Trout Magazine

  • Voices from the river

    Calm advice

    Monday At 3 p.m., my iPad dings with a message from the Calm app. “Your inner peace is a gift that keeps on giving,” says the app. It's tailor made for this audience of one, downloaded in the early days of the pandemic, back when we were all trying to figure out how to be a…

  • Voices from the river

    From the vault: Canjilon

    Editor's note: This piece was first published in August 2020. Periodically, we'll republish content we liked a lot when it first hit the internet. The village of Canjilon sits within a donut of low hills to the west and south, and a gradually rising wall to the north and east. Its establishment in the 1870s seems late by New Mexico standards, but that tracks with…

  • Conservation Barriers From the field

    Barriers limit cutthroat trout migration

    We are broadly familiar with the plight of the salmon, hatching in freshwater, moving downstream as smolts and, entering the ocean. Their magnificent return to the rivers during spawning migrations, hundreds of miles up the Columbia and Salmon rivers, illustrates fish movements at a grand scale. Few people know the same phenomenon occurs with inland native trout such as the cutthroat

    Few people know rivers more intimately than anglers. Every bend, pool and overhanging trees of our favorite river stretches are stored in the recesses of our brains. Particularly those where big fish are known to hide.  From year to year, the pools we fish are usually static and don’t change dramatically. We walk up to our favorite stream and, by all appearances, the water looks…

  • Voices from the river Featured

    Is this Heaven?

    A view up a canyon in eastern Idaho.

    No, Morgan ... it's Idaho I had just finished leveling the camper when Morgan pulled up in his white sedan. It’s a process—leveling the camper—made a bit more complicated thanks to a slightly hyper mutt running around while I work the jacks, wondering why we can’t just go straight to the creek.  “Who cares if…

  • Fishing Featured Trout Tips

    The ethics of the dropper

    By Chris Hunt The ethics of fly fishing can get pretty sticky, or at least I’m gleaning that from social media, where some folks aren’t afraid to scold fellow anglers for teetering on the edge of angling impropriety, whether that impropriety is real or perceived. For instance, when did using a “dropper” become taboo?  Last…