Photograph by Stephen Savage

Kiln, Mississippi, located just miles northwest of Bay St. Louis, has long been home to those that love and make beer. Known as the moonshine capital of the world, according to legend, during the bootlegging years of prohibition, moonshine was made there secretly for many years.

Today, beer is still manufactured in Kiln, referred to as “The Kill” by locals, in large quantities but in a very legal way, at the Lazy Magnolia Brewery. Lazy Magnolia is the first and only manufacturing and packaging brewery in Mississippi since prohibition and is focused on bringing a true Southern quality to all of its brews.

“Beer should fit the region where it’s being produced and consumed,” said Leslie Henderson, co-founder and co-owner of Lazy Magnolia. “It’s all about the climate, the culture, and the food.”

As Mississippi natives, she and her husband Mark, who she co-owns and founded the brewery with, know the regional factors that needed to be considered when creating different brews. Because of the warm, muggy weather in the area and the flavorful, greasy foods, Lazy Magnolia brews tend to be lighter and more able to cut through and cleanse the palette than beer in other areas.

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Portland, Oregon, has more microbreweries per capita than any other city in the country. Living here should make writing about craft beer a snap, right? As it turns out, the plethora of breweries, brewpubs, and bottle shops can be a bit overwhelming. Where to begin? Serendipity led photographer Frank Barnett and me to follow the hops.

On a blustery autumn morning, near the small town of Silverton, Oregon, we met Gayle Goschie, third-generation hop farmer. The Goschie Farms supply hops directly to BridgePort and Deschutes Breweries in Oregon, and Sierra Nevada Brewing Company in California, as well as Odell in Colorado and New Glarus Brewing Company in Wisconsin. Gayle also sends part of her hop harvest to Indie Hops, the only company in Oregon that converts fresh hops into pellets for craft brewers.

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Without preamble, I’ll continue this Spey-fishing primer with a discussion of mechanics for the basic casts and a general guideline for which cast to use when. If you’re just joining, it is imperative to visit the previous two issues, Vol. 2 No. 3 and Vol. 2 No. 4, for a review of the first two installments.

Each installment builds on the prior. Without foundations established in parts one and two, much of what follows may be difficult to grasp.
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Taimen fishing in Mongolia is just that to me. Legendary. And I got to go and do it, or rather I want to go and photograph it, live it, and perhaps fit in a few casts myself.

Rafting and camping your way down deserted river valleys that seem to be almost off the edge of the known world, together with trying to catch a species of fish as old and sought-after as the taimen, puts it right up there in my book. I know the guys who essentially “rediscovered” this fishing some years ago now, and I have a good idea about what it took to access and then begin opening up the taimen fishing in Mongolia to adventurous fishermen. The stories of camping out in the wilds and never quite knowing whether those dodgy ex-military helicopters were ever going to actually turn up for the return journey as the first snows of the harsh winters fell softly around them have fired my imagination for years now.

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Habitat and opportunity. Without the first, the second is impossible.

Trout Unlimited’s Sportsmen’s Conservation Project works on public lands throughout the West on landscape-level campaigns to protect the best of what’s left with this notion in mind. If we are able to protect irreplaceable fish and game habitat, we are cementing in place the ability to hunt and fish on public lands for generations to come.

This simple idea, that intact habitat translates into our opportunity to hunt and fish, isn’t always as elementary as it may seem. In fact, sportsmen and women are often guilty of losing touch with this vital equation. Sometimes, a reminder is necessary.

Take the gas fields across western Wyoming, where virtually unchecked drilling has eaten away at mule deer winter range in Sublette County. The result of a largely industrialized landscape of Bureau of Land Management property? We’ve lost half the mule deer herd—and the chance to hunt them.

Nearby, in the Wyoming Range, a vast and productive landscape that is home to mule deer, elk, moose, bighorn sheep, and three of Wyoming’s four subspecies of cutthroat trout, a gas well was drilled on the banks of Fish Creek in 2006. The well dusted out—no gas was recovered. But the well pad, which is the size of a grocery store parking lot, and the two-lane dirt road that was once a lonely jeep trail remain—the backcountry is now the front country, and the pad and the road now contribute silt and sediment to the Colorado River, a native cutthroat trout stream.

