Articles

Cutthroats and magpies

A childhood on water

by Myers Reece - Tuesday, Jan 30th, 2018

Photo: D. Beck

I grew up outside of Livingston, Montana, three miles up a curvy dirt road. A small creek, teeming with native Yellowstone cutthroats and flanked by bushy willows, paralleled the road, and I started fishing there as a preschooler with my father, planting the seeds of a lifetime obsession. By the time I was 5, I would venture to the stream alone with a rod and jar full of grasshoppers freshly procured from our front yard. On my way out the door, I would tell my parents, “I’m going to get lunch.”

Patagonia and others protest Trump's attacks on public lands with massive countdown clock

America's heritage will be open to mining and drilling in ...

by Chad Shmukler - Thursday, Jan 25th, 2018

Photo: Sorane Yamahira / Bellvisuals.com

Last night at the opening of the 2018 Outdoor Retailer Show in Denver, Colorado, Patagonia was joined by The Wilderness Society, The Center for American Progress and The Conservation Lands Foundation in protest of Donald Trump's massive rollback of the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah.

The fish in the sea

A catch is always in some sense an ending, but a loss can mark the beginning of something

by Tom Davis - Tuesday, Jan 23rd, 2018

Photo: Martin Christensson

She didn’t break my heart. She may have blindsided me a little, but it’s not as if she took my legs out and left me writhing in agony. We didn’t have enough history for that; there had been nothing promised. She simply vanished from my life—a life in which her appearance was at best a memorable cameo.

Not that I was blessed with the kind of telescopic perspective that enabled me to see that at the age of 17, when every word, glance, and gesture from a girl you’re interested in is freighted with earth-shattering significance.

Eat or be eaten

The cold fire in a predator’s eye is always unnerving

by Johnny Carrol Sain - Monday, Jan 22nd, 2018

Photo: Thibaud Furst / cc2.0

Gut-hooked bass are nearly always dead bass, but this one was just barely gut hooked. Thankfully, I’d pressed the barb down on the #2 Wooly Bugger—actually, a fly of my own creation that I’d christened the Beasty Bugger thanks to its trademark, outlandishly big hackles—and it looked like I could slip its point out of that tender lining easily. It was a decent bass, but with my hand in its mouth I couldn’t see what I was doing. It was all by feel. And after feeling the hook what I felt next was that bass trying to suck me into its gut—trying to to eat me—index finger first.

Catch and release concerns for winter fishing

It's not just extremes in heat that can be fatal to fish

by Matthew Reilly - Thursday, Jan 18th, 2018

Photo: Justin Hamblin

Several winters ago, about the time I settled into wild trout country, I fell in love with winter fishing—the conditions, the solace, and the fish. For when the air turns cold, all but the hardiest abandon the water. The lucky angler may even find themselves solitary among mountains blanketed in white—the air aroar with the static of snowflakes crashing into Earth—and with an honest chance at a truly large trout that are relatively unpressured and intent on consuming the largest number of calories for the fewest expended.