An always-appreciated view. Photo by Jeremie Hollman

Salmonfly Questions

Conservation, Daily Drake, Drake Magazine Back Issue Content 2022, Flies, Hatches and Bugs, Homepage Content, Trout, U.S. places1 Comment

Living in Eastern Idaho allows me to fish some of the finest trout water in the country, from the South Fork of the Snake to the Madison in Montana. But lately, nostalgia has drawn me south, to northern Utah’s Logan and Blacksmith Fork rivers, both of which flow through the fifty-mile-long Cache Valley where I grew up. Each of these rivers had healthy salmonfly hatches when my grandpa was a kid, but now only the Blacksmith Fork does, and few people seem to know why.

Photo by Brian Grossenbacher.

Full Boat

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I knew Patrick had a wedding the night before, but I didn’t know he’d be coming straight from it. His wine-stained dress-shirt hung untucked over his pants. He had no bag; he walked up my driveway from our mom’s car just after 5 a.m. with a five weight in one hand, a pair of cowboy boots in the other, and a hip pack and a pair of jeans slung like saddlebags over each shoulder.

The author holds his hard-earned musky. “Great works are performed not by strength, but by perseverance.” –Samuel Johnson. Photo by Brett Meany

Musky Flies

Drake Magazine Back Issue Content 2022, Flies, Freshwater Fly Fishing, Homepage Content, Musky, U.S. places1 Comment

Hours into the float already, we’d chucked green and yellow, chartreuse and pink, and black and purple—some with big reflective eyes and others with barred feathers that enticingly slip and slide behind the body of the fly. Nothing was working. Brett, my musky copilot, and I weren’t moving fish like I thought we would, considering the cold mornings that fall had been delivering.

Some GOAT flies for sure. Photo by Alex Cerveniak

Hex-Mania

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If Hexagenia limbata isn’t the GOAT of all bugs, it’s at least squarely in the conversation, beginning with its sheer size and density. “Nothing in flyfishing even comes close to the spinner fall,” says the legendary Kelly Galloup in Chris Santella’s book, The Hatch is On! “I don’t care how big a salmonfly or Mother’s Day caddis or Hendrickson hatch you’ve seen, it doesn’t compare in pure biomass.”

Appreciating Clyde

Clyde Appreciation. Photo by Chad Hoffman

Clyde Pride

Conservation, Daily Drake, Drake Magazine Back Issue Content 2022, Fly Fishing Industry, Humor, Lodges, Outfitters, and Guides, Ride With Clyde, U.S. placesLeave a comment

Clyde had been sitting in a barn outside of Gadsden, in West Etowah County, Alabama, for nearly six months, with a flat front tire and a massive gash in his gas tank. He wanted to rumble his Detroit muscles, but hadn’t done so for some time under my watch. I never developed any mechanical skills, but my friend Adam has worked on cars since his youth, tinkering with his grandfather in their garage in Decatur. He put on a new gas tank in a little more than an hour, performing what seemed to me a mannish miracle. Clyde was purring again, and my passion for flyfishing culture would be realized at the Fly Fishing Film Festival at Cahaba Brewing in Birmingham the following weekend.

Stream Access

Photo by Corey Kruitbosch

Public Mistrust Doctrine

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“The topic of stream access illustrates one of the most perplexing types of legal conflicts that can arise… Indeed, it is difficult to find a legal issue that is more tangled and uncertain.” —A Wildlife Primer (2009), by Eric Freyfogle and Dale Goble

Colorado’s river laws might be in trouble. Roger Hill, the octogenarian trying to fulfill his dream of legally wade-fishing the Arkansas River, was at the Colorado Court of Appeals on January 27 and got good news about his case—Hill v Warsewa. 

Biggie Smalls Featured Pic

Photo by Kendrick Chittock

Biggie Smalls

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There was no doubt it was a steelhead. Until it wasn’t. The grab had been so jolting, the head shakes so violent, that no consideration was given to the fish being anything but a steelhead. Yet there at my feet, in six inches of water, lay a brown smallmouth of grotesque proportions. Pulsing and flexing, flaunting its outsized strength.

Laurel Hell Featured Pic

Finding solitude in Appalachia

Fishing a Laurel Hell

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In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself within a dark woods where the straight way was lost. —Dante Alighieri, The Inferno

In Appalachia, there’s no straight way to travel. Laurel hell grows thick, and the only way to navigate it is to put your feet in a streambed and follow every meander and oxbow of the creek.

Photo by Kurt Budliger

Kings

Daily Drake, Drake Magazine Back Issue Content 2021, Homepage Content, Salmon/Steelhead, U.S. places2 Comments

Let this be a warning to you and to me and to all the other salmon killers out there; to the moochers and trollers and dam builders; the seiners and gillnetters; sushi chefs and leach mines; treaty breakers, billy clubs, old-growth bulldozers, and an ocean of plastic; to fillet knives, fish farms, and this ever-warming world, let this be a warning: These fish will outlast you.

