As you float serenely along any of the countless placid waterways coiled throughout Ontario’s Temagami region, there’s a question you can’t help but ponder: Why on earth has our outdoor culture so giddily embraced the extreme? There is, after all, such a venerable tradition of being easy in the outdoors. “We do not go to the green woods and crystal waters to rough it,” wrote George Washington Sears back in 1884, in his timeless book Woodcraft. “We go to smooth it.”

Five score years and change later, truer words have yet to be spoken. And there’s still no better means for soothing the spirit than a canoe. At least if you have any interest in, say, an uninterrupted string of lazy days on perfect water in a beautiful place, with high drama provided only by dawn and sunsets and maybe the occasional heron sighting. There’s no need for paranoiac weight-paring. Or worrying of any kind. You’re self-sufficient, but not self-supporting. You can bring whatever you want. It’ll float. You’ll float. The world will slip away.
Of course, for this last you must pick the right spot. A body of water that seems to exist solely for contemplative paddling. A bastion of serenity on our increasingly hyperactive continent. A place like Temagami, where a dozen big lakes, including the area’s namesake, are interconnected with a thousand small ones in the woods of Canada’s Near North, about five hours or so from Toronto.


The Temagami region, in my opinion, is the most perfect spot remaining in North America for recreating, in the old-fashioned sense of the word. It’s a place to be rejuvenated, made anew. No charter fly-in is necessary, and no strict scheduling either. You put in when you want and take out the same way. In between, you paddle slowly through old-fashioned beaver, bear, and moose country, on the line where hardwoods begin giving way to the boreal forest of the Far North. The hills are ancient and well worn, an occasional northwest-to-southeast ridge showing which way the ice cap withdrew. The highest point in Ontario, 2,275-foot Ishpatina Ridge, is close by. Paddling farther, you can easily push on to real wilderness—or, as the Canadians say, deep bush. Extreme country, indeed. But have no doubts: If your craft is well stocked and your date book is empty, Mr. Sears would certainly approve.

The journey begins at one of the most evocatively named lakes in North America: Temagami (“tuh-MAHG-uh-mee”), the perfect eponym for every child’s Platonic ideal of summer camp. About 250 miles north of Toronto, up on the 3.5-billion-year-old Precambrian Shield, Temagami is a big lake, with 300 miles of shoreline, 50,000 surface acres, 1,200 islands, and disconcertingly at first, hundreds of summer cottages.


The cottages are the giveaway: The main body of Temagami is not wilderness. There’s electricity here, and ski boats, and floatplanes. But Temagami is also a lake with long arms—seven of them—and each limb has an outlet that leads to another significantly less developed lake. And another after that, and another, and another, and so on, ditto, into peace and quiet and solitude, until empty, primitive campsites open up among towering red and white pines, or beneath granite cliffs, beside the most amazing water you’ll ever be privileged to immerse yourself in.
Excuse the hyperbole, but eastern American forest lakes are usually tannin-dark, and these are not. These are sunlit, and of a stunning clarity. They vary subtly in tint—Temagami itself is the deepest blue, the others flashing subliminal hints of green, red, even yellow—but they are always startlingly transparent, drawing the eye, not to mention the unclothed body, into seductive depths.


When I was a kid in Texas, one of my aunts came back from a Canadian vacation babbling about the lake swimming in that mysterious foreign nation. It was like diving into champagne, she said. That descriptive phrase leaped out of my memory the first time I slipped over the side of my canoe and into Lake Temagami’s blue, blue waters. The coolness closed around me. Bubbles broke and rippled across the surface. I shut my eyes, sipped, and decided yes, a very fine vintage.

The next lakes over from Temagami have equally marvelous names: Lady Evelyn, Anima Nipissing, Wanapitei, Obabika. Each leads on to several others. The Sturgeon, Montreal, and Temagami Rivers are occasional linkages, but more often you use a smaller lake, with a portage on each end, to connect your dots. The conventional trips are loops. For example, Lake Temagami to Red Cedar, Cross, and Jumping Caribou Lakes, returning through Wasaksina to Temagami’s Shiningwood Bay. That particular loop covers 60-plus miles. It’ll take five days if you push, more if you’re reflective. You get a look at and a dip (paddle, fishing line, full body) in 14 lakes large enough to be named, plus a lovely stretch of the Temagami River, with a couple of moderate rapids. It’s a good route for intermediates, or for novices if they portage the rapids. The longest of the 21 portages is three-quarters of a mile, the shortest a 25-yard lift-over. Put-in and take-out are at the end of the Lake Temagami access road, which saves 11 not very interesting paddling miles down the northeast arm of Lake Temagami (and avoids the bustle of the lake’s main body).


