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  Rivers are sacred and none more so than those that have the holy trinity of salmon, grizzly bears and steelhead. This book, a collection of tales on fishing, companionship and the power of dreams, is about one of those special rivers. The Babine spills out of a long lake with the same name in central British Columbia, north of the small town of Smithers. It cuts a ragged arc through the remnants of a once great forest, gathering flow from water pouring off the Sicintine and Atna mountain ranges, before turning south to join the great Skeena River system, which ties it to the...

  I've been asked to write many Forewords to fly-fishing books. So when Gary Soucie e-mailed me to write one for his new book on Woolly Worms and Woolly Buggers, I agreed. I expected a small book. Instead, what arrived was a two-inch-thick manuscript. I wondered, "How could anyone write more than 400 pages on two somewhat similar flies?" Gary did and I am grateful he did. I started fly fishing in 1947. The first few fish I caught were smallmouths on a popping bug. Joe Brooks, my mentor, said, "You should try fishing under water," and handed me some...

  Salmon flies developed from trout flies, and both were originally of a commonplace character and dull in appearance. The leap forward to bright featherwing salmon flies with exotic feathers appears to have gained strength and reached its greatest extent in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The popularity of these flies for fishing prevailed into the twentieth century. In the 1930s and 1940s, hairwing flies began to take over. I believe that the unavailability of many exotic materials, coupled with very high prices for those rare feathers that were available, played a major role in the decline of...

    Intuition, passion and perseverance are the building blocks of expressive, personalized beauty using hybrid timber framing. A lifetime of tenacious determination has, for the most part, assisted me on my timber framing pathway. As a son of a carpenter, I remember pounding nails as early as two years old. At the age of sixteen, I began my building apprenticeship in earnest. At twenty-four years old, I, together with my wife Kristine, founded Arrow Construction, as a high-end framing subcontractor.     In 2002, a client asked me whether I could do a bit of timber framing for him,...

Scanty-clad vixens serve crab cocktails to an interested crowd on the Astoria waterfront in the post-World War II era.   Ocean in View! 0! The joy in Camp!" scribbled Captain William Clark in his leather-bound journal on the wet and blustery afternoon of November 7, 1805. Captain Clark, his co-commander Meriwether Lewis, and the twenty-nine members of their Corps of Discovery had trekked over four thousand miles to reach this point, the fulfillment of their western exploration. In their haste to see the long-awaited Pacific, the Corps had traveled some thirty-four miles down the Columbia River that day before pitching...