Category: Best Places to Fish

Big trout. We hear that phrase bandied about, but what does it mean? These are the fish that we talk about in pounds not inches. A rainbow that tips the scales at 10 pounds. A brook trout that weighs in at 6 pounds. An 8-pound brown trout. A 10-pound cutthroat. A 20-pound lake trout. A…

They took out the stoplight on I-90 in 1991 and the townsfolk in Wallace, Idaho, their feelings hurt by the freeway bypass, proclaimed a manhole cover the Center of the Universe. I remember the stoplight. We stopped there in the 1970s on a trip to Montana. We ate lunch in a diner then hit the…

Up on the bridge, the captain fired the 350 horse diesel and the engine leaped to life. Below, the deck hand cast off mooring lines and we slid away from the dock, Newport’s bay front fading into the fog-shrouded morning. Before us, the mist parted, revealing the Yaquina Bay Bridge, spires and arches lifting high…

It was a rare opportunity. My brother-in-law had permission to fish on the property as long as he was wiring the new house there. And, because most of the fishable water on that particular river is bounded by private water, I jumped at the chance to go along. It was an overcast summer morning, with…

Pine needles filtered down against a leaden sky. A breeze whispered of snowflakes yet to come. My daughter, almost grown now, carried her own fly rod. This was the river where I had introduced her to the sport so many summers ago, when she stood alongside as I cast and tempted a trout to the…