My wife and I did that loop on our very first trip to Temagami. The various lakes have since become a blur as far as names are concerned, but as we retrace the trip on a map, each conjures up some vivid memory—usually a dawn put-in or a gaudy orange sunset, in any case a great outdoor quiet, carrying with it a sweeping wave of gratitude: to be in this place, to be allowed here. An incomprehensible privilege.
The Temagami-to-Jumping-Caribou Lakes loop is Route Number 5 in “Canoeing in the Temagami Area,” a useful overview map put out by the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources (705-475-5550). The map indicates campsites and suggests no fewer than 23 different loops. Some are day trips; some require three weeks or more. In my experience, the longer, the better.


You should also invest in regional topo maps to help you pick your way from one bay to the next and to locate portages. Topos indicate cottages as well, so you can choose which lakes to head for and which to avoid. On our last trip we easily made our way, in one day, to a lake with no cottages at all and in three days there saw a houseboat at the limit of binocular vision, plus two passing fishermen’s outboards, and not another soul.


A limited supply of topo maps and other last-minute necessaries is available in the very small town of Temagami, where there’s also an outfitter or two who may be able to rent you a canoe and other gear and supply food. Or may not.


You’re better off planning ahead. On the drive north, an hour before Temagami, lies the small city of North Bay, where there’s a wider selection of supplies, particularly perishables. (There’s no grocery store in Temagami itself.) At North Bay or Temagami, non-Canadians are supposed to register and pay a user fee—$10 Canadian per person per night—but the last time we were there no one would take our money. We tried to pay in three different locations. Everyone shrugged us off. They’d run out of the forms, they all said.


Canoeing here is, in other words, a fairly informal enterprise. You don’t have to get a reservation months in advance, as you do for more tightly controlled canoe-tripping venues. You’re expected to practice low-impact camping—and you will, because the place is so lovely and you won’t want to spoil it—but you won’t be policed into it. You’ll be treated as an adult. One more reason to love the Near North.

In touting Temagami and its kin, I’m not suggesting that this is some remarkably undiscovered paddling jewel. The Near North has drawn water lovers for more than 5,000 years, ever since the Teme Augama Anishnabai first launched their dugouts here. Some portages have by now been used so hard for so long that they’ve become deep U-shaped troughs. Captains of the Clouds, with Jimmy Cagney as a bush pilot, was filmed at Temagami Lake in 1941, typecasting the place as the quintessential north woods paradise.


But as the outdoor zeitgeist has moved on to more exotic locales and more strenuous, treacherous, louder pursuits, Temagami and its sister lakes have fallen off the outdoor-sports radar screen. Good news, because it means, in effect, that you can rediscover this area if you go now. For a place of so much beauty and so much accessibility, it’s still remarkably unspoiled, silent, the ideal spot to just float.
Trip guides assume you’ll cover 10 to 15 miles a day, at the rate of about three miles per hour. That makes for maybe three to five hours of paddling per day. When I tell some of my more driven friends this, they invariably ask, “But what do you do the rest of the time?” To them I reply, “Don’t take up canoeing.” Those who wonder about filling their days are not the type who would be at home on Temagami.


Because in my experience the days are jam-packed. You paddle. You stop. You slip off your clothes, you slip over the side. You float a bit. You splash. You drop beneath the surface and eye a walleye or two. Then you pull yourself back on board, break into the food stores, and watch for moose as you munch fresh bread and apples. Later still, you drop a line over the side and contemplate the enviable existence of the local sturgeons, most of which are much too wily to be caught by the likes of you.


Next day, repeat. Paddle and swim and eat and sleep. Then paddle and swim and sun and eat. Dangle your arm over the side. Watch the sun strike sparks off the surface of the lake. And count yourself among the lucky. What you want from a summer vacation is golden days, isn’t it? They come no more golden than this.

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From that first stinging cannonball off a riverside bluff to the last day at the beach, our idea of a sweet summer is one by, on, and in the drink. To get things flowing, we’ve charted the waters for you.

Blissful Indolence Made Simple

A Florida Stream, an inner tube, and no ambition in sight.