Jacklin's Fly Shop in West Yellowstone

Jacklin's Fly Shop in March 2021. Photo by Beau Davis

Jacklin’s Fly Shop-Since 1974

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“Look at that baby!” Bob Jacklin exclaims as the foamy waters of Montana’s Madison River churn steadily around him. Elegantly draped out of the net he’s holding is the tail of a now-famous 30-inch brown trout—a fish that Jacklin had caught before. “You talk about a fish—that is a big boy!”

Drake Magazine 2020 Winter

JUST OUT CATCHING LAS VEGAS LUNKERS.

Flyfishing Sin City

Daily Drake, Drake Magazine Back Issue Content Winter 2020, Freshwater Fly Fishing, Homepage Content, Humor, Lifestyle, U.S. places1 Comment

I thought I was still buzzed from the night before when I first saw what appeared to be a person lounging in a yellow pool-floatie on the water. “Only in Vegas,” I thought. Some drunk idiot ends up using Lake Bellagio as his personal swimming pool. But looking closer, I could see that the person was a man moving his arm back and forth a few times before bringing it to rest. “Is he casting?”

Image by Hogan Brown

The Life of Ryan. California fly angler wins conventional bass tourney.

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Until January 4, I’d never even heard the term “float-n-fly.” It sounded like a kid’s ride at the fairground, or the street name for some illicit new drug. But I Googled it that day—the same day Oroville, California-based flyfishing guide Ryan Williams, and his partner, Logan McDaniel, won the Shasta Lake Wild West Bass Trail tournament.

Photo by Kurt Budliger. The deeper colors of a seasoned grayling.

Ingrid. One woman leaves an oversized impression in Alaska.

Conservation, Daily Drake, Drake Magazine Back Issue Content Winter 2020, Freshwater Fly Fishing, Homepage Content, Trout, U.S. places3 Comments

I think that Ingrid would want you to know—as she stands in her waders, stands by her weir, looking down at a dark mass of grayling that were trapped in the night—that there was a time when no one would’ve thought fish would ever need to be counted. But she’d also want you to know that these don’t have to be the last wild days. She would want you to know that not everything has been lost, and that there is still the hope of unknown waters.

Archie Creek Fire along the Umpqua Hwy (OR 138) Photo taken Sept. 12, 2020. INCIWEB/NWCG (National Wildfire Coordinating Group)

Archie Creek Fire along the Umpqua Hwy (OR 138) Photo taken Sept. 12, 2020. INCIWEB/NWCG (National Wildfire Coordinating Group)

Get Well Soon. Sympathy card for the North Umpqua.

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Before first light hit any of the famed pools along Oregon’s North Umpqua on the morning of September 8th, the Archie Creek fire had already begun.

Photos: Hansi Johnson

Photos: Hansi Johnson

Mississippi Learnin’. Smallies and pike on the mighty Mississippi.

Daily Drake, Drake Magazine Back Issue Content 2020, Drake Magazine Back Issue Content Fall 2020, Homepage Content, Lifestyle, U.S. places4 Comments

Minnesota’s Mississippi shoreline bounds the “Southeast Blufflands” region, or what anglers know as the Minnesota Driftless. All five of us fish it: A magical world of pastoral valleys, each drained by a spring creek, mostly brimming with wild fish. 

Redfish friendly habitat in Northeast Florida. Photo: Alex Coleman

Redfish friendly habitat in Northeast Florida. Photo: Alex Coleman

North Florida Floodtides. Charleston isn’t the only tailing zone.

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If you’re unfamiliar with flood-tide fishing, imagine your grassy front yard that your kid was supposed to cut three weeks ago but hasn’t. In the West this might attract crickets or hoppers, but in the coastal Southeast, when the right moons and weather combine, the grass floods, attracting snails. The snails attract fiddler crabs, the crabs attract redfish, and the redfish attract us.

Bear Attack in Montana

Photo: Bryan Gregson

Ambushed. Another Bear Attack in Montana

Daily Drake, Drake Magazine Back Issue Content 2020, Drake Magazine Back Issue Content Summer 2020, Fly Fishing News, Lifestyle, Trout, U.S. places2 Comments

When Matthew Churchman woke up on a recent Sunday morning, at first the only thing growling was his stomach. Coffee and a cold breakfast took care of that. Camp, nestled in a 300-yard-long, cottonwood-and-willow stretch of river bottom, was in the process of being broken down. Skies…

Tarpon on the hunt during Palolo worm hatch.

PHOTO BY AUSTIN COIT

Once Upon a Tide

Drake Magazine Back Issue Content Spring 2019, Hatches and Bugs, The Put In, U.S. places4 Comments

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…

Patagonia's Riverside Warehouse

Photo: Julie Brown

Patagonia’s Riverside Warehouse

Conservation, Drake Magazine Back Issue Content Winter 2018, The Put In, U.S. placesLeave a comment

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…

Clyde and the Shark Louisiana Redfish Ahead

Clyde and the Shark

Destination travel, Drake Magazine Back Issue Content Winter 2018, Ride With Clyde, The Put In, U.S. places1 Comment

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 Fix – Streamer Fishing In Winter

Drake Magazine Back Issue Content Winter 2018, Freshwater Fly Fishing, The Put In, Trout, U.S. placesLeave a comment

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…