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Act, then put the Tongass on your bucket list
If you want to catch a very large steelhead in a very small stream, there’s probably no better place on the planet to do so than Southeast Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. The Tongass is almost 17 million acres of mountains, fjords, massive glaciers and wild rivers and creeks. With 18,000 miles of public waters that…
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Hanging with the pros
Dave Kielar felt like he had to pinch himself. There he sat, surrounded by what amounted to fly fishing glitterati, at a dinner table at TroutHunter in Island Park, Idaho. Earlier in the week, he got to rub elbows with the venerable Craig Mathews, who for years owned and operated Blue Ribbon Flies in nearby…
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Set your fantasy fly lineup
‘Tis the season. Over the weekend, my buddy and fellow TU-er Kirk Deeter and I faced off in fantasy football. We’re both underachieving this year--it seems we both have the bad fortune to play the highest-scoring opponents in the league every week this season, so we both find ourselves in the middle of the standings,…
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Longtime conservation officer now focused on steelhead and salmon
A fly fisherman searches the water of the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho waiting for the elusive tug on the end of his line from a steelhead. Josh Duplechian/Trout Unlimited As a conservation officer with the Idaho Fish and Game Department, Eric Crawford’s work was largely reactive. “I could make a great…
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Alaska TU leaders on public lands: Be an advocate
By Karl Schultz, Josh Greiser, Pete Lyford, John Messick, Maggie Harings, Jon Heifetz, Kevin Miller and Jake Fleetwood With tourist season winding down, Alaska residents flock to public lands to enjoy the best our state has to offer. With fewer people along our riverbanks and trails, the rush to fill our freezers before the snow…
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Guiding the guide
When the weather doesn’t allow the de Havilland Beaver floatplanes to fly at the lodge, we just hop in a meticulously-maintained, fully stocked, and (perhaps most impressively) clean jet boat to fish for trophy rainbows on the world-famous Naknek River. The guides carry lunches, complete with inventive sandwiches on fresh-baked bread, hot soup and a…
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Ode to the Olive
It's a tiny little bug, but it — and its many variants — might be the single-most important fly of fall. The venerable Blue-winged Olive, the vise-borne imitation of the tiny baetis mayfly, is the dry-fly king of autumn, even though it rarely materializes on the water in any form larger than a size 20.…
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