There are two ways to tube down north-central Florida’s Ichetucknee River: the easy way and the easier. Let’s examine the easier first, assuming it’s a radiant midsummer day, air temperature about 95, humid enough to confuse a frog.
Lie on your back, hindquarters submerged in the 72-degree water, gazing drowsily up through the overarching canopy of Spanish moss. Recall the First Law of tubing physics: The chill of the booty is directly proportional to the circumference of the vulcanized vessel. Fail to think of a Second Law. As the black rubber heats up, regulate body temperature by idly flicking water onto your belly and sighing.


Among Florida’s many artesian springs, famous for their mermaids and manatees, none is more beloved by inner tubers than this perfect conduit for the indolent. Though parts of the Ichetucknee are narrow and serpentine, its banks are buffered by a luxuriance of eelgrass that will gently catch and release your tube with a soft, whispering sound. Do not attempt to steer the tube, except in slow circles to rotate the sky and invite musings on the immensity of the ether, which is frankly miraculous and ultimately exhausting. It’s possible at any moment to be struck by a falling stinkpot, a turtle known to climb high into the canopy and leap into the water when startled. Possible, but unlikely. Disregard the threat, or think to yourself, If the blow must come, let it be fatal. Drifting, drifting, you’ve made your peace.


With the easier path, it’s more likely you’ll fall asleep, only to be wakened by the laughter of other tubers. You’ve gone aground in a shaded eddy, your mouth comically gaping. Sit up, blinking and grinning sheepishly. Now is a good time to tackle the easy way.


This way is more gear-oriented (a mask and snorkel). Flop onto your belly and, chin resting on rubber or head slightly elevated, survey the banks for stalking egrets, sunning Suwanee cooters, or periscope-nosed softshell turtles. You might see otters and beavers, but by and large this is wilderness writ small, though with startling clarity. Because many springs feed the Ichetucknee as it winds through pines, hardwood hammocks, and swampland, visibility is forever. It opens wee mysteries like a microscope slide.


Plunge your mask into the stream. Now you see the spring’s power, pumping an average of 233 million gallons a day. The fish, you see, the bream and bass and little sailfin mollies, are working hard not to drift. The eelgrass is waving as if in a gale. You see breaks in the streambed, phosphate pits and sudden overhanging caverns. Unable to resist, you slither from the tube like a gator and dive deep, and are rewarded by a chance meeting with a siren, a three-foot-long legless salamander. Which is thrilling and, ultimately, quite chilling.


You’ll need to get warm again. Clamber back aboard the tube like a cooter (from kuta, an African word for “turtle”), and take it easier.

Wild, Wild Midwest

This just in: You can say Wisconsin and wilderness in the same breath.

The kayak is often associated with rugged terrain, where rivers rise and fall with the melting of mountain snows. Wisconsin, on the other hand, is canoe country, which is to say it’s mostly flat, pressed smooth by the weight of long winters and the Ice Age, the longest winter of all. Topographic relief appears not on land but in the bouldery staircases and slick-water chutes of the rivers that drain it. Midwesterners feeling hard-put to explain why they even own a kayak need only run the Flambeau, a splash-and-dazzle river that barrels out of the North Woods as if from a glacier.
The Flambeau cuts across north-central Wisconsin in two branches. The North Fork has more quiet water, the South Fork more rapids. Between the forks lies some of the wildest country anywhere: pine forests banded in autumn with sugar maple, yellow birch, and hemlocks; trackless alder marshes like the Million Acre Swamp; and black bears, otters, eagles, ospreys, and at least two packs of timber wolves. Not to mention the isolated tavern, all knotty pine and smoke, with more antlers than bottles above the bar.


“It’s a gem of a river,” David Kelly says of the South Fork. “No dams. No towns to speak of. And it doesn’t get the traffic of better-known rivers like the Brule or Wolf. Already today I’ve seen a bald eagle and a coyote just out my front window.”


Kelly owns the general store in Lugarville—in fact, the only store in Lugarville ten miles northwest of Phillips and overlooking the South Fork. He also runs a shuttle service and canoe rental. Put in at Lugarville and you can cover the 20 miles to Little Falls in a day of hard paddling or two days at a leisurely pace, allowing time to play in the rapids.


