Marijuana cultivation’s impacts on our rivers Chris and James stand on the lawn behind Indian Creek Resort, stomping their feet against the cold while passing a joint back and forth. Recreational pot has been legal in California since January 2019, so the two aren’t breaking any laws. Tomorrow the three of us will be rafting…
Coming to terms with a new reality This past December, I received an unwelcome holiday surprise. Our corporate overlords rounded up the staff at the magazine where I’ve worked since its inception, twenty-three and a half years prior, to announce our new direction. The upshot: We could still pursue exciting careers in magazine journalism, a…
Past the Far East Restaurant, and Big Daddy’s Buff n’ Wax, we turn left at the Mexico Congregational Church and find the boat launch empty. This is normal in the mill town of fewer than 3,000 residents, but surprises me on a spring morning: the Androscoggin is at its most fishable (around 4,500 cfs); it’s…
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…
I’ve made a lot of trips between northern Minnesota and northern Michigan. Usually I’m fishing my way across, hunting hex-eating browns and flats-cruising smallies in July, and backwoods muskies in November. By far the fishiest route is U.S. 2 through the Upper Peninsula and across the Mackinac Bridge down into the top of the mitten;…
Is this what mortality feels like? They’re in the deep pools, the ones that are filling now with yellow alder leaves. They come up easily to a humpy or an elk-hair caddis, bright browns and brook trout flashing the colors of autumn. At least that’s what I suppose. I don’t know for sure, actually.
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…
One night during my sophomore year of college, a drunk Swedish exchange student sunk into my couch and began telling tales of the old country. Midsommar’s Eve is a special event in June, Henrick said, when all able-bodied citizens eat and drink till they can’t. He reminisced about his first Midsommar’s kiss, first Midsommar’s beer,…
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,…
A few years ago, I was sitting on the porch of a house I no longer live in, venting to a friend about “too much work, not enough fishing.” I told him I wanted to fish again, and said I knew just the guy to get me back on the water. The porch had great…
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…
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…
ATLANTA, YOU NEED TO UNDERSTAND, is not a particularly good fishing town. We have a striped bass run, as well as some nearby mountain fisheries for brook trout, but on the whole, it’s tough being a flyfisher in the Dirty South. When I moved to the city a decade ago, I took a stab at…
I passed the Rock Bottom Brewery on the final mile of my evening bike loop, where more than once I’d stopped for a thick porter to celebrate not being killed riding the second busiest road in Houston. Restaurants come and go quickly around here, but this place had a twist: A lily pad-filled concrete moat…
Photos by Lucas Young THE LIGHT FADED and the air went still, perfectly matching the low, slack tide of the bay. Several minutes later, leaping coho, some far away, others eerily close, broke the calm. I watched my line slice through the water as I stripped, then suddenly a small wake formed where I imagined…
One of the only upsides to having a drought year out West is that we can backpack up to the high country a few weeks earlier than normal. And since it’s hard work getting up there, don’t shortchange your trip by bringing that broomstick of a six-weight or that noodley old fiberglass rod because “it…
Bamboo fly rods are a little like herpes. Both are achieved out of lust which, in the light of day, provokes a certain retrospective guilt. Both, once acquired, invoke the sort of awe that elicits careful handling, and—be it split-cane rod or irritated genitalia—the newfound host might find himself wondering “Damn… should I even touch…
Back in 1980, Lake Placid played host to a little event called the Winter Olympics. A bunch of figure skaters and tobogganers showed up, as well as some dudes with hockey sticks and missing teeth. Naturally, no one paid too much attention to the figure skaters. (Tonya Harding was barely even born yet. And Will…
“This,” Guy Lobjoit says, with a sweep of the hand toward a tangle of reeds and dark water, “is where I was killed by a hippo last year.” The time was hard dusk, about the same as now, and the trio had just pushed through the papyrus thicket blanketing the narrow isthmus between a delicious…
What to do when a fish morphs from gills and guts into something larger – a memory that splashes across three generations of anglers, alternating between dream and reality? Born to my grandfather, this fish swam through my father Charles and landed with me. Even before I hooked her one cool April morning on Georgia’s…
“A brook trout wouldn’t last five minutes in this water,” I say to Haroldo as he leans over the gunwale and washes the slime off his knife. “Never mind the water temperature he’d be dead before he ever felt the heat.” Haroldo looked up, smiled, and nodded like he understood. “You believe in natural selection?”…
I grew up in Detroit, a city whose belching smokestacks and clamoring auto plants preach a relentless contempt for mass transportation. Yet when I moved to Washington, D.C., I fell in love with trains—the grand stations and comforting rhythms of the ride hooked me. I eventually ditched my car completely, relying solely on bike, cab…