View from Kluane Wilderness Lodge

north. The only time you have to be accounted for is at 6 p.m. for dinner and a headcount.

Wellesley is a fertile lake that grows giant lake trout and big northern pike, along with lake whitefish. I’m eager to try for all three, including those big whitefish—up to seven pounds—on dry flies. This early in the season there will also be some indicator and

Got some tools of the trade and I’m ready to throw.

chironomid fishing for lake trout that range between four and 15 pounds. Deeper, with sinking lines, I’ll be working massive streamers for the big lake trout, meaning fish that could reach 40 or 50 pounds. In the backwater bays and shallows, I’ll also be throwing for northern pike that range to 45 inches.

Just one like that and I would be stoked.

I think this is going to be an absolute fish fest and I expect to be thoroughly worn out by the end of it. I’ll be packing video equipment and a new Nikon camera with me and I’ll be

On the fly, yo.

eager to share the experience with you when I return. There’s the heads-up if you don’t see a post for few days. I’ll bombard you when I get back.

Holy whitefish!

Taking a friend with for photo purposes and because we fish well together, so I’m hoping to get some “double” shots like this one.

Still, rain or shine, my motto is FISH! So that’s what we did on Sunday. We packed up a crew of dudes and two rafts and headed to Rock Creek to float and fish the high roily stuff for browns and cutthroats. The weather people said it would be in the 70s that day, but I think I remember seeing the truck’s outdoor thermometer reading 42 degrees. And then the rain started and it didn’t stop all day, meaning we slogged through it for at least 8 hours. It was a good test of gear, that’s for sure with everyone reporting some level of saturation. Me, I got a little rain down my back, but only because I was delayed in putting a hood over my cap.

The fish were there and they were aggressive despite the weather. We landed scads of native westslope cutthroat, but only to modest size with, perhaps, the largest measuring 16 inches. I brought one brown to hand but we couldn’t get any of the big boys to eat. Following are images from the day. Hope you enjoy.

Blown focus here with my little Nikon 1, but this gives you an idea of the area and weather.

The Fitzpatrick brothers telling stories. You don’t want to know.

The passing of Rangers held the cold at bay, but we could have used a little Makers from a flask, too.

We didn’t let the weather and being wet and cold dampen our moods. Lots of fun with a great crew.

The girls caught this one and I said, if you are going to keep it we are eating it tonight. They said, “Yea, we’ll eat that.” I filleted it to the best of my ability, rinsed it, rolled it in a little olive oil, then put it in a zip-lok with Progresso Italian seasoning crumbs, and a few extra spices, then shook it up and fried it in olive oil, with a splash of soy to give it a beautiful brown hue. Girls ate it like candy and I felt like it was a good bass farm to fork lesson. We’ll give the bass a break for a while, but we had a blast with them while it was on.

But one thing puzzles me; since I founded this Web site a few years ago the book reviews I’ve written have hardly entertained response. Why? Am I wrong that fly fishers are natural readers? Are my reviews so boring that nobody cares to say a thing about them?

Who knows, is my answer.

Despite that response, I figured I would put together a super short summer reading list of classic outdoors titles, for all of us to consider when heading out this summer, whether traveling afar to a posh lodge, or backpacking into a remote lake, or somewhere in between those extremes. This isn’t a fly fishing book list. This is a book list. Feel free to point out titles that you like and that I’ve missed here, or to elaborate on any of the titles I’ve mentioned. Have fun with it. To me, these books are the types of reads that can keep you entertained in squalid airports, like the Bahamas domestic “lounge” or while waiting out two days of rain, kicked bak in your tent, at 10,000 feet in Wyoming’s Wind River Range while fly fishing for golden trout. Give them a try. Just good writing and reading here.

In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin (1977)
From Outside Magazine
We know you’re thinking: Idiots, it’s fiction! But the claims that Chatwin lied to fashion the episodes and characters that make up this exquisite little book turn out to be greater exaggerations than Chatwin’s own. Sure, he got things out of order, mangled some Spanish, and dished up a few now-classic Chatwinian embellishments (Se-ora Eberhard’s run-of-the-mill steel chair becoming a Mies van der Rohe, for one). But In Patagonia is at heart a personal quest to find the origins of boyhood fascination, “a piece of brontosaurus” supposedly recovered from a thawed glacier in Punta Arenas by Chatwin’s seafaring cousin. At first Chatwin’s prose seems uniform like Hemingway, only boring. But his subtle sentences sneak up on you, and their economy allows him to surprise, leaving an indelible impression. Take Walter Rauff, exiled Nazi and inventor of the lethal Mobile Gas Truck: “There is a man in Punta Arenas, dreams pine forests, hums Lieder, wakes each morning and sees the black strait. He drives to a factory that smells of sea. All about him are scarlet crabs, crawling, then steaming. He hears the shells crack and the claws breaking, sees the sweet white flesh packed firm in metal cans….Does he remember that other smell, of burning?” Chatwin’s haunting images stay with you, reminding you that this is one messed-up, astonishing world.

Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger (1959)
From National Geographic
THE LAST GREAT British explorer? Eric Newby, for one, might jokingly beg to differ, but that’s because Thesiger called him a pansy when they met in the Hindu Kush. Sir Wilfred, the now-92-year-old troubadour who explored Arabia’s Empty Quarter before the oil fields tamed Bedouin culture, valiantly resists the lame camel jokes made by so many of his contemporary countrymen and, in contrast to many of today’s travel diarists, rarely makes himself the subject of his own stories. Thesiger’s love of the desert is never easy, always hard-won. “I climbed a slope above our camp and bin Kabina joined me. I was hungry; I had only half my portion of the ash-encrusted bread the night before. The brackish water which I had drunk at sunset had done little to lessen my nagging thirst. Yet the sky seemed bluer than it had been for days. The sand was a glowing carpet set about my feet.” For us, the question was merely, Which Thesiger? Yes, Marsh Arabs may be, as some critics claim, the better book, but Arabian Sands is electric. And sure, we love those pithy quotes from T. E. Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, but we’re in no mood for that bombast cover to cover. Stick with Thesiger: He’ll make you wish you were born 50 years earlier and could make the trips he did with him.

The Long Walk By Slavomir Rawicz (1956)
From National Geographic
The author, a Polish cavalry officer, and six other men escaped from a Siberian prison camp in 1941, walked across Mongolia and the Gobi, through Tibet and the Himalaya, enduring incredible hardship all the way. Four of them made it to India and safety. It is a 3,000-mile (4,830-kilometer) epic, truly grand.
Lyons Press, 1997.

Sailing Alone Around the World By Joshua Slocum (1900)
From National Geographic
At loose ends and in your 50s, what better way to pass the time than to sail alone around the world? The journey took three years and covered 46,000 miles (74,000 kilometer); Slocum was chased by pirates, survived major storms, suffered hallucinations. But he made it. He was the first to do it alone. Then he wrote this marvelous, salty book. In 1909, he put to sea again. This time, he disappeared.
National Geographic Books, 2004.
The Snow LeopardBy Peter Matthiessen (1978)
From National Geographic

He sees wolves, he sees the wild blue sheep of the Himalaya, but he never does see a snow leopard. Never mind, this is still Matthiessen’s best book, a moving spiritual quest and a mountain adventure that celebrates the beauty of this dramatic country and the transcendence concealed in simple day-by-day survival.
Penguin, 2001.

The Snow Leopard review from Outside Magazine
SIMPLY PUT, The Snow Leopard gets to the heart of why we go to the mountains. There are many other fine books on the subject John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra comes to mind but none succeed, as Matthiessen’s does, on so many levels. One could say, for example, that it’s a book about sheep. After all, it delivers a funny, anecdotal account of American zoologist George Schaller’s field research on the Himalayan blue sheep, or bharal. (“Oh, there’s a penis-lick!” G.S. cries out, observing the rut. “A beauty.”) Then there’s the mythic cat of the title, which had been glimpsed by only two Westerners when Matthiessen and Schaller set out to track it in 1973. And the place the mysterious Land of Dolpo, a last enclave of Tibetan culture. And finally, without ever becoming a book about recovery, The Snow Leopard charts how the author came back to life after a great loss his wife, Deborah, had died of cancer the year before he left for the Himalayas. “Why is death so much on my mind when I do not feel I am afraid of it?” Matthiessen asks, while walking a sheer Himalayan ridge. “Between clinging and letting go, I feel a terrific struggle. This is a fine chance to let go, to ‘win my life by losing it.’”

