How’s that?” I asked, frowning into my crackling cell phone. “Did you say salmon?” “Exactly,” confirmed the young woman on the other end as I ransacked the glove box for a pencil. “Colorado salmon?” I pressed, confident that those words had no business sharing a sentence. “Correct,” she confirmed. “Okay . . . And, Read More
Coastal fisheries are ruled by the tides. High in the northern Rockies though, the productivity of an outing can be made or broken by timing the snowline. Unlike the tides, no reliable lunar cycle can forecast the elevation and condition of the snowpack. Rather you have to cobble together your own charts from investigatory day, Read More
I heard Steven set the hook from thirty yards downstream. “Fish on?” I asked over my shoulder, unwilling to abandon my own drift just yet. “Uh, you could say that,” grunted Steven in reply. It was the year’s first post-work outing. With the equinox behind us and daylight savings time tacking an extra hour, Read More
She is dog-ugly, but I’ve dreamed of getting into her bed for months now. Who am I to judge if she lies right next to the highway, downstream of town and in the middle of an oilfield? So her banks are intermittently lined with junk cars and half-submerged industrial debris… let he who hath, Read More
At 60 power, it felt like the deer were in my lap, like the scope was transporting me across the ravine and into the herd.
My lungs were about to explode, which masked the burning in my quads. The terrain was unforgiving. So were the birds. We had been in birds all day, but it was the last day of the season and they were onto us. Only minutes prior I had managed to scratch down my first chukar, Read More
I learn something every time I go fishing. Yet with every lesson I realize that the boundaries of my ignorance are farther away than ever. Usually this “progress” comes in bight sized chunks that, like parenting, are great for maintaining humility. It’s a puzzle here (jab), a challenge there (jab, cross) and maybe even, Read More
All day I had been swinging my fly through some of the best steelhead water on the planet, but I hadn’t connected with a fish. The Dean had been kind to me over the past few days and I was utterly spoiled on what was my first steelhead trip. Still, I was addicted to, Read More
Mark reaches under his pillow and pulls back the hammer of his pistol. My eyes are heavy as I’m about to drift off to sleep. I barely hear the pickup rolling into camp. More shocked by the pistol than the pickup, I urge Mark to put away the gun. Throwing on a shirt I get, Read More
He’s peering skeptically from behind a boulder at a shin-deep seam that looks to be another of his son-in-law’s eccentricities. The koi pond back home in Florida looks more promising. Fishing? Sure, he loves fishing, been doing it all his life. 360 degrees of Gulf Stream blue horizon, a mile of water under the, Read More