The first half of the trip is easy, Class I rock gardens and a couple of Class II rapids. (Water levels fluctuate according to weather; September usually beats out the dog days.) On the second stretch, the rapids are more concentrated and evocatively named: Cornsheller, Big Bull, Prison Camp Rapids. The last is just upriver from the State Prison Forestry Camp, where trustees in green dungarees and white T-shirts, many of them former urbanites, stand around and perfect the long stare.


The best whitewater comes at the finale at Slough Gundy, where the river accelerates as it enters a narrow cleft between a cedar island and a high granite ledge, dropping in three separate pitches over a half-mile. The first pitch is a straight shot down a center chute; the second is complicated by a crosscurrent that sweeps you toward the rock ledge.


On my initial trip, this current caught my paddle and neatly rolled me, so I rode the third set of rapids hanging upside-down, submerged rocks whizzing past my head. I managed to tow the kayak to shore before it went over Little Falls and, after sun-drying on the rocks, lugged it up the footpath to run Slough Gundy again.

A Piece of the Shore

Skinny-dipping under the stars, and other reasons to go cottaging in Ontario

In Ontario, “cottage country” is a precise geographical term, “to cottage” a common verb. The province has a pleasing ratio of 220,000 lakes to 200,000 or so private cottages beside them; about one of every 20 families owns one. And most of the other 19 families manage to cadge an invite or two.


Muskoka, Georgian Bay, the Kawarthas: The topography of the cottage regions changes from one to the next, and the cottages range from million-dollar showplaces to rustic one-rooms (like mine, where running water means hustling from the dock with a bucket). The uninitiated can’t see the appeal of suffering through Friday gridlock out of Toronto, of returning to the same place time after time. “You have to do it to understand it,” says a friend.


For me, the reasons come clear each time I arrive and slide my kayak into Mississagua Lake. I make a circuit to see what’s new, knowing almost nothing is. But always discoveries await: the loon’s nest on the edge of an islet; the heron stalking its supper; evening light striking the long fingers of granite that reach into the water.


Perched on Precambrian rock, our tiny, green-stained cottage is barely visible from the water, hidden among pines. The land around us belongs to the Crown and can’t be built on, so the bay is almost ours alone. When the urge for greater exploration strikes, we pack dry bags into the kayaks and go, because Mississagua Lake spills into the Mississagua River, which alternately meanders and rushes into a lake a dozen or so portages downstream. At its other end, Mississagua connects to a chain of other lakes via a wetland where snakes slither in the shallows, frogs bask on logs, dragonflies mate, and platter-size snapping turtles paddle in deeper stretches.


Any cottager will tell you a cottage is a place stacked with memories of what you can’t wait to do again. Skinny-dipping on a starry night. Devouring the season’s first ear of fresh-picked peaches-and-cream corn slathered in butter. Screaming along on the Laser, hiked out, head almost touching the water, laughing out loud. Sometimes when I’m back home, caught in the city’s hustle and hassle, the clatter seems to retreat and I hear instead the slap of the waves against the dock. I’m up north again, and all’s right with the world.

To the Inland Sea

The best swimming in Mexico: Ocean?

Somebody asked Subcomandante Marcos, the figurehead of Mexico’s Zapatista movement, how he first came to Chiapas. Half-jokingly, he answered that he got drunk and wound up in Ocosingo instead of Acapulco. “There is a lake near there called Miramar,” he said. “I asked which way the sea was, and they told me, ‘That way,’ so I started walking. Pretty soon I realized I was in the mountains, and I never left.” It’s not a bad story, and it’s even plausible once you’ve seen Miramar for yourself.
I’m a lake lover of four decades, and I have never seen anything like it. Laguna Miramar (“sea view”), as it is called in Spanish, lies in a ring of mountains 47 miles southeast of Ocosingo, in the southern state of Chiapas, the heart of the Lacandòn rainforest and the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve. It is also the Zapatista heartland, one reason Miramar may not be for everybody. Access is through the Maya community of Emiliano Zapata, where you are already “back there,” so to speak. Then it’s a four-and-a-half-mile hike to the lake.


The trail ends at a long, narrow beach. There, beneath chicozapote trees bristling with orchids, bromeliads, and epiphytic cacti, the community has erected two thatched, open-sided palapas, one for tents or hammocks and one with a traditional raised hearth for cooking. Zapata and the other lake communities bar hunting and logging near Miramar, so the only sounds are “lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore,” in Yeats’s words, and the unceasing drone of howler monkeys.