Arabian SandsBy Wilfred Thesiger (1959)

From National Geographic
The southern Arabian desert, a quarter million square miles of sand (650,000 square kilometers), is now a place of oil wells and Land Rovers, but before the 1950s it was still known as the Empty Quarter, a place you entered only on camel and only as an Arab. Only a few white men had ever seen it, much less crossed it. From 1945 to 1950, the British Thesiger crossed it twice, living with the Bedouin, sharing their hard lives. His book is the classic of desert exploration, a door opening on a vanished feudal world. It is a book of touches, little things-why the Bedouin will never predict the weather (“since to do so would be to claim knowledge that belongs to God”), how they know when the rabbit is in its hole and can be caught. It is written with great respect for these people and with an understanding that acknowledges its limits. With humility, that is, which is appropriate. Fail the humility test, and the desert will surely kill you.
Viking, 1985.

Fishing the Henry’s Fork during a summer evening, with mayflies dancing around and trout rising in front, is one of our sport’s quintessential experiences.

summer, or if you just want to read about a cool river that you should be fishing this summer.

2013 Looking Forward    by Rene Harrop

For several decades, it has been generally understood that fishing on the Henry’s Fork is shaped during the season when the least amount of opportunity is available. And while it is true that seasonal closures on some stretches of the river can provide relief to beleaguered trout that must withstand near constant human disruption for nearly half of the year, it is the influence of winter weather patterns that largely determine the status of

Whitefish Ed is just one of the characters you might meet while fishing the legendary Henry’s Fork.

the fishery. Even in late April one takes a serious risk in pronouncing the end of a winter essentially free of extremes in temperature or precipitation, but a 70 degree day and a good caddis hatch nudge caution aside just enough to take a chance…. READ MORE

From left to right Orvis Chairman Dave Perkins – Camp Bonaventure and Salmon Lodge General manager Junior St-Onge – Camp Bonaventure & Salmon Lodge Owner Glenn LeGrand – Orvis director of Eastern Endorsed lodges Scott McEnaney.

If you are thinking about fishing Atlantic salmon this summer or early fall—and, by the way, you should be thinking about fishing Atlantic salmon this summer or fall—you would be doing yourself a favor to visit the Web sites of Salmon Lodge on the Cascapedia, and Bonaventure Lodge.

Bonaventure Lodge, in particular, has been on my mind lately. That’s because I was able to sit down for lunch with Glenn LeGrand and Junior St-Onge, owner and general manager of Bonaventure Lodge and Salmon Lodge, respectively, and talk about the upcoming salmon season. Both men are excited about the prospects, as am I, because they are nearly booked out for 2013 and I already have my slot with them for September. In addition, they were stoked to have been awarded Orvis’ prestigious Fly Fishing Lodge of the Year award.

Well hell ya, those salmon jump a little higher in Quebec.

I can say that Orvis’ recognition is well deserved because I had an absolute blast fly fishing for big Atlantic salmon while visiting both Bonaventure Lodge and Salmon Lodge last September. There were scads of fish in all the pools, up to a hundred or more in some places, and I managed to get some of them to eat, including a 20-pounder and one hen that weighed close to 30 pounds, among others.

Well yea, a shot of Johnny Walker Red and a cigar taste better in Quebec (at 9 a.m.) than just about anywhere else.

I’m telling you that those lodges offered awesome guides who could help you when needed it, but they knew enough to stay out of the way when they weren’t needed—as in nobody breathing over your shoulder all day, which I hate. But these guides were cordial and fun to be around, too (Danny thanks for that Johnny Walker and the smokes!).

Well, yea man. They grow to 50 pounds on the Gaspe and this one might have gone 25 or 30. Take that every day you know.

Again, if you want to fly fish Atlantics on Quebec’s Gaspe Peninsula this year, you better give these guys a call right away and see if you can grab a spot before they’re all gone. Hope to see you on the river, hopefully with a big Atlantic jumping out front.

Here’s the news story on Camp Bonaventure winning the Orvis award:

We are very pleased to announce that our sister lodge – Camp Bonaventure has won the “2013 Orvis endorsed Lodge of the Year Award”  This year Missoula Montana was host to the 2013 Guide rendez-vous and Endorsed Lodge retreat. Over 300 guides and a host of lodges participated in this annual event.

Each year Orvis nominates a handful of lodges for this much coveted award. This year there were seven finalist from all over North America. The Endorsed lodge of the year award is based on how Orvis rates our lodge and by the reviews they receive from you, our clients.

As a lodge owner I am very honored to receive this award, but most of all I am honored to be surrounded by a fantastic staff who are really the recipients. Only because of their dedication and hard work this was possible.