not to get attached to the dabblers.

Photo by Todd Towle

Untanglers Anonymous

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ONE THING BEGINNING fly anglers should be taught is the importance of knowing when to quit. In certain sports, sheer will and dogged determination are critical to success, but this can backfire in the case of tangled leaders. Every seasoned guide has witnessed this: The caster has missed a hookset or thrown a tailing loop into themselves or committed some other cardinal sin resulting in an infamous bird nest. Their rod is draped with a wet girdle bug, some split shot, a size-18 pheasant tail, and a strike indicator, all webbed together with dripping coils of crisscrossed fluorocarbon. Without fail, the new angler will ignore the line nippers hanging from his neck and instead set about trying to untangle the jumbled snarl while avoiding having to snip or re-tie any part of the system.

Jim Lichatowich: Don’t Lose Faith in Nature

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Jim Lichatowich is as happy as anyone that the Elwha dams on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula came down. But a recent attempt to witness the biological recovery
there reminds him that there are equally stubborn obstacles to steelhead and salmon recovery that unfortunately can’t be removed with dynamite or heavy equipment. “A
former colleague of mine organized a trip to Elwha after the dams were out,” Lichatowich says. “He called me and said, ‘the trip is still on but you’re not on it. The guy
from National Marine Fisheries Service that was gonna show us around mentioned your name to his supervisor and was told you couldn’t come.’ So I was uninvited. But that was the week that Republicans shut the government down, so no one got to go anyway.”

NOSTALGIC NIGHTCRAWLERS

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It rained nearly all day—not heavy but steady—and stopped just after dinner. Perfect! I knew from his manner, Dad was itching to hop in the old pickup later that evening and motor to our local, unassuming public golf course. With a bucket in one hand, a flashlight in the other, he took me to one of his favorite spots—about 100 yards down the second fairway. His other choice spot was just this side of a fairway bunker on the eleventh hole.

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

Colorado’s Access Issue

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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).