I visited Laguna Miramar with Fernando Ochoa, a bilingual outfitter from San Cristóbal who helped Zapata develop its tourism plan. We paddled the lake’s more than seven square miles for three long days and didn’t see it all, though we did visit pictographs, rock carvings, and a full-scale island ruin left behind by Miramar’s ancient inhabitants, ancestors of the Maya who live there now. A thousand feet deep, Miramar sustains enough aquatic life to entertain a Cousteau, including turtles, crocs, and a cryptozoological creature the Indians say resembles a manatee. In our canoe cruising, however, all we saw were several dozen species of tropical and migratory birds, a bewildering array of plant life, and fish. Mostly we swam.


And the swimming was the best I’ve ever had, anywhere. The few divers who have sampled Miramar’s depths can get downright poetic about it. We paddled from one travertine shoal to the next, diving into water the color and clarity of Aqua Velva and basking in shallow depressions eroded along the shore. Once in a while we saw a single dugout in the distance. The rest was silence.

The Hillbilly Autobahn

West Virginia’s most wicked whitewater, speed limits be damned.

I’m supposed to be listening to my guide, Sib, who barks directions at us in fluent Appalachian. But I can barely hear him over the roar of the water, so I stare at the snarling froth thundering out of Summersville Dam and feel my leg stubble prickle against my rented wetsuit. The first raft to launch is a rowdy all-male squad from Buffalo. They grunt like apes as they try to muscle downriver, but their raft gets swirled around and sucked sideways while the guides on the shoreline whoop with uncivil glee. Our group pushes off next, thwacking paddles and stroking furiously, only to have the Gauley’s unforgiving current push us back to shore. We finally make it through the spin cycle, and Sib yeehaws while grabbing a smoke from his waterproof pack. Fortunately, I’m upwind.


It could drive anyone to tobacco, or worse, taking boatfuls of tourons into world-class West Virginia whitewater. The Gauley has more than a hundred Class IV and V rapids in a 28-mile stretch; even in late summer and beyond, when western rivers whimper down to a trickle, the Gauley rages. Back in 1988, Congress mandated that on 22 days between Labor Day and late October, Summersville Dam must release 2,800 cubic feet of water per second—2,800 basketballs with each tick of the clock—just for rafters and kayakers. Not surprisingly, guides from around the world migrate here before they follow the sun to the Southern Hemisphere.


We approach Insignificant, the first Class V. Sib keeps his instructions light and funny, but since he’s puffing like a furnace while trying to position the raft, I’m not sure I shouldn’t be terrified. The white foaming jaws come into view just before they swallow us. Sib’s yelling, “Paddle, paddle!” but all five of us have been thrown to one side, and we paddle only air. When I dig in for a real stroke the raft suddenly buckles, and I’m waterborne, sucked under like driftwood.


Before I can panic, though, the river’s spit me out and I’m swimming jerkily toward the rocky shoreline, instead of toward the boat as instructed. But, serendipity: The boys from Buffalo are waiting in the eddy, and they yank me up by my life jacket. I lie sputtering in their boat until my own raft comes, then I grin a goofy thanks-for-saving-my-sorry-butt smile and hop back in. Cold, beat-up, and sure I’ve broken my foot, I couldn’t be happier. I’ve been baptized by the mighty Gauley. Just 99 more rapids to go.

God’s Own Plunge Pool

A grotto behind the waterfall, a bracing New Hampshire river, and thou.

During a desert-dry lull in an otherwise water-obsessed lifetime—in west Texas—I used to drift off to sleep imagining perfect swimming holes. They always had a waterfall, for aesthetics and to keep the air moist, and cliffs for diving, à la Acapulco. The diving had to be into a deep pool of exceptionally clear water, with underwater formations to explore. The outlet was usually a tumbling riffle over smooth granite. Maybe fruit trees lined the banks, dropping, oh, ripe plums in my lap while I sunbathed.
Years later I discovered just such a place, although the fruit is blueberries and their season ends just before the swimming gets really enjoyable. My nomination for the world’s best swimming hole is the Upper Falls of the Lower Ammonoosuc, near Fabyan, New Hampshire. Pure snowmelt flows from Mount Washington, plunges 12 feet into a succession of three glacial potholes, and exits gracefully over the required smooth rock, spilling into a trout pool to break Izaak Walton’s heart.