Nobody is saying we can’t drill for oil or gas on public lands; and nobody is saying that industrial development shouldn’t be a part of our economic landscape in the American West. But the country’s sportsmen and women are warming to the idea that intact habitat not only secures opportunity for their kids and their grandkids, but it ensures economic activity, particularly in the rural West, where hunting and fishing are viewed as long-term renewable economic resources that will pay off for generations, so long as that all-important factor—habitat—is kept healthy.

And this notion is spreading to the recreation industry. Tenkara USA, a company that manufactures and imports tenkara fly-fishing rods and tackle, recently gave its “1% for the Planet” donation to the Sportsmen’s Conservation Project. The reason? The SCP works diligently to protect intact backcountry habitat, which includes the mountain streams of the Rockies, on which tenkara fly fishing depends. The company has made the connection: Habitat equals opportunity, which translates into economic activity. In other words, without those cold, clear waters running off the spine of the continent, tenkara fly fishing might become a memory.

It’s past time for others in the industry to get involved—and not just the fly-fishing industry that depends on clean water and public access to public lands. This equation is just as important to the manufacturers of hunting rifles, compound bows, and spinning reels. It’s important to any company that manufactures equipment meant for use outdoors, where hunters use wall tents and anglers brew their morning coffee over a propane stove.

And it’s important to any business that makes its living serving those who venture outside, particularly those who take advantage of the public lands that belong to every American as a birthright. Keeping those lands, and the waters that flow through them, just as they are now should be viewed not as a feel-good effort, but rather as an obligation to those they serve, and to the next generation of consumers who will no doubt want the best spotting scope or the finest fly rod to pursue their quarry in a place that is much like it was nearly two centuries ago.

Habitat equals opportunity. Opportunity equals economy. Please help us protect the reason we all venture outside.

Chris Hunt is the national communications director for Trout Unlimited. He also blogs at www.eatmorebrooktrout.com.

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From the cold winter waters of North Carolina’s Outer Banks to the salmon rivers of Canada, I am held, enchanted, and at peace, knowing that there is life for me when I am suspended between worlds, dancing with surf and currents, salt water and fresh. Only in remote grouse coverts am I as touched by time and my ancestors.

The miracle of the Atlantic salmon is a strong one; from birth to death the great fish reminds us that his journey is not unlike ours. We are born and we seek, often returning to our own “Home Pools” with a deeper appreciation of life and the journey yet to be. In the grouse coverts, I can fire my gun, hopefully bringing a grouse to hand. Later, in the cabin, the grouse can be prepared for our table and we can taste the essence of the mountains, the wild berries and soft twigs. In the wild rivers, the choice is my own as to whether the union of hunter and hunted must end in death. And, while I freely confess that I love the occasional wild trout in the skillet and smoked salmon on the table, my angling is at its best when I am granted a simple dance with a rare creature from the world of water. I can hold a bamboo rod just so and feel the very life within river and fish. There is a current that runs from fish to line, line to rod, and rod to soul. Here is the primal, the life force of Nature and the youth of the angler.

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November Slough—Pheasant by Jim Rataczak Courtesy of Wild Wings

Fortunately, late in December, the diminishment of your desire to kill a pheasant, or anything, after you’ve killed so many, is balanced almost perfectly by the increase in your desire to do right by your dog, and to keep on hunting.

Thus it is that you find yourself going out into the wind-chill of twenty below in search of brilliant roosters. The hunting grows progressively and quickly harder—the blue-sky windless days of early October, with the riverside cottonwoods only just beginning to turn yellow and orange, seem like scenes from your childhood, so distant are they to the reality of cold feet and gray skies and bones chilled by the north wind.

