Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2025 i The Drake

WHEN I WAS A KID I was all about using Mepps spinners. Both my parents were from Minnesota, and my earliest fishing memories are of casting a Mepps Aglia or Black Fury off my grandmother’s dock for crappie, bluegill, and the occasional bass. In 1973 Mepps launched its “Master Angler” program: I’d mail Mepps a photo of me bass slayin’ and they’d mail me back a bitchin’ bass patch that Mom would sew on my jacket. Win-win! Thirty years later I came across the “Louisiana Bassport,” where anglers got stamps for catching bass in Louisiana state parks. Louisiana’s Bassport program sadly ended the following year. So now we’re launching our own version. Instead of state parks, The Drake Bassport features eight different bass species, with illustrations provided by uber-talented artists…

ALL I WANTED to do was bring a piece of home back home. A few months ago, a longtime fishing pal passed. It hit hard, as I had grown up fishing with him; he taught me to play Hearts in salmon camp, and how to make a proper gin and tonic. He and my dad were close, and he owned one of my dad’s bamboo rods. When that rod came to auction recently via a small UK auction house, it held a double whammy of sentimental value for me. So I bought it. Or, I paid for it at least. We’ll call this installment number one. During the live auction, which occurred the week after the tariffs were introduced, the British auctioneer repeatedly bemoaned all of the low bids due…

PHIL CAN’T FIND LUNCH. This is a problem because Phil, 35, a jovial flyfishing guide, has to meet his clients in thirty minutes. I stand next to him at 7:30 a.m. in the parking lot of a local bakery/sandwich shop in Missoula, where a line of bearded, bleary-eyed men step out of SUVs, and file through the front door. Phil checks his watch. “Well, crap,” he says. We see Brad, a muscular, sunburned guide with Steve McQueen eyes, walk out of the store. He turns and waves. “Better luck tomorrow!” he says. “Early bird gets the sandwich.” Not many people equate buying lunch with eventually paying rent, but flyfishing guides do. On a given workday, each oarsman’s life brings its share of occupational questions: Which flies to use? How fast…

In a universe sufficiently large or long-lived, everything physically possible will actually happen. Any steelheader who has spent enough time on the river knows this well. In case you have not mulled over the statistical mechanics of thermal equilibria lately, imagine a box filled with gas particles. As these particles move around, they will spread evenly throughout the volume of the box. Still, by random chance, at any given moment there might be more particles on one side of the box than the other. Over time there could occur much less likely fluctuations, like all the particles finding themselves packed into a small corner of the box. Such an arrangement would last only a fraction of a second before poofing back into some other, far more statistically likely, configuration. What…

Wilford Woodruff must have been buzzing as he rigged his bamboo rod, about to flyfish for the first time in America. After a thousand-mile trek from Illinois to southwestern Wyoming with a company of wagon pioneers, the early Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints leader had just encountered water unlike any he’d seen since learning to flyfish a couple years earlier on England’s River Ribble. The Mormon vanguard had crossed more than a dozen mouth-watering trout streams before camping near Fort Bridger, close to where the Blacks Fork of the Green flows. The following morning, Woodruff grabbed his rod and likely made flyfishing history. On July 8, 1847, he cast his fly and watched the drift with as much interest, he later wrote, as “Franklin did his kite when…

MID-JUNE IS HEAT-STROKE season in New Mexico’s Gila country. The sun dries you out like a four-dollar steak under a warming lamp, and wind whips sand that chaps every exposed inch of skin. It’s a brittle, harsh time. Nevertheless, living and adventuring in the desert has taught me that I prefer it bluebird, hot, and blowing hard—it makes the complaints more colorful when you can alternate your bitching between the wind and the heat. Aldo Leopold said the Gila was so big that you need a horse to traverse it. But I’ve never let good advice deter me from a dumb idea. There’s a dwindling strain of native trout in these parts that I’d been wanting to add to my life’s tally. So, with my old friend Jess in need…

