Articles

We said we were going fishing and we did

On Voelker's Frenchman's Pond with John Gierach

by Tim Schulz - Thursday, Oct 10th, 2024

John Gierach casting on Frenchman's Pond (photo: Tim Schulz).

I arrived at the Crossroads shortly before 9:30 a.m.—a half-hour early, with plenty of time to add ice to my cooler and gas to my tank. I had driven all morning under an overcast sky, but now the clouds were gone, and the temperature was rising toward ninety. Although catching a trout on an afternoon like this in a shallow spring-fed pond would be close to impossible, I knew crazier things could happen. I, for example, was escorting John Gierach to John Voelker’s famed Frenchman's Pond.

October brook trout

The beauty of even the most diminutive brookies eclipses all others

by Chris Hunt - Saturday, Oct 5th, 2024

Photo: Rueben Browning.

Some years ago, while working as a newspaper journalist in the mountains of Colorado, I remember having an epiphany that I couldn’t help but include in a piece I did for the paper on fall fly fishing. At the time, we were enjoying a really nice Indian summer — we had a blustery start to September and then, as things are prone to do in the southern Rockies, those perfectly blue and cloudless skies came back, along with warm temperatures and that flawless golden hue that graces the aspens and the cottonwoods of the West every autumn.

Beloved author John Gierach passes away at 78

Gierach was one of fly fishing's most iconic voices

by Hatch Magazine - Friday, Oct 4th, 2024

John Gierach signing the guest book at John Voelker's cabin (photo: Tim Schulz).

Iconic storyteller and self-described trout bum John Gierach died on Thursday, Oct. 3, after suffering a massive heart attack. His passing was first reported in a Facebook post by Gierach’s long-time friend, AK Best.

Due to alarming king salmon bycatch, feds close Alaskan pollock trawl fishery

Excessively high bycatch numbers continue to challenge the idea that trawl fisheries are sustainable

by Chris Hunt - Wednesday, Oct 2nd, 2024

Chinook salmon (photo: USFWS).

The notion that Alaskan pollock are a sustainably caught fish took a mighty blow last week when the National Marine Fisheries Service closed the Gulf of Alaska pollock trawl fishery after a pair of midwater trawlers reported the bycatch of 2,000 increasingly rare Chinook salmon in a single day.

Protecting California's Medicine Lake Highlands

Nestled within three national forests, these water-rich, geologically unique lands demand greater protections

by Tom Hazelton - Tuesday, Oct 1st, 2024

Mt. Shasta looms over the Pit and Fall Rivers (photo: Kimberley Hasselbrink).

The first time I saw a spring was the first time I fished with my friend Erick Johnson. He brought me to his favorite bend on a famous northern Michigan river, where he showed me a muddy depression covered in pine needles. He swept them aside to reveal a small dark pool of cold, clear water, watercress-framed, into which he sank a pair of stubby Coors bottles. Later, after a decent spinnerfall and a few good trout at last light, we drank those numbingly-cold beers on the bank, listening to the fish, still rising in the dark.