From beer labels to literary classics like A River Runs Through It, trout fishing is a beloved feature of the iconography of the American West. But as Jen Brown demonstrates in Trout Culture: How Fly Fishing Forever Changed the Rocky Mountain West, the popular conception of Rocky Mountain trout fishing as a quintessential experience of communion with nature belies the sport’s long history of environmental manipulation, engineering, and, ultimately, transformation. A fly-fishing enthusiast herself, Brown places the rise of recreational trout fishing in a local and global context. Globally, she shows how the European sport of fly-fishing came to be a defining, tourist-attracting feature of the expanding 19th-century American West. Locally, she traces the way that the burgeoning fly-fishing tourist industry shaped the environmental, economic, and social development of the Western United States: introducing and stocking favored fish species, eradicating the less favored native “trash fish,” changing the courses of waterways, and leading to conflicts with Native Americans’ fishing and territorial rights. Through this analysis, Brown demonstrates that the majestic trout streams often considered a timeless feature of the American West are in fact the product of countless human interventions adding up to a profound manipulation of the Rocky Mountain environment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKMwEkKj9jg

Distills five centuries' worth of angling lore and wisdom about trout feeding behaviorPhotographic sequence shows in detail how trout take a flyExamination of flies includes the importance of wings and what they are made of, hooks, soft-hackled flies, and skipping, dapping, and dry-fly techniquesEven after centuries of observation, anglers are still trying to solve the mysteries of that magical instant when a trout takes a fly. The Rise, based on recent scientific research into trout feeding behavior and the author's extraordinary photographic studies, provides many new clues.With unprecedented photographic clarity, Schullery reveals the subtleties of the trout's feeding behavior, analyzes the riseforms that puzzle us, and offers startling and reassuring insights into the lessons of rejection. Schullery challenges modern "common knowledge"; reconsiders neglected flies, ideas, and tactics; and faces some of fly fishing's toughest questions with wit, patience, and the happy conviction that the questions are more important than the answers anyway.Learn more at author Paul Schullery's website.