I leave Glenn’s Sweetgrass Rods shop a little after 3 p.m., putting me in Livingston around 5. Physically, I stand more than a half-foot taller than Glenn Brackett. Figuratively, the man towers above me like an enormous redwood from his native California. His artistry is beyond reproach, but his humanity and decency make him a giant. Like Glenn’s, all our lives are the sums of everything we do and everything we don’t ..read more

When I was in 10th grade, I bought a fiberglass fly rod and Pflueger Medalist reel and decided to try my luck at fly fishing for trout. It felt like a natural progression, having already spin-fished for bluegills in ponds, and bait-cast for bass and pickerel in lakes. Now it was time to cast flies into rivers for pretty fish that ate bugs. But I knew little about how to catch trout, except from what I had gleaned from a few Field and Stream articles with banner headlines like: “Ten Tips for Giant ‘Bows ..read more

About one hour ago, I mixed three tablespoons of Miralax with eight ounces of Gatorade and downed the concoction like a college sophomore knocking back a Jägerbomb at an SEC tailgater. Then I set my iPhone’s timer for fifteen minutes. Since, I’ve mixed, rinsed, and repeated every time the three-chord mandolin riff blasts from my phone ..read more

It wasn't so long ago that I was at the stage in life where a number of iconic figures in the art and entertainment world I'd grown up with had begun to pass out of this world. I am far from being a celebrity hound, but as I scanned the headlines each morning, it was sad and mildly shocking to see that an actor, singer, writer or other celebrity I'd long admired had been admitted to a hospital for the kinds of illnesses that portend the end, or that indeed the end had come ..read more

Writing about Chris Dombrowski’s 2016 book Body of Water—which recently appeared in the Wall Street Journal’s list of the five best books on angling—John Gierach described Dombrowski’s voice as “concise language that reminded me of Gary Snyder one minute and John McPhee the next.” Dombrowski’s most recent book, The River You Touch, has been described by USA Today as “A poignant rumination on marriage, parenthood, friendship and what it means to connect with nature ..read more

I teach basic fly-fishing skills at Penn State University. Most of my students have little experience fishing for wild or native trout but have spent plenty of time targeting stocked trout. Our class takes at least three field trips to fish for wild trout on Spring Creek, near Bellefonte, PA. This fishery is full of wild trout which are not easy for inexperienced anglers to catch. Every semester, I witness students with extensive experience targeting stocked trout fail to catch a single wild brown trout during the combined six hours of class time spent fishing the creek ..read more

Some years back, I had the opportunity to fly fish for trophy northern pike on Reindeer Lake, a massive and unspoiled boreal lake that straddles the border of Saskatchewan and Manitoba. We hit the lake right around the summer solstice — the ideal time for trophy pike in the northern reaches of Canada’s southern provinces. We arrived during a short cold snap that quickly retreated and spent a week watching the lake go from spring to summer in just a matter of days. Fishing was good. Really good ..read more

Yesterday, the Biden administration rejected the “speculative” Amber Road Project that would have constructed an industrial-grade road some 210 miles into the Alaskan interior in order to allow minerals to be transported to market from the Ambler Mining District ..read more

Bliss Perry was a pioneer in American literature. He taught at Williams College, Princeton, and Harvard and edited the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others. But I wouldn't know anything about Professor Perry if he hadn't written a book called Fishing with a Worm. His short book—published in 1916—begins with an indictment of the fishing gene: A defective logic is the born fisherman's portion. He is a pattern of inconsistency. He does the things which he ought not to do, and he leaves undone the things which other people think he ought to do ..read more

Flats fishing is an active pursuit, and the terrain isn’t always as friendly as we wish it was. And when you’re wading, it’s all about stealth and balance. Keeping your feet safe and comfortable over a weeklong trip where you’ll wade across everything from eelgrass to jagged Caribbean limestone is every bit as important as the rod you cast and the fly you choose to put in front of bonefish and permit ..read more