Beer at the ready, it’s time to start tying. By Mark Taylor My local Trout Unlimited chapter recently jumped on the trend of hosting fly-tying gatherings at bars. The inaugural gathering at Ballast Point Brewery in Daleville, Va., drew about 30 people, which is about how many people show up to the chapter’s monthly meetings.
By Chris Hunt Years ago, when I was cranking out fishing content for my old blog, I did a feature each Friday titled, “20 Questions,” which was a thinly veiled homage to the back page interivews of Vanity Fair where folks were asked off-the-wall questions via the famous Proust Questionnaire, like, “What is your greatest
When is too much water a bad thing for a river and its economy? Montana’s fabled Bighorn River is struggling these days thanks to a flawed water management strategy that is having a serious impact the wild trout fishery below Yellowtail Dam. There’s simply too much water in the river, almost all the time, and
If you’re on social media, I’m confident you have noticed that #vanlife has swept the nation. Powered by social media, modern day van life is inspired by the romantic excursions of previous generations who loaded up VW Westfalias and Transporters to chase down their favorite musical acts, post up at the river in a trout
The Steelhead Whisperer and his daughter with a jewel from the Big Sur River. By Sam Davidson On Martin Luther King Day three men and a diminutive young lady went fishing on California’s Big Sur River—a tiny but fierce watershed on the central coast with a bona fide steelhead run—and the smallest member of the
“The best thing one can do when it’s raining is to let it rain.” — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow By Dave Ammons It was going to be a wet one. In the days prior to my trip up the canyon the forecast promised showers over the weekend, although I was hoping for the intermittent variety. Nope.
Ice fishing can be fun. Right? By Mark Taylor “Ice fishing?” The text popped up the other day, a week into the unusually frigid spell that had gripped much of the continental U.S. “I don’t think so,” I replied. I’m usually up for just about any kind of fishing, especially if options are limited. And
By Dave Ammons I’m pretty sure that woven into most rivers in North America are intervals of private and public water, and the river I fish is no different. I am privileged to have access to nearly a mile of private water, a beautiful mix of long runs, boulder-strewn pocke ts, and stretches of riffles
The Steelhead Whisperer, on his home water, in his characteristic pose. By Sam Davidson Apparently I like to observe important fishing occasions by making other anglers feel better about themselves. 2017 was a case in point. I ended the calendar year, and the 2016-17 winter steelhead season (in March), in the same fashion: by going
By Dave Ammons For about two weeks in late June, the garden off the cabin deck explodes in the brilliant red-orange shades of the Papaver rhoeas, common poppies whose seeds were first sown in that spot by my grandfather years ago. I imagine him scratching the soil, strewing a few handfuls of seed indiscriminately, perhaps
By Mark Taylor During a visit last summer to the stomping grounds of my youth, the family and I found ourselves not far from one of my favorite fishing spots, a small pond at the site of a long-ago razed lumber mill. “I want to show you guys a place where Grandpa Steve, Uncle Greg
By Chris Hunt It’s December. How did that happen? Why, just last week, it seemed, I was casting fat Chernobyls to willing cutthroats on Bear Creek under the warmest of summer suns. But today, as I step outside to grab the mail, my nostrils freeze tight and the vapor from my breath circles my face,
Tight-lining a tandem set of nymphs through a bucket on the North Fork of the South Branch of the Potomac River in West Virginia with his 11-foot Euro nymph rod, Mark Taylor comes tight to a 14-inch rainbow trout. (Sam Dean photo.) By Mark Taylor Fishermen never stop learning, but we are also victims of
By Erin Rodgers Trout Unlimited continues to make good progress in efforts to reconnect the fragmented Mettawee River near Dorset, Vt. This year’s projects are part of a larger effort by TU, the Poultney-Mettawee Natural Resource Conservation District, U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Natural Resources Conservation Service to reconnect over
The author and his daughter, filling buckets on Yellowstone’s Lamar River. By Tim Frahm When my daughter was in third grade (she’s in sixth grade now), her class practiced a regular exercise they called “filling buckets.” This involved being kind or thoughtful or in other ways a good friend to each other. The outcome of
Photo by Chris Hunt By Chris Hunt < p dir="ltr">There’s something primal about dark water shrouded by cypress. The color of strong coffee, these stained swamps of the South nurture mystery and offer refuge to critters that hang on in acid-tinged water filtered through layers of eons-old peat and sand. The gators come to mind
Photo by Chris Hunt By Dave Ammons The size of the ponderosa pines in Silent Forest is testament to the vigor of mother nature. These are clearly not discontented trees, rising a hundred feet with red-barked girth that my outstretched arms cannot encircle. The entire forest is rooted in satisfaction as it climbs the steeply
“Thank you No. 3. See you next time,” I whispered to the warm cabin as I closed the door of one of my favorite public-use cabins in Southcentral Alaska and turned to soak in the view from the deck with my wife and two dogs. It’s my trusty routine to thank the public resource that