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Photograph by Russ Schnitzer

Depending where you live, the odds are better than even that you are probably buried in snow right now up to your derriere or at least freezing the latter off. I feel for you—really I do—and I am almost embarrassed to say that is late December here in Mobile and it is a frigid 73 degrees and sunny. In fact, my wife just gave our dog a bath, which resulted in the dog losing ten pounds of hair. The poor dog can’t make up her mind if she wants to shed her summer coat and grow a winter coat, or vice versa. The trees seem equally confused. They are dropping their old leaves at a much slower rate than would be expected and some have commenced the process of growing new ones. Roses are blooming and the azaleas have new buds and look like they are going to explode any day. Naturally, I am still wearing shorts and polo shirts and, of course, the ubiquitous flip-flops. In short, everything (including the winter one wants to escape on holiday) is relative. As Jimmy Buffet once said, perceptions are based on attitudes and attitudes are based on changes in latitudes. Which brings me to changes in latitude.

Several weeks prior to Christmas Russ Schnitzer and I packed our bags and, thanks to our good friend Christopher Pipes, shuffled off to the Bahamas to chase bonefish for a week. Chris is the National Accounts Manager for the Deep Water Cay Club on Grand Bahamas Island and High Lonesome Ranch in Northwest Colorado. He is a great guy, a rather good fisherman, and an impeccable host. In short, he rescued me from our terrible winter down here in Mobile for a week of paradise in the Bahamas. OK, I know this might seem a little unfair to some and I agree complaining about our little semblance of winter reveals that I indeed have the thermal fortitude of a skinny snowflake, but, hey, winter is winter and the bonefish seemed eager to play.

More to the point, it was winter in the Bahamas, too. Thus, some hardiness was still required. Even in the tropics and subtropics, cold fronts roll through with the frequency and dependability of Old Faithful this time a year. Strong winds and cooler temperatures are the norm. Those mythical, travel brochure “warm and gentle breezes” apparently have to be booked separately, or rather simply imagined. Of course, that is exactly as it should be in the tropics during the winter months. The strong winds and cooler temperatures have more of an affect on the angler than the bonefish. The latter are perfectly fine with it. It’s the fishermen who might get a little frustrated pitching their flies into gales and seeing them come up rather short, much to their boat mates’ general amusement. Of course, everything that is frustrating can also be rewarding. As Spock once said, you have to become one with the wind. Clearly, this is easier said than done and sometimes, especially since it has as much to do with the grey matter between the ears as it does with the wind.

Therefore, who you go with on a trip like this makes all the difference. You want someone who enjoys a challenge and knows how to have a good time, even if not every single thing always goes his or her way. Russ Schnitzer is exactly the type of partner in crime that was called for. Russ is a wonderful photographer and writer who, for the most part, will drop whatever he is doing to chase anything that eats a fly—especially bonefish and permit. That is if Kelly, his wife, doesn’t have an alternate agenda. You can’t have enough friends like Russ.

What makes fly fishing an adventure is that fly-fishing trips rarely go as planned. More often than not you can expect at least one snag, maybe two—okay, possibly three. Of course, a little bit of adventure is a small price to pay for a week in the Bahamas chasing bonefish in the middle of December.

The fishing allocation of the trip officially started Tuesday, but if we could manage to get to the lodge early enough on Monday we might get an extra half-day of fishing in. Clearly, the race was on. Our plans seemed sound. Russ was to fly in Sunday night around eleven. I would pick him up and we would fly out the next morning at seven thirty. If everything went as planned, we would even get four or five hours sleep before leaving for the Bahamas. I had been driving for the last ten hours and Russ had driven from Wyoming to Denver then flown from Denver to Fort Lauderdale, so we both needed some sleep. Needles to say, Russ’s flight was a little late and so by the time he arrived and we made it through baggage claims, found the truck, and actually found our way out of the airport it was a little after midnight. On the way to the hotel, we spied a Village Inn and decided to stop and grab a late night breakfast. The flaw in that plan should be immediately apparent to all who have attempted the experiment before: two friends (especially fly fishermen) who haven’t seen each other for five months naturally have a lot to catch-up on. The last time I had seen Russ we were walking the beaches of Sanibel and pitching flies to snook. Maybe we spent a little too much time catching up and had a little too much coffee, so when we finally dragged our tired butts to the hotel, it was rather late. Crawling into bed almost seemed useless.

