2018 has been a continuous road trip for me. The road trip has been a combination of trips to some old familiar streams and rivers that are special to me as well as some visits to many places that were totally new. The first year of a new three-year book project has taken me all over Pennsylvania in the course of conducting my “research” with a tent, a fly rod, my camera and some pretty special friends that have tagged along as accomplices. There’s been encounters with bears,

“….we followed no trail, just stream-sound tangled in rhododendron, to where slow water opened a hole to slip a line in and lift as from a well bright, shadows of another world ……” I think this Ron Rash poem excerpt captures the essence and wildness of fishing a headwater stream better than any other I’ve ever read. A beautiful depiction of the small stream pursuit many of us know and love. Thin blue lines, quiet woods cloaked in moss and shadows, a place where a person can g

Ever since I was a teenager I’ve dreamed of having the chance to fish in Yellowstone Park; and more specifically, to fish the Firehole River. Ernest Schwiebert described it as the “Strangest Trout Stream on Earth” in his classic book “Remembrances of Rivers Past”, which is a fantastic read. The Firehole River has been on my bucket list ever since. Thanks to my good friend Dan Barr, I finally had my chance to visit this strange and beautiful land of geysers, hot springs, fumar

I’m writing this today while looking at an angry stream that’s busy churning, chocolate, rolling out well beyond its banks and not looking anything the one I’ve fished for the past 40 years. Welcome to eastern Pennsylvania and the summer of monsoons. While it doesn’t look like I’ll be casting a fly there anytime soon, my thoughts turn from fishing toward the wild trout that swim there and how they can endure this. Thousands of years of adaptation to changing conditions, flood

I met Sally; the Yellow Sally (Isoperla bilineata) that is, for the first time years ago as a much younger man on my first trip to Pennsylvania’s Kettle creek. It’s a hatch that has brought me a lot of great memories in the years since then, and my fly pattern “Ramsay’s Little Yellow Stone” was the first original pattern I ever designed and one of my “go to” flies. I’m honored to have one of my images of this beautiful little bug in the July / August issue of Eastern Fly Fish