2015 Winter Issue1 × $15.00Subtotal: $15.00
Trout
If My cats were talking cats they would ask me the same question my father does: why don’t you keep the fish you catch. Why are you so spineless, so un-hungry, so thoughtless as to our longsuffering? I’ve released countless fish, many which could have turned a day into legend for my dad. We didn’t…
With the Winter 2017 issue of The Drake Magazine on its way to fly shops and mailboxes around the world, we figured we’d chat with Tom Bie about his favorite parts of the upcoming mag. We also hear from authors Dave Karczynski and Michael Graybrook about their recently published books, Smallmouth: Modern Fly Fishing Methods, Tactics…
A week from now the creek at our boots will be too thin to float. Fueled by the dregs of a heavy winter snowpack atop Wyoming’s Bighorn Range, its window is on the verge of being shuttered. “Hard to say how it’ll fish,” Clark Smyth says from under the brim of an oversized straw hat.…
Her hand, inches from my nose, is filled with a half dozen hooks in varying states of undress and oxidation. Reaching out, I choose a moderately rusty hook with a small clump of fur dangling from a bit of unraveling thread. “Just think of it like summer camp craft hour,” she says, holding up a…
Dan caught the only inconnu. Let’s get that out of the way. “Dan” is Dan Armstrong, a well-traveled, Bozeman-based photographer who occasionally gets invited on spectacular fishing trips with the tacit understanding that his job is to record the heroics of the writer and keep his hands off the rod. But it was our last…
After graduating from college, I accepted a position as an actuarial analyst—a very digital, very stationary job. My parents appreciated this move, as it meant financial independence, and also that I wouldn’t be joining some friends on what eventually became an eight-month motorcycle tour of America. I was mostly certain I didn’t want to become…
CHASING HATCHES IS STUPID and obnoxious. I know. I’ve tried. Pursuing particular insects insures that the potential for disappointment will dwarf the likelihood of success. If us fishing media folk are to be believed (also a bad idea), fishing is an appreciation of the moment, being present, or some other Baba Ram Das shit. Planning…
Mid-June after a May-long drought and, weeks before we thought they would, the rivers had begun to “take shape,” an idiom I’ve always loved for its suggestions of primal formation and rebirth. What was just days prior a brown blob squirming primordially down from Rogers’ Pass is suddenly the jade-green Blackfoot, its boulders and riffly…
Though separated by several hundred miles, the Ozark Mountains and Appalachia share a certain colloquial charm. Small wooden cabins with prison bars in the windows advertise cheap guns, rundown gas stations converted into liquor stores promise a sale on Sundays, and friendly folks serve barbecue on styrofoam plates. Additionally, each mountain chain sports an under-appreciated…
WHEN IT’S TOO HOT TO FISH, Yakima River guide Nate Rowley snorkels his favorite trout water. He’s been snorkeling a lot lately. On a scorching August afternoon at a coffee shop in downtown Cle Elum, Washington, he reports his findings from a stretch of the Teanaway River, one of the Yakima’s more significant tributaries, protected…
If you’re looking for a 20+ pound cutthroat, you’re either high or you’re fishing Pyramid Lake. Maybe both. In the center of northern Nevada’s elevated-desert lie the remnants of Lake Lahontan, once covering more than 8,000 square miles. Today, the largest body of water left is Pyramid, home to legends of spell-casting mermaids, human-snatching babies…
Lund’s opened its doors to the people of River Falls, Wisconsin in 1873. A. W. Lund Co. sold wooden carriages. As the town grew, the Lund family’s operation grew. In 1881, they opened a general store on Main Street that focused on hardware. The Kinnickinnic River ran behind the store and sometime in the 1970s,…
FOR MANY YEARS after I met Jeff Cottrell, I would have said that SoCal’s Bear Creek was the best small stream I’ve ever fished. A secretive tributary of the San Gabriel River not far from the troubled sprawl of the L.A. basin, it was the kind of place only fishing kids knew about.…
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…
In 2015, the Park Service opened all of what were once known as “red line” brookie streams in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. In doing so, it endorsed both anglers and trout. It is now the official policy of the United States to let these Appalachian natives be their own brookie selves. Contributor Zach Matthews…
DEEP INSIDE MOST TROUT anglers lies an understanding that the existence of clean water and healthy public habitat are what get us out of bed in the morning, especially on weekends. Many have sacrificed lucrative careers, either by stalling out in the middle when the job-responsibility-to-annual-vacation-day ratio became optimal for fishing, or by running away…
NO ONE IS SURE where the brook trout found in Soda Butte Creek came from. Maybe a flood washed them over from a neighboring drainage. Maybe somebody in Cooke City had a bucket and a brookie fetish. Then again, the source doesn’t exactly matter. The fish are interlopers in one of Yellowstone National Park’s most…
The flashing freeway sign reminded us that high winds had closed I-25 to light and/or high-profile vehicles. This wasn’t a problem for Clyde. Ford built him in 1974 weighing just under 5,000 pounds. Its big-block 460 engine alone weighs more than 700. We weren’t getting blown anywhere. Instead, we were comfortably cruising north riding low…
THOUGH HE’S LOGGED some incognito years on the shaded two-lane roads of the Pacific Northwest, and rolled many an empty highway undercover in Montana and Wyoming, I can tell that, in the city, Clyde commands the attention he deserves. The turnpikes of Colorado’s Front Range are crowded with blue-collar sorts who appreciate Detroit craftsmanship and…
Most ski tourists don’t think of flyfishing as a legitimate resort-town option in the wintertime. And why would they, as long as the snow and skiing is good? But say you’re on day six of a weeklong ski trip and fresh snow has failed to fall. Or your legs are tired from fighting moguls for…
NO FRESHWATER FISH swimming the American West is more badass than the bull trout (Salvelinus confluentus). Like Mongolian taimen, bulls are the undisputed apex predators of their watersheds, and they know it. A mature bull swims with the élan of a gangsta in his lifted Cadillac; when he rolls by, the little fish dart for…
Five on six, from sockeye to smallmouth. HANNA PERKINS, BROWN TROUT, BIG HOLE RIVER,MT. PHOTO: AUSTIN TRAYSER KATHRYN HICKMAN, SUMMER STEELHEAD, DEAN RIVER,B.C. PHOTO: JEFF HICKMAN
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…
Wisconsin Mayfly-Induced Accidents Wisconsin, the epicenter of all things loaded in hops and lactose, is now also the place to crash your car in an apocalyptic Hex hatch. Reports of mayfly-induced accidents continue to make the rounds after the National Weather Service last week recorded a mega hatch over the Mississippi River between Wisconsin and Iowa…
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…
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…
A couple years ago, new to Washington, I made my first trip to the Yakima River—a Columbia tributary in the southcentral part of the state. I arrived after dark, with moonlight revealing glimpses of the river as I neared the campground. By the time I got there it was pushing midnight, yet most of the…