This short film by photographer Scott Nelson highlights the highs and lows of Deschutes River waters. Before the dams went in, the Deschutes flowed a fairly consistent 700 to 800 cubic feet per second (cfs) year-round, said Brett Hodgson, district biologist for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife in Bend. There would be occasional increases and decreases in flow, but “no big changes like we currently experience.” Contrast that with 2,000 cfs flows out of Wickiup dam in summer and 20 cfs in winter. The dramatic fluctuations are hard on the river and led to a fish kill in fall 2013 when hundreds of fish got cut off in a side channel near Bend.
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.