Tired, but excited, we did nonetheless manage to get to the airport on time, check in, and make it through security fairly quickly, which is not always the case when you travel with tons of camera gear, bags of fly rods, and all the other paraphernalia associated with a fishing trip. The flight to the Bahamas is a rather short fight, 45 minutes or so, and even shorter if you have a strong tail wind. We landed and managed to find our gear easily enough. We even managed to get through immigration in short order and that, my friends, is when the bottom fell out. A nice, but rather stern agent pulled Russ and me out of line and started to tear our luggage apart. I went first, but it was easy to notice that Russ was the one she had her eye on.

It took about ten seconds to search my bags; in fact, she skipped my camera bag completely then moved quickly to Russ’s rolling camera case. I don’t have enough room here to tell the whole story in detail, but, suffice to say, Russ was held for a little over two hours. It seemed, before you enter the Bahamas with expensive cameras, you are supposed to submit the proper paperwork ahead of time. It took an official representative from the tourism department to spring Russ. Needless to say, we were running late but that is not enough to truly deter the determined fly fisherman. I am proud to report we did manage to go out for a few hours later that day and scare a few bonefish.

The next several days seemed to slip past like the tides. As with all great fishing trips, it was over in the blink of an eye and each day seem to meld into one quick memory. Of course, that doesn’t always happen; some trips drag on for eternity. More often than not you find yourself hiding in some out-of-the-way tiki bar drowning your agony in rumrunners or margaritas; this trip, however, bordered on the sublime. The lodge and the fishing were outstanding. Actually, Deep Water Cay far and away exceeded our expectations. We still managed to drink ourselves silly, but it was at the tiki bar of our choosing, and from what I remember, it was always in celebration of a wonderful day on the water.

On this trip, it was the figurative bookends that made for memorable adventure stories because the journey back to the Fort Lauderdale was equally as memorable as the passage in the opposite direction had been. It involved two transitions from one Freeport airport to the other, with ground transportation and various other fun surprises and interludes. Eventually, we did, however, make it back to the homeland. Oh, but the fun did not stop there. You see, when we originally arrived at Fort Lauderdale Airport, I dropped Russ and the bags off at the appropriate airline and then looked for a place to park the truck. Evidently, depending on where you parked, the price of parking ranged from ridiculous to unbelievable (cleverly, there were no clear signs indicating relative tariffs). Clever soul that I am, I thought I would make it easy for us to find the truck and thus make a quick escape upon our return. So I parked directly across from the terminal marked “arrivals.” It seemed to be a rather smart plan and I patted myself on the back for thinking ahead. How was I supposed to know that the international terminal was on the opposite side of the airport? Needless to say when we returned and cleared customs and immigration we found ourselves to be what seemed like several miles from the truck.

Looking back I guess it’s the trial and tribulations that actually define the trip and not necessarily the fishing. If fishing trips went according to plan, without any variation, we wouldn’t have much to write about. More often than not it’s the variables that make our fishing trips interesting and unique, and strangely enough it is usually our sufferings and misadventures our friends want to hear about the most.

In short, let not the hardships or insanely designed airports deter us, let us boldly head out and face untold adventures head on. Most importantly, let us remember life is an adventure not a guided tour and let us also remember where we parked when we get back home.

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Photograph by Terry Wieland

We’ve only one virginity to lose, wrote Rudyard Kipling, and where we lose it there our hearts will be. Kipling was writing of the sea. I am writing of ruffed grouse. I was nine. It’s like it was yesterday. That’s not the day I shot a ruffed grouse, for that would come some years later. No, it was the day I first saw one, heard one, and felt it as it landed near me in some leaves on a brittle day in October.

For a long minute I stared at that bright, brown bird with his tail fanned out and his head thrown back, rustling in the leaves, and then I blinked and he was gone in a never-to-be-forgotten whirrr-rr-r. Little did I know that when he left, he carried my heart away with him.

There is something about the ruffed grouse—North America’s most exasperating game bird—that brings out a desire either to quote from literature or slash one’s wrists.

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Check out this great video from [one percent] for the planet. Click on the link above to view the video.