Grip & grins, screaming reels, and airborne salmonids are the bread, butter, and bacon of flyfishing media. It sure gets the heart thumping to see that tarpon thrash its head side-to-side in midair. The film tours capitalize on this adrenal desire and know how to deliver. But there are times you don’t want your heart to race. Occasionally, you just want to sit back and relax with some wholesome videos of fish being fish.
In “High Country Gems,” the folks at Scumliner Media teamed up with Fish Eye Guy to deliver that dose of serenity. The filmmakers chose to leave the rods at home as they followed a migration of spawning cutthroat trout. “My work revolves around the environment and I document all these fish as they are, not as they are being caught. These days I find myself observing more and casting less,” says Fish Eye Guy Pat Clayton.
Maybe someday passive filmmaking will enter mainstream flyfishing media. Until then, this video will always be here for you whenever you need to calm down.
High Country Gems from scumliner media on Vimeo.
Tom Bie is the founder, editor, and publisher of The Drake. He started the magazine in 1998 as an annual newsprint publication based in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He then moved it to Steamboat, Colorado (1999), Boulder, Colorado (2001), and San Clemente, California (2004), as he took jobs as managing editor at Paddler, Senior Editor at Skiing, and Editor-in-Chief at Powder, respectively. Tom and The Drake are now both based in Denver, Colorado, where The Drake is finally all grows up(Swingers, 1996) to a quarterly magazine.