Articles

The ties that bind the Outdoor Retailer show

Cross-continent collaboration in search of consumer tolerated pricing
There are 1,626 exhibitors at Outdoor Retailer Show 2016. Among them are 333 fishing related vendors (photo: Kris Millgate).

I’m having breakfast before I walk through the Outdoor Retailer Show in Salt Lake City, Utah in early August. The conversation at the table next to me is a combination of English and Chinese. I’m reviewing my media appointments for the day so the talk to my right is background noise until I hear the word wader. Not the waiter pouring coffee in cups, but wader. The kind I wear when I fish. I stop drafting questions for upcoming interviews and start listening to the wader discussion.

Howl

If forced to pick a favorite from my bevy of cruel mistresses, it would have to be the Peshtigo
Photo: Ken Lund (adapted).

The Empty Corner of northeastern Wisconsin boasts a suite of brawling freestone rivers with which I have a longstanding love-hate relationship. I love them for their prideful beauty and for their occasional benevolences; I hate them for the way they draw me in, raise my hopes, and, as often as not, dash them.

But then, I suppose that’s only to be expected when you ignore the lessons of history.

Spray casting

How grizzlies change fishing trips
Yellowstone cutthroat trout consider the North Fork of the Shoshone River their home. So do grizzly bears (photo: Kris Millgate).

It’s my first time fishing the Shoshone River near Cody, Wyoming. It’s my first time fishing with bear spray clipped on my wading belt. It’s the first time a guide has followed me into the willows when I sneak off for a bathroom break.

​I’m used to living, working and playing in Idaho’s bear country. I’m bear aware, but Cody takes the conflict to a whole new level. The area has to. Grizzlies have a stronghold here.

The new normal

Are you ready for it?
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
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.

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