TERRY HARMON steps lively as he walks. We are crossing the campus at University School, a college prep academy in northeast Ohio, where Harmon has been an instructor since 1972, teaching such varied subjects as outdoor skills, watershed management, and embryology. Now 85, Harmon is starting to slow a bit, but I still have to walk briskly to keep pace. Harmon is a lover of wild places and wild creatures, especially his beloved brook trout, the only trout other than lake trout that is native to Ohio. This interest began on a Canadian fishing trip with his father and sister when Harmon was just a boy. They caught brookies, and the delicate beauty of these fish fascinated him. The Harmon family farm had a spring-fed pond, and his mother was…

“My bill exempts 15 categories of land. And even then, it’s less than ONE PERCENT of federal land.” (6/20/25) Translation: “One percent of federal land is 6.4 million acres, more than Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Glacier, and Everglades national parks combined.” (You’re not so good at this, are you?) “Housing prices are crushing families and keeping young Americans from living where they grew up.” (6/23/25) Translation: “Nothing lowers housing prices like slapping a crappy condo over the only public creek in my hometown!” “I plan to establish FREEDOM ZONES to ensure these lands benefit AMERICAN FAMILIES.” (6/23/25) Translation: “Freedomzones is just another word for nothing left to lose.” (Side note: We just polled every human on earth, and no one has any idea what the fuck a “Freedom Zone” is.) “I’m…

THE ORIGINS of many Lake Superior tributaries are hard to pinpoint. If you zoom in on the six-hundred-square-mile Lake Superior Provincial Park, you’ll see more lakes than it seems possible to pack into a single landscape, almost all of which have tributaries flowing into tributaries that course into lakes with more tributaries which, at some point, end up in the Sup’. Consequently, I could never figure out where the Sand River really began. But I knew exactly where it ended: close to the mouth, within sight of Lake Superior proper, at an impassible set of falls that stop all species of migratory fish, including chinook, coho, and pink salmon, steelhead and walleye, likely a few smallmouth bass in late spring, and the occasional Lake Superior coaster brook trout, which spend…

WE RESCUED HER in early March, the last of a ten-puppy litter. Darkest in color, she stood out from her siblings, which ranged from light tan to mahogany brown. The last lingering puppy, her sleek black coat and a grey swath on her back-right paw prompted the name, Ember. For much of March, she tagged along on our fishing trips, creek-stomping with joyful chaos only a young pup could muster. As spring rains fell and flowering buds bloomed, Ember grew into her oversized paws. On the way to and from the water, she’d tuck herself snugly between the waders, boots, and rods, already knowing her next ride meant prime bird-watching time while we chased hatches in the tri-state area. When the cicada emergence came through in late May and early…

EIGHT GUYS FROM MINNEAPOLIS and one Bostonian were on Cuba’s Isla de la Juventud. Our first day I was paired with the youngest and most inexperienced guide, Yulde, who’d learned his English from country music radio. Halfway through the day Yulde fell off the poling platform, temporarily losing the push pole but permanently ruining his smokes. The day ended with Yulde getting the anchor stuck on the reef. After several attempts at retrieving it, we tied the other end of the anchor rope to a life vest and finally returned to the mothership. Yulde was exhausted, and I needed a mojito. The next day I fished with Paul and we drew Arnold as our guide. But first we helped retrieve the anchor. Yulde, now wearing goggles, gave it his best…

Editor’s Note: On June 23, as many of us were in the midst of fighting the historically deplorable proposal to sell our public lands, the Trump administration announced its repeal of the 2001 Roadless Rule, opening up 58 million acres of pristine national forests to development. Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, America’s largest at 16.7 million acres, is home to bears, wolves, wild steelhead, and longtime Drake contributor Jeff Lund, who has words to share. —TB IF YOU’RE LUCKY ENOUGH to put wet hands on an Alaskan steelhead, fingers often become dull and red, then purple and numb. You could sit under a tree and warm up, but that’s not where the fish are, and being at least a little uncomfortable is a prerequisite for steelheading. While not a volume fishery…

A FLOAT TUBE is the wrong vessel for Dworshak Reservoir. The lake is more than fifty miles long, nearly twenty thousand acres, in some of the wildest country in Idaho. A friend who hunts elk in the surrounding forest, usually from a boat-in only campsite, refers to the lake as “Big D.” I knew all of this before I showed up there in early May to search for smallmouth. Yet there I was, shouldering a float tube to a beach a few hundred yards from the launch, trying to avoid hearing the jet-boat crowd laughing when I strapped fins on. There was a cove south of the ramp that had a rock wall on the far side, a little more than a quarter-mile from where I put in. A few…