The slick granite chute above the waterfall is sized for human buttocks, a natural slide. A small cave behind the waterfall can hide a couple of swimmers at a time. But it’s the potholes themselves that cause swimmers’ hearts to flutter. The first, probably 20 feet around and nearly as deep, is ringed by 20-foot cliffs. The second, connected to the first by an underwater passageway, is larger, and its cliffs offer launch points from perhaps 10 to 40 feet, choose your height. The third pothole is larger yet, with even more diving heights, and sunnier, thus attracting more leisurely attention.


Pardon my obsession with structure: The sheer geology of the place offers all a swimmer could devise for fun in water, except a rope swing. Its only problem: See “snowmelt,” above. The water temperature is bearable for about three weeks in August, past the blueberries’ prime. So bring your own.

Flipper . . . Is That You?

North mixes with tropics in the Channel Islands’ underwater bizarro world.



Suspended 40 feet beneath the surface. Visibility, maybe five body-lengths. Kicking in slow motion through a forest of kelp. Enormous, sinuous stalks, some nearly 200 feet long, rise from the sea floor and grope for light.


To the right, a large, dark shape lingers, barely discernible in the green murk. Consider the possibilities. It’s not a curious sea lion, or it would’ve already stormed your face mask. A great white shark would make great bar-stool fodder, but those are thin odds; people dive southern California for decades without even glimpsing one. Charlie the Tuna? Easy, man; don’t lose your grip here.


Whatever it is, it’s approaching. The other divers seem to have vanished. But then, adrenaline surges and otherworldly ambience are the draw in the Channel Islands, less a Disneyesque reef dive than a bushwhack through the jungle. Warm and cold currents collide here, attracting a through-the-looking-glass collection of species that rarely lurk in the same circles. Other kelp forests grow up north, and some of the same fish, invertebrates, and mammals swim farther south, but only here do they mingle.


At last, the behemoth emerges from the soup: a giant sea bass longer than you, bulkier than you (maybe two or three hundred pounds), and probably tastier, too. Gargantuan up close but a runt among its peers. Its world-record forebear, weighing in at almost 600, succumbed to a hook near Anacapa Island in the sixties. Mouth gaping and eyes bulging, this one circles around and then back for a second pass unusual for a fish—before it slips away into the gloom. The pulse gradually slows.


Nights later come the surreal dreams, of hulking, amorphous creatures seen only out of the corner of the eye. And in the morning, musings about the ones that choose not to be seen at all.

Time Off the Grid

In blissful isolation along the Rogue River, where it’s easier to find a fly rod than a phone.

From its headwaters near Crater Lake, the Rogue River twists and veers for several hundred miles through the lower left-hand corner of Oregon before arriving at its broad estuary on the Pacific at the town of Gold Beach. But the part of the Rogue I love is its 40-mile run through a corridor of Klamath Mountains wilderness—one of those faraway worlds you can still find in pockets all over the Northwest, where the nineteenth century lasted at least halfway through the twentieth. Even today, it’s a long way to a phone.
The surrounding landscape is an absurdly crenellated empire of sharp ridges, steep fir-covered slopes, and deeply notched ravines; a perfect refuge for coots, renegades, and survivalists; and a terrible place for cars. (A wag in Yreka once put up signs that read, “Our roads are not passable, hardly jackassable.”) The sheer cussedness of this terrain has been the Rogue’s best defense against civilization’s embrace.


The Rogue played a supporting role in the Meryl Streep vehicle The River Wild, and it’s a popular summer run for rafters and kayakers. Dams upstream have partly tamed it, but once it enters this coast range the river reverts to a primordial rush of swift and sometimes ferocious Cascadian snowmelt. Still, the pleasures I’ve found along the Rogue have mostly been slow ones. They began with a six-month caretaking job I had at a remote ranch homestead near Horseshoe Bend, a blissful interlude that offered a pretty good argument for the Unabomber lifestyle. I hiked through gorgeous swaths of old growth, saw a pair of cougars lope side by side up a hillside, heard the kind of lore that seems to thrive in the absence of electricity, and had my first taste of fly-fishing for the late-summer run of Rogue steelhead, the signature species of the place.


Steelhead embody the secretive, once-upon-a-time glamour of the Rogue. Like their cousins the salmon, steelhead spawn in rivers and migrate to the sea. But these Homeric fish sojourn in the ocean and return to the river twice before they attain the four- to eight-pound size and quick-strike savagery of the classic Rogue steelhead. Alas, like the Rogue itself, they are threatened, but like the wild Rogue, they triumphantly persist.

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