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Desperately seeking steelhead in Alaska for science
After a long float plane flight back to Juneau, a hurried meal and a handful of Ibuprofen, I turned in for the night with one last thought – Tomorrow. Tomorrow we’ll find the fish and all of this will be worth it.
By Mark Hieronymus After the first couple of hard-earned, bushwhacked miles, about the time we had fished every inch of beautiful holding water in this wild, remote river, and just after we finished post-holing our way through a couple hundred yards of thigh-deep snow, I started to second-guess myself. Months of reviewing fisheries and habitat…
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Keeping a secret, even when the secret’s out
Given its dearth of trout fisheries, the state of New Mexico can boast of very few secret hot spots. One of these, a favorite of mine forever, is prone to extreme high water temperatures during the summer but becomes decent at the end of irrigation season. Its browns and cuttbows come out to play when the leaves turn yellow, hitting…
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Say it with me … ‘Chena’
In time, rivers begin to emote their names ... or maybe it's the other way around There's something in a name. And some rivers ... well, after a fashion, their names are pushed from their currents, roared from their rapids or whispered from quiet slicks where fishy noses poke through flat water in search of…
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Finding hope in a hellish year
Amid the choking fumes of this hellish year, I found hope recently in an unlikely place. I found it walking a concrete path in a city of over 100,000 souls. Aimless I walked, and aimlessly stopped serendipitously next to a thread of a creek trickling over riprap and steppingstones, as the onset of autumn burnished…
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Aromas bring back childhood fishing memories
The James River was flowing cool and clear on a recent weekend morning when a handful of friends and I embarked on what would likely be our final smallmouth bass fishing float of the season before switching focus back to trout for the coming eight months or so. One buddy was in a kayak, two…
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Are we raising the conservation generation?
These days, I have a habit of starting my morning with too much coffee and a big fat bucket of guilt. The mornings start with Rooster mistaking the kitchen light for the sun, unhappy dogs whining in their crates, a growing pile of unfinished third-grade homework, a to-do list with a pathetic one or two…
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These hips don’t lie
Crawling around small creeks was an exercise in bad yoga, as I dragged myself to standing by grabbing branches and logs. When I finally had the hip examined, I was told what I already knew
Two summers ago, I agreed to join a backpacking trek with some friends I hadn’t seen since college. Our mission -- honoring the life of a mutual friend who’d passed away -- took us deep into the Sierra Nevada range, a 54-mile journey filled with golden trout and jaw-dropping views of ice-etched peaks and verdant hanging valleys. As…
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