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Individual taste in books varies as much as the favorite rod or fly. With that in mind, we hope to review books and videos from the ever-growing fly fishing world, and share them with you. Books will be the best of all worlds, new and old. Many of the old books are now available in reprint, and the wisdom contained is timely today. Others can be found in second-hand book stores, or by mail order dealers. As we find videos we feel are outstanding they will be included. Be assured, reviews are based on what we have actually read or viewed, and due to that fact, may not appear weekly.
RIVER STORIES
This is first for me, a review of an e-book, River Stories, Headwaters to the Sea. The author is Tom Alkire, a name that is familiar to many of our readers. This book is a series of essays about rivers and the people that fish them. There are stories about fishing headwaters streams, spring creeks and big, brawling steelhead rivers. The author takes the reader from the headwaters of our rivers to where they flow and mingle with the ocean.
I especially enjoyed his account of fishing for winter steelhead on the Hoh River in western Washington. I have visited the Hoh on several occasions, but never to fish. It is set in a beautiful valley within a temperate rain forest. It is a place of great beauty, but it can be cold and harsh. His description of the Hoh says it all.
"Even today few people drink from the Hoh. It does not flow by any towns, only a handful of farms in the lower end and the small reservation. It doesn't generate hydroelectricity, as do so many other Northwest rivers. Its water is not used for irrigation as this country gets all the water it needs from the sky. By our measure, it is a little used river, an under-utilized river, a river of lost opportunities, as the economists would say. But by nature's measure, it is a well-used river supporting sustainable runs of steelhead, chinook and coho salmon, sea-run cutthroat trout and sea-run Dolly Varden trout. And by the measure of the pre-settlement tribes that lived on the Hoh, it was a well-used river, a river that helped sustain them with its cycles of returning fish."
Just reading that makes me want to toss my gear in my car and head for Washington.
The book is available from Amazon for $5.99, and can be read on the Kindle reader.
The following is copied from Amazon:
File Size: 380 KB
Print Length: 121 pages
Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
Publisher: Tom Alkire [June 1, 2012]
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
Language: English
ASIN: B00888UJ52