When I was a little kid back in Nova Scotia Canada I caught frogs, built clubhouses on an industrial scale and generally ran wild. I started to acquire some elementary skills that would never help me to get a job but would begin building my career as an outdoorsman. And it was probably at this […]
Read more "How to Adventure"8:30 PM – It’s dark outside and darker here underground. This tunnel allows a tiny brook to flow under the freight yard down to the Allegheny River and allows me to reach the walleye, I can only hope. At least when your fishing begins with sloshing through a dark tunnel to a flooded river, […]
Read more "Walleye, the Steel City, and a Long, Cold Night"It’s twilight now up on the Allegheny Front. As I begin to write something I can still see words taking shape on the page without a light but that won’t last. I might be able to see better elsewhere in the forest but here below tall hemlocks and red spruces, it’s dark. Owls have already […]
Read more "Sylvan and Nocturnal"I love to watch the season change late every year and there’s nowhere better to watch this than the state of New York. It’s overlooked as an outdoorsman’s paradise, I think. I’ve lived all over the east and I believe this to be true. If there were no further considerations than outdoors possibilities, I would […]
Read more "I Love NY"This article is an attempt to work through the residual pain of an unusually traumatic week’s fishing. Susan and I run off to the north country every fall, a foray that might take us to anywhere in New England. This year’s trip was a somewhat reduced jaunt up to the northern Adirondacks and St. Lawrence […]
Read more "I’m Not Fisherman Extraordinaire…I’m Mrs. Nesbitt"Where I live right now, while I’m not in the woods, is a paved place in general. There’s a lot of asphalt. McKnight road, one of the major high-speed and high noise conduits of Pittsburgh’s North Hills passes within sight, it’s roar permeating all till long after dark. Businesses have proliferated here and I can […]
Read more "Suburban Hunter-Gatherer"The chipmunks that live down the hill count on me to launch peanuts daily from the back porch. A bit further out I can see parking lots, a highway and a shopping center but there’s a strip of woods here and it’s home for an assortment of animals, great and small. Even my porch hosts […]
Read more "Quiet Little Places"The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is one of the world’s two major organizations scrutinizing the issue of global warming and working toward advocacy and regulatory objectives. The other is the Non-governmental Panel on Climate Change, a research and advocacy consortium who promote an opposing position to that of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on […]
Read more "Global Warming – A More Complete Briefing"Finding big fish isn’t easy and catching them is even harder. I’ve fished a good deal over the last 34 years or so and I’ve very seldom caught a really big fish, and by “big fish” I mean a fish that is at least half as large as the species will potentially grow. I have […]
Read more "Big Fish (of Scale)"A couple of days ago I found myself in an outfitter’s canoe transport van, eavesdropping for just a moment on the bearded outdoorsmen in the seats behind me. Like myself, they were on the way upriver for a day of floating and fishing the Conemaugh River – a new place for me. At the moment […]
Read more "A Well-Rounded Outdoorsman"
the dying fish 