Caption: Lynn Finley alongside the Encampment By Chris Wood I met Lynn Finley last week when Beth and Bruce White hosted a fundraiser for Trout Unlimited’s North Platte restoration work. Lynn is a small, fire-cracker of a woman who runs a lodge in Riverside, Wyo. We were sitting in her kitchen overlooking the Encampment River,…
By Toner Mitchell The four-day gathering was a professional development course for secondary school teachers, its mission to explore the nexus of fly fishing, religion and philosophy, and how the re sulting ferment might motivate resource conservation in anglers (and students). We discussed several texts, some Thoreau, a PhD thesis arguing that fly fishing naturally…
Getting bent on the lower Yuba River. The Yuba River is one of California’s many coldwater fishery jewels. In its upper forks the Yuba is a fine freestone trout stream; in the reach between Englebright Dam, where the river flows into the Central Valley, and its confluence with the Feather River near Marysville, the Yuba…
By Chris Wood Take an undersized culvert and add eight inches of rain in a few hours and you have the makings of a major problem for the creek and the adjacent road into “the holler”—the name of our place in West Virginia. A neighbor called me. “Chris, your road. It’s just gone.” The irony…
Dunoir – from the French “du noir,” literally “of black.” The footprints of the French trappers faded long ago from the upper Wind River country in Wyoming. But the place names live on in the black timbered ridges of the Great Divide. You cross the Wind River above Dubois at the mouth of the Dunoir.…
By Mark Taylor The river was brown. Coffee-with-heavy-cream brown. It’s-been-raining-for-days brown. You-don’t-have-a-chance-in-hell brown. “Top off the raft and get the stuff down to the shore while I go drop off the truck,” I told my fishing partner for the day, Brett Prettyman. “I’ll probably be back before you’re done.” So, if conditions were more appropriate…
A native Yellowstone cutthroat trout. A backcountry treasure. Photo by Chris Hunt. By Chris Hunt Who knows how many times I’d driven over the little creek as it flows southeast through an arched culvert toward its eventual confluence with the mighty Yellowstone River. A hundred? At least a hundred. And every time, I made a…
