Indholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2021/2022 i The Drake

IN LATE JANUARY, the Colorado Court of Appeals gave a favorable ruling in Roger Hill’s decade-long fight for public access along a stretch of Colorado’s Arkansas River. The case stems from a 2012 incident in which Hill was run off a prime piece of water that he feels should be public. Hill is far from alone in these beliefs, but he has three things going for him that many who share his views do not: the time, the guts, and the resources to see it through. To be clear, Hill won nothing in January that grants further public access; he simply won the right—as a private citizen—to argue in court that he deserves that access. (Attorneys for the state had held that only state authorities can argue for public access.)…

LONGFELLOW CREEK BEGINS just north of my home in Seattle and empties into the industrial no-mans-land of the Duwamish Waterway. Along its four-mile stretch, numerous roads cross or parallel Longfellow, and on every wet Northwest day, stormwater washes into the stream carrying a mixture of toxic substances, including the compound 6PPD-quinone (6PPDq), identified as a coho killer by University of Washington and Washington State University researchers in December 2020. In Puget Sound, scientists calculated that 60 to 90 percent of adult coho returning to urban watersheds died prematurely—as opposed to almost none in rural streams. These scientists knew that the deaths were somehow tied to stormwater runoff, where they had often seen coho swimming erratically, gasping for air, and later, dying. They just didn’t know the cause. The question took…

Hola, Trask! Q: We’re rescue pups from Mexico, recently muled up to Oregon by a nice couple named Greg and Katherine. Oregon is cool, but we heard about California’s Bill 1881—the “Dog and Cat Bill of Rights.” We don’t care about cats, but this law thing would give us the “right to nutritious food!” We survived in Baja battlin’ gulls for fish guts. Should we bail to Cali?—Filbert, Raúl, and Scrappy A: Guys, You three allowed yourselves to be “rescued” from La Paz, Baja, to the ’burbs of Portland? Have you last your eight-week-old minds? People in Oregon save money all year just to go drinking in Mexico and call it a fishing trip. My advice? Hop in the next suitcase to Cabo. Then again, I did burn my paws…

THE OLD SAYING SUGGESTS that night is darkest before the dawn. And in dull daily consciousness, much of life can feel like waiting for sunup. As my wife and I share a drink and a steak and navigate covid-era careers, the death-march of elder-care obligations, a teenage daughter’s romance, and coming college visits, we are comforted by the notion that this path of endurance eventually leads to the “other side”… Retirement. Travel. Complete engagement in the river. Free time—our truest liberty—to peruse the personal papers of John Voelker in a dusty Marquette library. Yet spirits foretell of waste in rushing to the future, only to get there and discover a failed appreciation for many moments from the past. What would an 85-year-old angler trade for one more day as a…

In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself within a dark woods where the straight way was lost.—Dante Alighieri, The Inferno IN APPALACHIA, there’s no straight way to travel. Laurel hell grows thick, and the only way to navigate it is to put your feet in a streambed and follow every meander and oxbow of the creek. Native rhododendron, the true laurel in any laurel hell, always wins. These shrubs thrive where water flows generously. Along runs and seeps, over narrow streambeds hidden by earth and stone. Their limbs reach well over fifteen feet, thicker than any child’s leg and snaking in every direction. Pliant and possessed of a preternatural strength, they push back, as if offended to find you wandering among them. The going is…

THERE WAS NO DOUBT it was a steelhead. Until it wasn’t. The grab had been so jolting, the head shakes so violent, that no consideration was given to the fish being anything but a steelhead. Yet there at my feet, in six inches of water, lay a brown smallmouth of grotesque proportions. Pulsing and flexing, flaunting its outsized strength. I had caught plenty of smallmouths before, just never one that big or that mean. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Kneeling in the waning glow of an early-spring sun, there was little time for contemplation. I sent the fish on its way, returned to my station at the head of the run, worked out some line, and was promptly fooled again. I felt in awe about the entire…

MY SON’S FACE was barely visible with his hood pulled tight around his head. But from what I could tell, he looked as attentive as a 7-year-old could be. Ten minutes earlier, I’d suggested he pass on this fish. But to my surprise, he decided this bluegill was the one. For possibly the first time in his life, I let my son take the wheel. There was a lot going through my head at this point. I really wanted him to catch this one. He was invested. Earlier that morning, he’d helped me tie the fly he was using. I wanted to tell him to be patient; when to work the fly and when to let it rest. But I didn’t. He needed to earn this one. This wouldn’t be…

When anglers daydream of traveling 6,000 miles to fish Chilean Patagonia, it’s unlikely they conjure images of chasing small-stream brookies with a three-weight. Yet that’s precisely how I spent one of my favorite days at Rio Palena Lodge, wading up the Rio Tigre catching brook trout no bigger than those of any American creek. Not that I didn’t have terrific fishing the other three days, it’s just that those days didn’t begin and end in a helicopter. (Pro tip: When wanting to hit various fisheries scattered among lakes and rivers of the Chilean Andes, it’s handy to have a heli.) Flyfishing may be what brings you to Patagonia, but Southern Chile’s visual onslaught of lake-srivers-forests-mountains, and its potent mix of asado, pisco sours, Chilean wine, and Chilean people, will be…

