The allure of the river captured me at a young age. Fortunate to have grown up near the banks of a year-round stream, I keenly explored its wonders and secrets, seldom, if ever, disappointed. In middle and high school, in a complete embrace of the...
The Refugee Ocean by Pauls Toutonghi (Simon & Schuster, $27.99) is the kind of novel for which the form was invented. It creates sweeping, lush worlds, fully inhabited by its unforgettable characters. It spans continents and lifetimes with careful detail and balance. It leaves the...
All mayflies are beautiful, but especially so to the fly angler’s eye. That all mayflies feed and fatten trout makes them, to that eye, more beautiful yet. I may have a favorite, and that favorite could change, but each Montana mayfly is surely the favorite...
A deep pool Water as clear as the air I see She lives there My happiness I know this Though I’ve never seen her Not physically I’ve never touched nor held her vermiculated structure So I believe Despite all my efforts to prove otherwise It’s deep and the water is moving But I see nothing So I...
Among America’s most renowned luthiers, Montanan Ren Ferguson has made custom guitars for The Beatles, The Stones, Tom Petty, and Emmylou Harris, just to name a few. But recently, he’s used his hands to craft a heralded instrument dedicated to the stars of the trout...
Upon walking through the front doors of the Simms headquarters in Bozeman, Montana, a passion for angling is immediately apparent: It permeates the very building. There’s the latest merchandise on display, an entire wall filled with best-in-the-business awards, and a brief history of the company...
The trout-filled limestone canyon of Montana’s Smith River — twisting through the Big and Little Belt mountains — would have made a magnificent subject for America’s best Western landscape painters and photographers, visionaries like Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, William Henry Jackson, and Ansel Adams. And...
Some might find it strange that one of my favorite trout streams flows through a burned-over canyon. I first visited Roaring Lion Creek in mid-July 2019, almost three years after a wildfire engulfed much of its basin. It was a cool and cloudy day, with drizzling...
I am featherlight, tossed like confetti into a brilliant blue sky, jostled about on the velvet wings of thousands of birds — tundra swans, herons, snow geese, northern pintails, marbled godwits. I roll from one downy back to another as we soar in harmony toward...
We’re a couple dozen miles down a rolling, dusty, backcountry road that shadows the Greys River in western Wyoming, and I can’t find the dream pool I want to fish. This uncertainty has my 15-year-old daughter stressed out. “Dad? Are we lost?” she asks for the...