This past weekend I spent time camping along the Beaverkill nestled deep in a fold of the Catskills. With no cell phone service I had the opportunity to get caught up on my reading in between a little trout fishing, socializing and relaxing with the family. In the stack of dead trees that accompanied me was Trout magazine. Trout was fairly high in the stack, well above the well recognized "how to" periodicals. During the past few years I've come to have a keener appreciation for the writers who are closer to the literary end of the spectrum than the "hook and bullet" end. The Drake, Flyfish Journal and Gray's Fly Fishing issue (though I feel it's aging out) are my new staples. Trout's in that class too though that's a fairly recent development.
I first met Kirk Deeter in 2012 shortly after he was announced as editor of Trout Magazine. Kirk's vision for Trout, the in house magazine of Trout Unlimited, was to be of such high quality that folks would join TU just to get the magazine. That sounded awful ambitious.
A few months later I ran into Kirk again at TU's annual meeting. He handed me a copy of the latest issue just before it got dropped in the mail. It was the first copy that he had edited front to back and it was an interesting change of course most notably for the stunning front page - a black and white photo of a chinook salmon. But the changes ran deeper.