Month: February 2017

Fishing the North Platte River under crystalline sky, I cast a Royal Coachman on a number-eight hook behind a large rock midstream. Immediately, a big trout pulled my rod over, silencing the wind on the sagebrush hills and rocky outcrops where the night before I had heard mountain lions. The…

When I first visited Wyoming’s breathtaking expanses of sky, sagebrush, pine woods, and splashes of cars and junk strewn around trailers like exploded bombs, I lived in a brick room at the university in Laramie. I’d have never had known about Wyoming from my concrete and baked-clay cell. It had…

A corporation bought the family newspaper I worked for, and I was scared. My fear was for myself, for my coworkers, for my family. We had worked to turn the paper into something we could be proud of, and the men in suits didn’t care as they walked around us…

One of the Germans and I wandered off down the bank though the sycamores into the night. Several long, flat-bottom boats motored by, outfitted with huge spotlights and muscular men who spit mouthfuls of tobacco past the tines of their tridents. Udo, the tall German, and I watched the men…

As soon O’Kelley and I turned into Bennett Spring State Park, we were in a foreign land. We had gone to the park with great hopes, having heard accounts of the place’s beauty, tales of strong trout jumping from the spring river at well-cast dry flies, and of the relaxing…