Articles

The new normal

Are you ready for it?

by Johnny Carrol Sain - Monday, Aug 29th, 2016

Photo: Johnny Carrol Sain

August in Arkansas. Lawns dried to a crispy, dusty brown. Bathwater lake temperatures, creeks cinched down to trickling riffles with pools full of hungry smallmouth bass. Day after day of 95-105 degree sunshine, which seems a damn near impossible combination with the ungodly and stifling humidity billowing up from the Gulf of Mexico. I like to spend this time waist deep in the creek.

But that’s not what’s happening this year.

A closer look at the Yellowstone River fish kill

What Idaho can teach us about Montana's closures and PKD

by Kris Millgate - Friday, Aug 26th, 2016

The watercraft check station is open on the Idaho-Montana border. All vehicles carrying or pulling watercraft must stop for inspection before entering Idaho (photo: Kris Millgate).

Whitefish belly up on my right. Few minutes later, another one off the nose of the boat. It’s early fall on the South Fork of the Snake River in Idaho. The cool release following summer heat is a relief, but it didn’t come soon enough in this cottonwood-lined corridor. Dead whitefish are the fatal sign and the sight is alarming. Whitefish are a river’s canary in a coalmine. If something is wrong with whitefish, something is wrong with the river.

Cutting for cutthroat

Yellowstone throws net wide to save native fish

by Kris Millgate - Wednesday, Aug 24th, 2016

Fly fisherman Todd Lanning shows off a native Yellowstone cutthroat trout caught on the Yellowstone River (courtesy Todd Lanning).

The message comes in via text: “Millgate, get up here. We gotta fish. The Yellowstone is like it used to be.”

Breakfast, in the Maine woods

A soujourn in the wilderness

by Matthew Reilly - Wednesday, Aug 17th, 2016

Photo: Matthew Reilly

There’s not much more peaceful than a simple breakfast amid the chirpings of an awakening northern forest. Humans, with their God-like reign over fuel, need do little more than boil water and add it to oats and coffee grounds to enjoy a meal as comfortable as one prepared in the modern home. After doing just that, on a brisk morning on a remote pond in the Maine woods, I recorded those thoughts, and reveled in the opportunity to be where I was.

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