“Water is emotional,” says Trout Unlimited staffer Hillary Walrath, so never forget that river work is people work.
And let us be clear. We are being disregarded. The Senators and state governments who’ve led us down this path to the brink of unthinkable calamity have sized us up, taken our measure and deemed us impotent.
I’ve always disliked the term “harvest” to describe the taking of a game animal. Vegetables are harvested. Animals we kill.
Call ‘em caddis, sedges, dancers, grannoms, shadflies, peters, makers, millers, micros, travelers or whatever your local dialect has adopted. Just don’t overlook them.
Happy Independence Day! May yours be spent enjoying our public lands — the fruit and foundation of our most genuine freedoms!
Before its hollow bottle baritone – “H’hoohoohoo… hoo… hoo” – interrupted the predawn stillness of a snow-draped January morning, I’d done most of my “bird watching” down the barrel of a 12-gauge shotgun. In fact, I was only in the backyard at four a.m. as a potty-break escort for our weeks-old Labrador, my new bird dog in training.
Purple mountain majesties get all the ink. But for every picture-postcard perfect acre of Tetons, Big Horns or Snowys in Wyoming, there are ten of high desert sagebrush steppe – and they do the heavy lifting. They never make the movies or the magazine covers. They just make the antelope, sage grouse and elbow, Read More
You greet 5 a.m. with your boots on, headed up-hill. By dawn, you are miles from camp and have a band of twelve elk in your binocular. They’re grazing lazily away from you along the opposite slope, flirting with rifle range in the early morning quiet. And like you, they are standing on public, Read More
Pop Quiz: 1) If a carpenter in San Juan County purchases a New Mexico fishing license for $25, and a hedge fund manager from Connecticut purchases a lifestyle ranch on the San Juan River for $6.8 million, which purchaser acquires constitutional protection of his individual rights? A) Neither. Rights can’t be bought or sold, Read More
I knew dawn, when it finally broke, would be anemic and gray – little help in driving the cold from the house. Too bad, I thought. I needed all the help I could get. The sun hadn’t cleared the mountain yet, but already I was behind: behind on the errands, the house chores, the, Read More