In search of solitude The first time someone mentioned a packraft to me was about three years ago. “A pack what?” I said. Which is the response most fly fishers probably would have. I knew about drift boats, pontoons, canoes, and paddle boards, but I’d never...
Fly fishing through Montana’s Bannack State Park My first cast into Grasshopper Creek was by the Bannack, Montana, jail. Beyond these dank and constricted pens stood the gallows where Sheriff Henry Plummer and his road-agent deputies, “The Innocents,” were hanged in 1864. “Give me a good...
Fishing mountain lakes As passionate as we claim to be, many fly anglers reach a time in our lives when that excitement wanes, and we yearn for a higher level of challenge and adventure. Some turn to the fierce steelhead of the Pacific Northwest, some fly...
Three writers explore the bond that’s often shaped by time spent on the water Our Common Tributary by Myers Reece Addictions tend to strain relationships, but fishing has worked out pretty well for my family. I understand angling isn’t included as an addiction in medical literature, but to...
As angler numbers increase, is grace the answer? It's early morning on Idaho’s Silver Creek. The water is calm, the fly anglers are calm. There is a symphony taking place between insect and trout, between trout and angler, and between angler and angler. It’s music played...
For millennia, flowing water has been a powerful metaphor in mythology, religion, and art, explaining our precarious passage down the river of life. And when once-sparkling trout streams slowly, warmly, and mysteriously slip into the earth — only to upwell transformed — perhaps they symbolize...
An adventure-loving couple combines biking and fishing One could consider Russ Roca and Laura crawford gurus of simple living and the Zen of bike packing. Living in a tiny three-room apartment in Missoula, Montana, they own one car and cell phone between them, and get around...
A trail re-route to save a species [caption id="attachment_13415" align="alignright" width="300"] The 1,200-mile Pacific Northwest Trail, that stretches from Glacier National Park to the Pacific Ocean, has the potential to put the diminishing Yaak grizzly population at risk.[/caption] Last year was the 50th anniversary of the National...
Montana’s smallest ski area is a big part of the community One Sunday last winter, on the second ski day of a weekend road trip to Bear Paw Ski Bowl, I pulled into the parking lot a little before noon. Making the rather slow, 35-mile drive...
Writer Tim Cahill and I walk, scouting the horizon for pronghorn antelope (Antilocapra Americana), an animal like no other and North America’s fastest. None appear. No cattle are here now either. From this bench situated within public lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management,...