The Drake

ARE YOU A GOLFER? Or do you, like me, just occasionally go golfing because your friends are going or because it’s some sort of dude-gathering like a fraternity reunion or bachelor party? In either case, imagine playing your next round with only a 7-i

IF YOU FISH in the Rocky Mountain West, your success on many waters is often dictated by the Bureau of Reclamation (BuRec). Nowhere is this more evident than in the Snake River watershed in Wyoming and Idaho. Bureau managers have a lot of demands to

ON JANUARY 2, 2024, Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket containing the first Starlink satellites capable of sending signals directly from space to smartphones. The SpaceX/T-Mobile collab will first provide only texting, but satellite-to-cel

LIKE MANY IDEAS, this one began on a cocktail napkin. In 2012, Karen Talbot and her husband, Ret, were enjoying beers at the Kern River Brewery in Kernville, California, the “gateway to Sequoia National Forest.” After a day catching golden trout in t

ON JANUARY 30, 2023, after more than two decades of research, public input, litigation, appeals, and political controversy, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued its Final Determination for the proposed Pebble Mine area of Bristol Bay, in

IN THE SUMMER OF 2010, filmmaker RA Beattie and I bought a 1974 Mercury Marquis. We named it Clyde and put it in a movie, Guiding Goes Gangster (still on YouTube). In the fourteen years since, Clyde’s keys have been passed from writer to writer, cros

ANGLERS HAVE REASON to be wary when a mining operation comes to town, particularly near Missoula, Montana. By the time the Clark Fork River reaches city limits, its water has already flowed past a string of Superfund sites filled with the toxic after

LAST WINTER, Pacific Northwest anglers anxiously awaited approval to fish for wild steelhead on Washington’s legendary Skagit River, which hadn’t opened in 2020 or 2022. January and February passed with no news. Finally, on March 22, the Washington D

IT’S ONE THING to have written a book on steelhead flyfishing. It’s another thing to have written the book. Trey Combs did, twice. First came his 1976 classic, Steelhead Fly Fishing and Flies, with the not-kept-wet steelhead lying dead in the grass o

Q: Dear Trask, Didja catch me on the YouTube in January? I escaped from a pet-rescue kennel, tried to let my friends out, opened a human-door, and met a cool cop. It got me thinking: rather than paying kennels, owners should pay people to take us fis

I’M NOT ONE TO BRAG about my fishing accomplishments, but what few trophies I’ve labored to accumulate while flyfishing lay strewn about my home and yard—placed strategically out of sight, as deemed by my wife. Below a juniper shrub near the shed sit

IN THE BELLY of the eleven-floor dormitory, my knuckles thumped on Mark’s door. He had a mischievous smile when he opened, turned to his desk, and clutched a miniature fly rod barely longer than his hand. “My parents got me this for Christmas,” he sa

I TOOK SOME time off one spring to fish. Weeks earlier, as I tied flies and rigged my truck for camping, my wife began referring to the coming downtime as my “sabbatical.” That felt generous; a characterization more befitting of priests and tenured p

IN THE DUSTY pile of abandoned hobbies in my garage lay a fly rod and an old canvas vest with boxes of rust-stained flies in the pockets. The vest was a gift from my sister-in-law when I was a teenager and wanted to be a flyfishing novelist. Like man

WHEN WOODSMOKE TWIRLS above chimneys and tires spin at stoplights, winter has settled in. These are the “fiddlin’ months,” and it’s the season for gearheads everywhere. Fly lines get cleaned or replaced. Reels get lubed. Boat boxes are stocked with f

I JUST FELT naughty. The steelhead I held under the water was so chrome she was practically glowing. It had slammed my fly in the middle of the swing and tail-walked her way into my backing before I got her under control. I should have felt elated—an

Death echoes through Gardens of the Queen. From the anchorage lagoon beyond our ten-room live-aboard, I hear a detonation. Something big—a shark maybe, or a barracuda—is attacking in shallow water. It sounds like bodies dropping off a bridge. Closer

“My name is Miguel,” the man said. “And I’ve got a fish story.” I’m not typically a fan of guys in bars who just start telling stories, on account of how such stories usually involve the misdeeds of ex-wives or become tedious boasts about the storyte

THE A1 OUT of Harare must be the worst highway in Zimbabwe, if you can even call it a highway with its tractors and goats and cattle, and old Japanese hatchbacks dodging semis and cement mixers and steel-laden flat beds—to say nothing of the road its

HIKING UP THE TRAIL, I was struck by the contrast between colorful wildflowers—Indian paintbrush, Lupine, Columbine, Mule Ears—and the blackened remains of what were once mature trees, now reduced to branchless, charcoal-black remnants of a forest. T

HE DIPPED HIS HAND into the live-well that rarely gets used for bait. What he pulled out was beautiful. “Look what I have,” he said, using his index finger and thumb to dangle the crab in front of me, as if holding a used tissue. What legs it had lef