Q: Dear Trask, I’m an Epicyon haydeni, biggest dog ever, and native to North America. Since direwolves are now back, and since flyfishy types love natives… is it cool if we come out of hiding? We’ve been gone six zillion years, but some biotech bro de-extincted us in May—we’ve been living on his Bozeman ranch since we ate him. (PS: I’m 8 feet long, 260 lbs, if that’s a thing.) —Epi A: Dear Epi, I’m behind on my borophagines podcast, but aren’t you, technically, like a hyena or something, what with the bone-crushing jaws and all? Whatever. Doesn’t matter. As long as you were native here at some point, you’ll be welcomed. We’ll likely put a dozen of you in cages and release you, probably in LA or Chicago or Portland.…

ON THE WAY to the landing, I saw that the church was for sale. Even sanctity has a price tag, I suppose. Looks like the man with Ohio plates has moved permanently into his vacation home. More time for him to fish, perhaps, but that’s always an impossible standard, regardless of age. Although I’ve never met him, we are familiar with each other. When Tyler and I were fishing across from his place and idled toward the bank to photograph a bald eagle, we heard what sounded like gunfire hitting the water, only to find it was a meatball of redfish ravishing the surface, repeatedly. The reds weren’t eating selfishly, but symbiotically, ambushing as a group so forcefully that their prey—a smattering of shrimp and minnows—was sent spraying onto the…

LAST JUNE, my wife, Denise, asked me to stop speaking to her—in English. I have friends who dream of this. Not me. I like my wife. French, she said, would be fine. She would be attending an immersion program and taking a French-only language pledge. If she broke the pledge, she’d be asked to leave. Militant? Yes. But also very French. My wife has an obsession. She loves French the way I love fish. Of course, this was before we found ourselves in Guadeloupe, with her hooked to a big jack headed for blue water. This was also before our guide—a kid, really—or, more specifically, a punk kid, who, when he wasn’t poling us aimlessly through the mangroves, or giving me grief about my casting, was tapping away on his…

A SHARP SUN is pinned overhead, drilling into the back of my neck like a hot desk lamp. I’m alone in a rowboat on a lake, a shallow depression with the sort of soft marl bottom that squelches unpleasantly between the toes. Its shape is the result of glacial waves that once buried northern Michigan in six thousand feet of hard, gray ice. In late June, with a ring of leafy oaks surrounding the lake and the air hanging wet and heavy, the fact that there was even snow here three months ago seems unlikely, and a mile of ice, impossible. When it’s hot here it seems like it’s always been hot, and always will be. From the air I’m a dot in the middle of a mirrored lake among…

This is never going to work. That’s what I thought, anyway, as we were trying to catch a king salmon on a Hardy Perfect Kings Coronation fly reel. The idea was to take a vintage collectible reel worth nearly five grand and do justice to the King. It was early September and Teddy and I were on the ferry heading to Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. We only had a few days there, but we planned to make the most of it. The goal—Teddy’s idea—was to take this collector’s reel, many of which never even get attached to a rod, and land a Chinook on it. It’s a tall feat, demanding a high level of proficiency and a lot of luck. The King’s Coronation is a unique, limited-edition 4-inch Perfect built…

“CAREFUL,” Rick cautioned us, “when you get to the other side, there’s barbed wire hanging down.” I was crouched behind him, following two other anglers beneath a low bridge. Hunched over, fly rods in hand, we navigated through the crawl space, our boots slipping on silty ground as the rush of water reverberated off concrete piers. The air smelled like a cocktail of marijuana grow-houses, oil refineries, and wastewater treatment plants, all of which surrounded the water we were trying to reach. “We call it The Stink,” Rick said, his voice echoing through the shadows. Emerging, we took turns shimmying around the sharp strands of wire. As I ducked through, the strap of my backpack snagged, jerking me backward. “I’m caught,” I shouted, reaching awkwardly behind me. “You gotta get…