Let’s Go Bass’nIt’s time to test the warmwaters By Beau Davis and Tom Bie Photo by Jeremiah Watt Want to avoid bumping elbows with ten million new trout-chasers this summer? Then consider a guided day on some warmwater. You’ll surely face a less-pressured fishery, and if the trip includes kicking around in a float-tube, you…
Spending more time at home lately? Fancy yourself a writer? Could you use $2,500? Then consider entering a submission for the 2020 Robert Traver Fly Fishing Award, sponsored by the John D. Voelker Foundation and the American Museum of Fly Fishing (AMFF). Here is the link to the awards page: https://www.voelkerfoundation.com/traveraward/ and below is the winning submission from 2019—”A Wet World that Burns” by Jimmy Watts (photos by Carson Artac), which first appeared in the summer 2018 issue of The Drake
The return of the Elwha’s steelhead Give a rainbow trout a direct line to the ocean and you have a potential steelhead. Throw a dam in its path and watch anadromy hit a wall. Salmonids in Washington State’s Elwha River, on the northeastern edge of the rain-soaked Olympic Peninsula, found their long-lost gateway to the…
When a net-pen enclosure holding more than 300,000 farmed Atlantic salmon, owned by Canadian company Cooke Aquaculture, broke open in August, approximately 160,000 fish escaped into Washington’s Puget Sound. Atlantics are classified by the state as an aquatic invasive species and a “pollutant.”
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…
IT’S NOT DIFFICULT to imagine the tiny community of Forks, Washington, on the Olympic Peninsula, kindling the kind of small-town restlessness that prompts its sons and daughters to move elsewhere. But Gray Struznik, born into this land of tall trees and deep puddles, was never struck by that desire to bounce. Instead, he stayed and…
STATE OF ARMS AS WOULD ANY GUY SPAWNED FROM THE gravels of Oregon, I had deep reservations about driving the backroads of my home state in a rig blasphemed by California plates. It was a red Tacoma with a watertight canopy and a rod rack permanently bolted to its hood, an otherwise brilliant fishing truck,…
Scoring a paycheck to fish incessantly seems like a savvy career move—if you can find the right mix of employer (preferably a company churning out badass gear) and locale (somewhere near steelhead, or poon flats, smallies ponds, tidal redfish… a carp ditch). Insatiable flyfisher Russell Miller began the process in Boulder, CO, in the late…
CHAD BROWN, the Navy veteran who spawned the Soul River Runs Deep brand, looks like he’s just fought the battle of his life. And it’s no surprise he’s beat. A glance at my watch shows 3 a.m. Alaska time and Brown, along with his squad of vet volunteers here to herd a posse of bedraggled…
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…
THE DONNER PARTY MEMORIAL in Truckee, Calif., stands 22 feet tall, indicating the depth of the snow during the fateful winter of 1846-47. The snowstorms began in early November, trapping the Donners and other families near a frozen lake, deep in the high Sierra Nevada, until rescuers were able to reach them in March. Of…
Seattle is a fishy place. With the Puget Sound in its backyard, the Olympic Peninsula three hours west, and sneaky creeks within striking distance due east, you’d think that in addition to espresso factories on every corner it’d be easy to source a fly shop. But that hasn’t always been the case. Until now.
CLYDE HAS A FLAT. I can see it from the boat ramp of Montana’s Bitterroot River. The front of the old Merc is sloping toward the passenger side, and while I’m happy to discover that there’s a spare in the trunk, I’m unhappy to discover that the jack is missing its handle. I’m unhappy again…
Patagonia Inc. Founder On The Offensive Patagonia Inc. founder Yvon Chouinard went on the offensive today, imploring President Obama to turn his attention toward eliminating dysfunctional dams on eastern Washington’s Snake River. In a New York Times op-ed he notes that electricity generation from the four dams along the river’s lower reaches is marginal (at…
The state fish and game departments for Washington and Oregon both face a major dilemma: how to adequately protect what remains of their wild steelhead, while also continuing to produce hatchery steelhead for the many anglers who like to bring one home for dinner.
Years before I saw either a steelhead or the Quinault River, they were twin obsessions dominating my imagination. I would eventually come to meet both, but at different times in my life, and under very different circumstances.
Almost Every Northwest Angler living within 100 miles of the Columbia River or its tributaries has a weekly, if not daily, if not hourly, ritual this time of year: checking the salmon and steelhead counts passing over eight dams on the Columbia and lower Snake rivers—Bonneville, The Dalles, John Day, McNary, Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental,…
The browns had started to rise just as Sam Bush was taking center stage. Twenty yards of dimpled St. Vrain trout water was all that separated me from Planet Bluegrass amphitheater and a full night of music in Lyons, Colorado. The urge to tube my rod prematurely and forgo my well-designed plan was tempting, but…
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…
ABOARD THE MV MATANUSKA, on a 1,000-mile journey up the rainforest coast from Washington, a cross section of modern-day Alaska’s citizenry relaxed to a gentle January swell—old salts in halibut jackets bound for port towns; rotund men goat-t’d up, ball caps blazing with logos of off-road-vehicle brands; young hippies, all dreadlocks and skirts-over-pants, moving North…
Across the continent, 2012 was a bad year to be a climate- change skeptic, but a much worse year to be a fish. Before you bid a tepid au revoir to this torrid 12 months, consider: According to 350.org founder and climate raconteur Bill McKibben, June broke 2,132 high-temperature records across the country. May was…
My flight was delayed an entire day. My bags were packed for a two-week stay in Guatemala City, where I would accompany an underground cadre of ex-gang members who were now volunteer chaplains entering Central America’s infamous gang prisons. As a jail chaplain myself, working with Chicano gangs in Washington State’s Skagit County, these young…
The trout hatchery at iDeath was built years ago when the last tiger was killed and burned on the spot. We built the trout hatchery right there. The walls went up around the ashes… The hatchery has a beautiful tile floor with the tiles put together so gracefully that it’s almost like music. It’s a…
Severed by North Dakota, the Saskatchewan plains, Alberta tar-sands, and British Columbia’s snow-covered Coast Mountains, Gaylord, Minnesota, is far removed from a proposed large-scale Alaskan mining operation and the toll it would take on anadromous fish runs. But it’s in Gaylord that Sportsman’s Alliance of Alaska Director Scott Hed had lived a quintessential Midwestern life—playing…
Members of the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe will tell you that 100-pound Chinook salmon once returned to their namesake river on the northeastern tip of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. While no one can substantiate the existence of these behemoths, one thing is certain: The construction of the Elwha and Glines Canyon dams between 1913 and 1927 cut…
Hwy 101, from Northern California to Port Angeles, Washington. No stretch of highway in the country crosses more prime steelhead water than this one. Start on California’s Klamath or Smith, then head up to Oregon’s Rogue or the great Tillamook Bay rivers like the Trask and Wilson, and then finish up on the drippy Washington…
Next time you’re driving around fishing the rivers of southwest Montana and you’re in the mood for a little adventure, try driving the High Road. This rough-and-tumble 20-mile county road connects Twin Bridges to Melrose and the Big Hole River to its confluence with the Jefferson. But before you start out, learn from the mistakes…