Blog Archives

Back from the Brink

Posted on by Geraldine Mathias / Leave a comment

My spouse Jim is an avid fisherman. Did I say avid? He’s a fanatic about fishing. When I told him I was driving down to the new Springfield Fish Hatchery for sockeye salmon to interview the manager and have a tour of the facility there, he was more than ready to accompany me. “I’ll be your photographer,” he announced. Continue reading →

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The Fishing Hole

Posted on by The Editors / Leave a comment

When I was a young girl, a friend and her family took me fishing on Warm River, about fifteen miles north of Rexburg in Fremont County. I had never been fishing before, so it was a memorable experience. Last April, on a nice day to take a drive, when it was slightly overcast and I was suffering from a bit of spring fever, I set out to see if I could find the same area I had fished so many years earlier. Continue reading →

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Ice versus Fly

Posted on by Ron McFarland / Leave a comment

When I arrived in Idaho more than forty years ago, I swore I would not allow myself to fall prey to the allure and blandishments of fly-fishing enthusiasts. I would not yield to the mystique. I felt the whole business was too darned precious, a tad too hoity-toity. Also, fly fishing would doubtless require a pricey set of waders, a costly fly rod, a broad array of feathery insects (not cheap), and exotic volumes of arcana dating back to Sir Izaak Walton and Charles Cotton. If I were to “get involved” with this ostensibly fair maiden, it could prove risky in various ways. Instead of the reliable, stationary, bank-fishing mistress I’d courted over the years, I would find myself incessantly rambling along the banks of rivers and creeks, splashing across snot-slippery rocks in icy mountain streams. I would fall head over heels, and not necessarily in love. I would need to access an entirely different langue d’amour having to do with everything from tippets to matching the hatch, from roll-casting to where-the-hell-did-that-willow-come-from? She seemed out of my league. I could imagine myself whispering regretfully one evening as the mayflies hatched and I tied on a Light Cahill with my newly-mastered clinch knot, “This is getting too complicated.” Continue reading →

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Austin Goes West

Posted on by Les Tanner / Leave a comment

I’ve got one,” Austin said quietly as I was in the middle of a cast. I looked up to see my oldest grandson standing knee-deep in the cold water, a few yards upstream from where I was fishing—and sure enough, his fly rod was bent into a big curve. He definitely had a fish on.

I was surprised that Austin was so calm. But he was a cool kid, even at eleven years old—and he remained cool in spite of the fact that he had hooked his first trout of the day. Continue reading →

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North to Heyburn

Posted on by Kimberly Landon / Leave a comment

The first time I went pike fishing, five years ago, my dad and I packed the old SUV to the gills with various spinner baits, all-weather clothing, and more food than either of us would know what to do with.

We headed north to Heyburn State Park, to fish with Dad’s buddy Ron. Up until then, those two had taken an annual, man-only trip, but this year I was allowed to crash the party. As we drove through the canyon between New Meadows and Riggins, Dad quizzed me on the names of several songs by ZZ Top, AC/DC, Def Leppard, and Ted Nugent. A moose waded nonchalantly into the waters of the Salmon River, and I tried to be the first to spot a deer.

Five years later, on a placid morning at Lake Coeur d’Alene, my husband Brock and I walk down the marina docks, following Ron to his boathouse. Barn swallows dart in and out of the rafters as we tie on our tackle for the day, and Ron teaches me the first fishing knot that I can remember to tie on my own. Once we pack our food and emergency rain clothes into dry storage, we head out past the pilings towards our first stop for the day, the Mill Pond. I smile at the sight of Brock experiencing for the first time the sheer speed of the boat as we power under the Chatcolet Bridge.

We headed north to Heyburn State Park, to fish with Dad’s buddy Ron. Up until then, those two had taken an annual, man-only trip, but this year I was allowed to crash the party. As we drove through the canyon between New Meadows and Riggins, Dad quizzed me on the names of several songs by ZZ Top, AC/DC, Def Leppard, and Ted Nugent. A moose waded nonchalantly into the waters of the Salmon River, and I tried to be the first to spot a deer.

Five years later, on a placid morning at Lake Coeur d’Alene, my husband Brock and I walk down the marina docks, following Ron to his boathouse. Barn swallows dart in and out of the rafters as we tie on our tackle for the day, and Ron teaches me the first fishing knot that I can remember to tie on my own. Once we pack our food and emergency rain clothes into dry storage, we head out past the pilings towards our first stop for the day, the Mill Pond. I smile at the sight of Brock experiencing for the first time the sheer speed of the boat as we power under the Chatcolet Bridge.

Ron has a top-of-the-line Ranger Bass Boat, equipped with fish and depth finders, a trolling motor that can be driven from the front of the boat by foot, and enough horsepower to blow your cheeks back. That first day on the boat five years earlier, I had been caught completely off guard when he hit the gas. My dad’s eyes had shone with laughter at how fast my hands grabbed for anything that would keep me in my seat. He and Ron promised I wouldn’t be catapulted out as we flew towards the Mill Pond. I’d never been pike fishing before, and was more excited than a school kid on the first day of summer. Continue reading →

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Tied and True

Posted on by Les Tanner / Leave a comment

Just so you’ll know who’s writing this, I caught my first trout on a fly in the summer of 1945. I still have the fly (gray pillow feathers tied to a long-shanked #8 bait hook with pink sewing thread). So I’m not a fly-fishing newbie.

