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Take care of your feet
Footwear matters on the river, especially when you’re putting in big miles and days in and out of the boat. If you can keep your feet happy, the rest will follow
A couple of weeks ago I showed up to a friend’s house after a day on the water. My choice in footwear became the focus of conversation. One would assume I was going for a mid-day stroll in my Crocs and socks. “What in the world are you wearing?” “Do those work?” They were talking…
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Books: The Orvis Guide to the Essential American Flies
Originally printed in 2011, and including a foreword by the late Lefty Kreh, this book drills down on 20 patterns
I was delighted to receive an advance paperback copy of The Orvis Guide to the Essential American Flies by Tom Rosenbauer, because it just snowed for the first time this fall and as such, I’m about to enter what I call “tying season.” And when I tie, I like to focus on the basics, spinning…
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Red Rock Lakes shows off its fish and wildlife conservation values
Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be easier if all public lands were just lumped together. I mean, who can keep straight national forests, wildlife refuges, national parks, national preserves, national monuments, national lakeshores, BLM lands—it can all be a bit much to keep track of! But then you experience a place like Red Rock…
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Fooling Dollies with dancing streamers
All trout and char, to some extent, are predators — even the little fish that swim in small water and eat virtually nothing but insects. But there are true predators in the salmonid world, and these are the fish that make fly fishers tremble. They're big browns that feed on smaller fish and, during the…
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Fishing the pegged bead
It's the pegged bead — the target of much derision from the purist crowd, but an oft-used technique to catch big trout and char when salmon eggs are in the water
A nice Dolly Varden that fell for a pegged bead. Chris Hunt photo. The ethics and the logic examined Fly fishing is a craft that appeals to the purist in all of us — the notion that fooling a fish by casting something that resembles that animal's natural food source without resorting to bait is…
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Starting over before an Alaska fishing trip
What to do when your fly box looks like the dog coughed up a flamingo
A rebuilt fly box for a trip to Alaska. When the old fly box just won't cut it anymore When I booked a place to stay in Southeast Alaska for this coming week, I still had eastern Idaho carp on the brain. Like a lot of anglers, I have a running "fishing calendar" — a…
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Starting over before an Alaska fishing trip
Rather than an orderly collection of streamers, Gurglers and Egg-sucking Leaches, it looked, as I explained to my friends on a group chat as we planned out the week ahead, like the dog had coughed up a flamingo
A rebuilt fly box for a trip to Alaska. When the old fly box just won't cut it anymore When I booked a place to stay in Southeast Alaska for this coming week, I still had eastern Idaho carp on the brain. Like a lot of anglers, I have a running "fishing calendar" — a…
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