Trout Bum

customer reviews

While most of us fly-fish to escape from daily life, for John Gierach and his friends fly-fishing IS a way of life. They are trout bums. But John Gierach is also an exceptional writer. The essays in Trout Bum are reflective, bitingly humorous and enormously wise in the ways of fishing and men. In vivid, unforgettable detail they recount the emotional, spiritual and tangible adventures and pleasures of stalking trout in and around the Rockies -- day in, day out, from season to season, with friends and alone. John Gierach's essays join the literary tradition of angling classics like The River Why, and A River Runs Through It.

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Book details:

Simon & Schuster |
224 pages |
ISBN 9780671644130 |
January 1988

$17.00 List Price

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Praise

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“Thomas McGuane Trout Bum captures the passion, confusion and left-handed poetry of modern fishing, having his heart to the rivers he fishes, John Gierach conveys the power of his experience without pretense. ”

“John Nichols author of The Milagro Beanfield War, The Magic Journey, and American Blood Trout Bum is one of those delightful funds, like Norman McLean's A River Runs Through It. John Gierach is simply one of the more wonderful... ”

“Rod & Reel A brilliant collection of narrative essays about flies, fly rods, float tubes, and just plain fishing. Trout Bum will be a classic of angling literature, not because it adheres to an ancient model, but because it... ”

“Rocky Mountain Streamside If you enjoy incisive comment, wry humor, and some inventive insight into trout and trout anglers, then Trout Bum is just the book for you...this is highly intelligent stuff indeed, but it is masterfully... ”

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Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

Trout

Let's say you're nymph-fishing on Colorado's South Platte River. You've hiked up into the canyon where those deliciously deep potholes are -- the big-fish water -- but have found that today the trout are working the shallow, fast runs. It took you two hours to figure that out, but it's a good sign. They're hungry and, as your partner says, they are "looking up." You're fishing a scud pattern, not the scud pattern, but one you worked out yourself. The differences are minute but are enough to make it your fly and you are catching fish on it, which is highly...