CAPE COD. MARTHA’S VINEYARD. THE HAMPTONS. If you live north of the Mason-Dixon and east of the Allegheny, these are places you’re likely to fish. They require a drive just long enough to feel like you’re getting away, yet short enough to prevent road rage while stuck in traffic. None of that is on the agenda for Zach Benson, a State Trooper in rural upstate New York who offsets his everyday realities by daydreaming of salmon, rainbows, and arctic grayling in the farthest reaches of Alaska. Benson once responded to an auto accident and found an Amish girl in the middle of the road with her head split wide open. As a scuba diver he retrieved the bodies of a father and daughter from the bottom of a lake after…

“The topic of stream access illustrates one of the most perplexing types of legal conflicts that can arise… Indeed, it is difficult to find a legal issue that is more tangled and uncertain.”—A Wildlife Primer (2009), by Eric Freyfogle and Dale Goble COLORADO’S RIVER laws might be in trouble. Roger Hill, the octogenarian trying to fulfill his dream of legally wade-fishing the Arkansas River, was at the Colorado Court of Appeals on January 27 and got good news about his case—Hill v Warsewa. Hill aims to show that the Arkansas was a “navigable” river at statehood, rendering its beds public and legal to wade under the “equal-footing doctrine,” which grants each state, at statehood, title to the beds of navigable waterways within its borders. Hill first filed his complaint in…

WHEN JOSEPH ROSANNO, the multimedia artist behind the Salmon School collaborative, arrived at the United Nations climate summit (COP26) in Glasgow late last year, he had one goal in mind: to help protect salmon and steelhead. Unlike others at the conference, who engaged in protracted policy and business negotiations, Rosanno hung glass. A lot of it. At COP26, the Salmon School was given the coveted Blue Zone, dignitaries-only space to display their project: more than 300 reflective glass orbs hanging invisibly to form a large, curving school of fish overhead. The sight, for anyone who has seen the work, is arrestingly beautiful. “It’s going to look stunning,” said Ben Heywood, Rosanno’s partner in the project, as the art was being installed. “And that will get people talking about the real…

IT WAS A REMARKABLY COLD WINTER in the ragged foothills of the southern Appalachians. The dark days were consumed tying great volumes of flies, which meant that I had an abundant supply of woolly buggers and hare’s ears overflowing from the boxes now stuffed in my pack. My aggressive tying schedule was interrupted only briefly for the occasional junket to the local micro-brewery for a pulled-pork platter and a classic porter that should come with a knife. The weather broke on an early March day with a meteoric rise into the 50s. My gear had been packed and repacked, in faith-filled optimism that the cold would eventually loosen its grasp. I loaded the SUV and headed east toward the mountains, hoping the sun had warmed the water enough to inspire…

THE ABRUPT SOUND of a seven-foot wingspan catching an updraft exploded overhead in an alien whoosh, like a skydiver deploying his canopy. My chest instantly filled with some kind of foreign, inexplicable adrenaline. With my ass stuck firmly in the thickets, the bird glided past with little regard for the terror it had just inflicted. It hovered a moment, unflinching, like a temporary statue born out of the whitespace between river and rock. Then it slid across the sun. I took this as a sign to loosen some of the knots in my casting shoulder and crack one of the two warm beers I’d been toting around on my waistband for four hours. The fishing had cooled since the mid-morning beatis hatch, and with three good browns tallied, it was…

Some 10,000 years ago, glaciers formed during the last Ice Age were retreating from the Upper Midwest. While portions of Wisconsin were scraped into the rolling landscape found across much of the state, a roughly 24,000-square-mile piece of land at the intersection of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa, now called the Driftless Area, was left untouched. Broad ridge tops with shallow soil, river-formed valleys, and steep, craggy ravines make the region a geological anomaly. For millennia, this was fertile brook-trout habitat, but in an evolutionary blink of an eye, its waters became threatened by modern agriculture. More than 6,000 miles of trout water, with roughly 1,300 miles of public access, span this region of sandstone and limestone bedrock, but many of these creeks continue to compete with agriculture to survive. The…

I HAVE A LOVE-HATE relationship with spring. Warming temps are the “hate” part. My little slice of the Rocky Mountain West is ski country, and its winters deliver dozens of powder-packed days during most years. Few of those happen in April or May. Instead, the spring thaw leaves us to settle for slushy afternoon turns at 10,000 feet. It’s still fun skiing, but it plays second-fiddle to 12-inch-plus dumps that at times can go on for a week. The fishing that spring delivers is the love part. Gone are the days of dwindled daylight when midges are the only bug on the menu. With spring comes consistent blue-winged olives on cloudy days. Caddis rise from the surface and bank edges in blizzarding gales. And on some streams, march browns begin…

I MUST TURN LEFT a hundred times a day. Driving, walking, spinning around in my office chair, playing with my dog, rolling over in bed, reaching for toilet paper. So the move should’ve come easy when it was needed. But it did not. A recent December permit trip to Key West provided me with the most exciting fishing I’ve ever experienced. It wasn’t my first time fishing these flats, but it was my first trip specifically targeting permit. The stories about this fish are all true. As soon as one came into sight—or, more commonly, into my guide’s sight—I suddenly turned into my 14-year-old self asking out a girl I had a crush on. I forgot how to cast. Everything I’d learned and practiced over the years just disappeared from…