california

Man fly fishing from a horse in alpine lake
Profiles

Trent Peterson: The Way Forward

During a trip to the Sierra Nevada’s in 2015 he first set his eyes on the mountains he now calls home while scouting the area for a planned horse traverse of the PCT. He settled into an area next to the Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks, where he often gone for weeks at a time working as a Forest Service Packer and lives a mountain man way of life, living and packing in the mountains in the summer, and building lightweight packer saddles in the winter.

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3 Min
Fly Fishing Los Angeles River_HERO
Profiles

The punk rockers of fly fishing – angling on the LA River

Few Angelinos are aware that prior to the 1930s, the LA River was home to native rainbow trout and seasonal runs of steelhead and Chinook salmon. The Los Angeles River was, in fact, a trout stream. Then, in 1938, the Army Corps of Engineers began a nearly 20-year process of channelizing the river, encasing its banks in concrete in an effort to control flooding. Today, the concrete canyon of the LA River is not the idyllic, catalog-ready backdrop that comes to mind when most people think of fly fishing. When the water is low, it makes a great location for Hollywood car chase scenes, but it’s not a typical destination for the average fly angler. Luckily, the community of misfit fisher-folk who call the LA River their home waters is anything but average.

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5 Min
woman leading a line of pack mules up the side of a mountain toward distant mountain peaks
Profiles

McGee Creek Pack Station: Sierra Nevada, California

Jen spent her teenage years doing everything she could to be at the pack station as long as possible during the season. She would figure out what schoolwork needed to get done, complete it early, and get to the pack station by late May and stay well into November until the first snow finally drove both her and the pack stock out of the wilderness. Susie not only shaped Jen’s life, but the lives of the other young women who would not have been hired as packers by other outfits. These traditional outfits would only hire women to cook or do day rides. Male owners of the eastern Sierra outfits dubbed the McGee Creek packers ‘Packerettes.’ A title worn with pride by the McGee Creek crew.

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5 Min
bottle of rancho de la luna mezcal next to two glasses of tequila cocktails
Profiles

Rancho de la Luna Mezcal: An intoxicating new jam from rock icons

Rancho de la Luna sits on a hill surrounded by the otherworldly desert landscape. The unassuming adobe home has hosted sessions with many of the true legends of rock and roll since 1993 and is the full-time residence of studio cofounder and music icon David Catching. Three decades’ worth of liquor (and stories) are soaked into the sand here, but for a bottle to bear the Rancho de la Luna name, it would need to be truly special…

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3 Min