Category: Trout
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Wednesday Night Ties: Ed’s flies.
I never saw John Prine live and I never tied Ed Shenk’s flies, save maybe a couple Letort hoppers when I first started out. I moved on to other, more complicated ties, with beadheads and eyeballs, rubber legs and plastic wingcases, upright divided wings and parachute hackles. We lost Ed the other day, and I…
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First of April.
I had a dream a golden stonefly exuvia drifted down between my legs and so I woke up and went. Could’ve called John or Paul but it’s Good Friday and I didn’t know I was going until I was in the car and I didn’t know where I would park until I got to the…
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First of February.
Laptop died. Camera died. And there’s been a slew of nasty weather and other obligations. But green fingers of daffodils are sprouting up along the front porch, and I figured maybe it was time to get out and see something. They must’ve had two or three more feet of water down here, judging by the…
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First of December.
Twenty-four hours before I mentally chastised two coeds pouting lips and snapping selfies in front of an art-deco bar downtown for living an inauthentic self. Now I’m making a long drive for a short trip, checking a box that says I visited the creek this month. Not that I didn’t want to come, just that…
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Deconstructing mortality.
New research out of Alberta puts numbers on something I addressed in a previous post- big, rare, charismatic predators like bull trout generate lots of likes and clicks- and that may have consequences for trophy fisheries. Even with C&R. The study compared two groups of fish: A control group, where adult bull trout were immediately…
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First of November.
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Wild trout.
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Last Best Streams: #956.
There’s a guy with a paint roller using a step ladder as a straightedge to mark cadmium yellow lines along the handicap space in front of the liquor store outside Kemmerer. It’s late season and I’m bouncing along a one-way rutted gravel road, braking for pronghorn and admiring soft blue lupine poking above mostly featureless…
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Last Best Streams: #1172.
Bicolored snipe lift off vertically from wet willow thickets and I’m reading a sign in the middle of nowhere lauding native species and I turn thirty-seven degrees and watch black cattle wear out wet willow thickets where bicolored snipe lift off vertically and I wonder how we define value.
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First of September.
Ed Abbey says some writers become synonymous with their geography. Thoreau and the northeast. Muir and the Sierra. Ed Abbey and the desert. We have the same with anglers, folks who focus decades on a region or a handful of rivers. Roderick Haig-Brown and the Pacific Northwest. Robert Voelker and swampy streams of the…
The outside bend. 