I’m not a purist, either. On a windy and up-to-that-point fishless trip a few years back, I completely surprised my buddy by abandoning flies in favor of a grasshopper on a #10 Eagle Claw. Caught a nice brown right away, too.

Most of my fishing is done on smaller streams, but I’ve fished the South Fork of the Snake River a few times with a limited amount of success. However, the size of the river and the scarcity of access to wading fishermen such as I restricts most of the fishing there to float-boaters.

After reading Snake River Flies (WestWind Press, 2014) by Boots Allen, I’m eager to do a lot more fishing there. I want to take another shot or two—or many—at the river, this time using flies that were created, tested, and popularized by expert fly-fishers and fly-tyers from the area. One of these is the author, a third generation Snake River fly-fisherman. Others are folks like Bob Carmichael, Marcella Oswald, and Bob Bean, none of whom I’d heard of before I read the book. My loss. Continue reading →

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Those Were the Days

Posted on by Ted Trueblood / Leave a comment

Those were the days, my friend; we thought they’d never end.” I liked that song.

I‘ve been there.

In 1954 the Weiser River was running clear when the spring chinooks turned into it from the Snake, a rare thing. Much of the drainage of the Weiser had been devastated by abusive logging and grazing, and when the hard rains came or the snow melted quickly in the spring the red mud flowed into the river and I never saw the Weiser high and clear. Streams in the wilderness may be up and flowing through the willows and yet be so clear you can count the pebbles on the bottom. But they know not the cow and bulldozer.

We got the word from Fred Einsphar on May 30. He had a ranch along the river from about halfway between the town and Galloway Dam, and he was a sportsman. Herb Carlson, Clare Conley, and I were there early the next morning. There were no other anglers.

Herb and Clare had spinning tackle. I had my nine-foot, five-and-a-quarter-ounce Winston and a three-and fifth-eighths-inch Hardy Perfect reel filled with backing, monofilament, and a shooting head—my steelhead tackle. I intended to use nothing else. I believed that salmon would hit a fly as well in Idaho as in the tidewater pools of the Eel and this was the chance to test my theory. Continue reading →

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Sorting Spawners

Posted on by Kris Millgate / Leave a comment

On weekends, I hit the hills with my family to play and at the same time I scout for places to shoot video. On weekdays, I return to those places with my camera equipment to work.

Following this routine of scout, then shoot, I’m lying on wet boulders in Swan Valley’s Palisades Creek on a sunny June day. While hiking with my kids the previous Sunday, I saw fish jumping a four-foot waterfall. Now it’s Monday afternoon and I’ve returned in waders. It’s sweaty hot on the rocks. It’s painfully hard to hold still. I’m belly-growl hungry for the granola bar in my pack on the bank. I’m questioning my strategy when the first trout finally breaks the current in front of my lens.

“It is really amazing what fish can do when they’re trying to go spawn,” says Brett High, Idaho Department of Fish and Game regional fisheries biologist, as he sits by the rushing river on an overturned bucket. “We’ve seen fish hold their positions almost vertically for several seconds.” Continue reading →

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Tricks of the Trade

Posted on by Les Tanner / Leave a comment

It was my wife’s response to a completely innocent question that got me to thinking about writing this, so blame her.

“When can I go fishing again?” I asked as I unloaded my gear after returning from my latest three-day excursion to the Lochsa River.

“Why on Earth do you think you need to go again? You’ve already learned everything there is to know about fishing. Instead, you should be mowing the lawn and fixing the leaky faucet in the bathroom sink and—”

If there’s anything I have learned in the past almost-sixty years, it’s how to tune her out when she begins talking like that. The more I thought about her answer, though, the more I returned to her statement that I know everything about fishing. Of course I don’t. Who does? But I do believe that I’ve gained more than a little bit of information about the sport in the past seventy-five years. I expect to be at it for another twenty-five or thirty years, too, but this might be a good time to jot down some of what I’ve learned. So here, for the first time in print, are a few of my tricks of the trade.

A major problem is knowing where to start, of course. Another will be knowing when to stop. I won’t describe how I became involved with fishing. For one thing, the first fish I ever caught was purely an accident (which describes a large percentage of what I’ve caught since then, as well), and because accidents can’t be planned, the details aren’t important.

Nor will I spell out precisely how to choose rods and reels and lines and lures, and how to read water and tie flies and so on. Those are the subjects of umpteen zillion books and videos and TV programs intended for folks at the two extremes of the fishing spectrum: those who don’t know which end of the long stick to tie the string to, and those who would bypass a fishing safari to Chile or New Zealand in favor of a month-long workshop on tying Royal Coachman flies on #38 hooks.

So I guess I’ll have to zero in on the subtler things that make me the guy that people point at and say, “See that guy in the orange hat? Somebody told me once that he’s a pretty good fisherman.” (I started that rumor many years ago, and it really caught on.) Continue reading →

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