I’m standing alongside the Gallatin River in Southwest Montana, stringing up my new custom rod. I’m careful taking it out of the tube, and I avoid putting it on the ground like I usually do for fear of getting it dirty. But truth be told,...
In the world of American freshwater angling, the Nez Perce tribe occupies a special place. Take, for example, the case of Rapid River, a relatively obscure stream approximately 150 miles north of Boise, Idaho. The trout-filled, remote, and rugged upper 27-mile section, accessible only by...
On a sweltering August evening, our trip to Idaho’s sylvan St. Joe River was winding down. After dreamy days of camping, hiking, and fly fishing along the swift, intimate, fir-fringed headwaters, my wife Mary and I washed up on the wide, languid, lower reach in...
My first encounter with a cutthroat trout came in the era of tail fins, Sputnik, and hula hoops. I was still so young that I spent more time thinking about fish than girls (and my life might have been simpler had it stayed that way)....
As twilight shrouded the lingering light on the Missouri River, members of the Corps of Discovery looked toward the towering cliffs. Rising from both sides of the water’s edge, the rock walls projected toward the sky, with a channel flowing from a narrow break in...
Although we got a late start getting on the river on a sunny afternoon last August, after years of hoping and dreaming about fishing in this legendary spot, my wife and I had finally made it to the Fontenelle Dam on Wyoming’s Green River. As...
Early on a summer morning, while the rest of the family sleeps, a small boy makes his way alone to the overgrown banks of a nearby mountain stream in California’s Eastern Sierra. He tosses a worm-baited line just right. Soon, he’s using all his might...
The delicate, white-feather legs of a thistle seed run upstream with the wind. The fragile physics of a miniature tumbleweed ballet make it magically spin against the weight of mountains while standing still until this exquisite balance fails and must wait to find its moment again downstream from where you brace your feet against the...
Ernest Hemingway in the Yellowstone High Country by Chris Warren (Riverbend, $19.95) paints a portrait of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist that may surprise and enlighten Hemingway enthusiasts. Shining a light on the small ranch outside of Cooke City, Montana, where the writer spent five summers,...
When he’s not in the kitchen, Chris DiMaio, the executive chef of Three Forks Grille in Columbia Falls, Montana, is often out on the trail foraging for wild food: morels, boletes, chanterelles. When the mushrooms fade, he then looks for arnica, elderberry, and fiddlehead ferns....