The Nez Perce call the river yáwwinma, meaning place of cold water. Non-Indigenous people refer to it as Rapid River.  It’s the only stream Congress ever designated a Wild and Scenic river exclusively because of its water quality. Even in August anglers wet-wading its headwaters suffer numb feet. The steep forested canyon and its rock formations […]

Bulldozers sit on the shore of Lake Powell, having worked to extend the boat launch. I don’t envy my wife’s uncle as he backs his 20-foot fishing boat down the 300-yard dirt ramp. It’s a family trip to the lake, and we’re staying at what was once a lakeside hotel in Bullfrog, UT. The view […]

The Soča River in northwestern Slovenia belongs, rightfully, in discussions about the most beautiful rivers in Europe and is renowned within the flyfishing community for its most mysterious resident—the marble trout. A subspecies of brown trout, marble trout evolved within the confines of the Soča watershed and other streams in the Adriatic Sea basin, and […]

Nearly 85 million years ago, what is now New Zealand separated from a massive continent known as Gondwana. A few million years later New Zealand was likely at least 1,200 miles from Australia. As a result, for more than 82 million years New Zealand’s native flora and fauna thrived and adapted in isolation with no […]

On August 2, 2012, the Assi Ganga River flowed peacefully from its source, Dodital Lake, seated at the head of a valley in the Indian Himalayan foothills. Trout swirled in its eddies, sipping stoneflies from the surface, growing plump like they had been doing since British eccentric Pahari Wilson introduced them to Dodital in 1862. […]

Somewhere South of Chokoloskee, FL It’s easy to get lost in the Florida Everglades, both physically and mentally. Covering some 1.5 million acres of southwest Florida from Lake Okeechobee to the Gulf of Mexico and Florida Bay, it’s the largest subtropical wilderness and second largest national park in the United States and, curiously, one of […]

Copi Vojta  I need a fishing license. At the Double J in Happy Camp, CA, a woman behind the counter is having a bad day with the license machine. Quiet sighs and dangits make up most of the one-sided conversation. A man arrives and interrupts, wanting to exchange a Penthouse magazine for a Hustler. The […]

Let’s go back to a few years before we bought our cabin—390 million to be exact. It was the middle of the Devonian period, more than 150 million years before the first dinosaurs roamed. Terrestrial earth consisted of just two primary landmasses: Gondwana in the Southern Hemisphere and Laurasia to the North. The first vascular […]

In Los Angeles’ concrete jungle of freeways, industrial sites, abandoned lots and graffiti scribed walls there is a ribbon of water that wants to become a living, breathing river. Author, artist, landscape architect and fly angler Daniel Lopez knows the L.A. River better than anyone and is working to bring the river back. It is […]