“One bad thing about carrying a box loaded with flies, as I do, is that nearly half the time I still don’t have the right one.” – Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It
You’re perusing the menu at a fancy restaurant when the famous chef comes to your table and says ‘You know, you could make all this at home, and maybe you should.’”
That’s the odd position fly fishing anglers find themselves in as they thumb through Pheasant Tail Simplicity, the new book by Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, Blue Ribbon Flies founder Craig Mathews and European master fisherman Mauro Mazzo. The three adventurers have each built lucrative careers encouraging others to adopt this gear-centric pastime. Now they introduce their book quoting Henry David Thoreau’s command: “Simplify, simplify!” And they follow it up with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s response: “You could have said that with one simplify.”
“There’s only 17 flies in [the book], but you could fish 99 percent of the time with these 17 flies,” Chouinard told Mountain Journal. “I spent a whole year fishing with one fly in different sizes. I went all over the world and caught as many fish as I always catch.”
Pheasant Tail Simplicity provides step-by-step photographic instructions for tying those flies. But beyond the how-to, it contemplates the why-to of fishing. The authors warn that “this book is not intended for the beginner fly angler nor for the gear junkie who believes the secret to success lies in buying ever more equipment and flies … It’s for the person who knows that restricting your options forces you to be creative.” And as Chouinard puts it, their advice is not so much an alternative approach as a course correction to a pastime at risk of swamping itself.
Depending on who you ask, fly fishing started in ancient Rome, 12th-century Japan or 15th-century England, although given the general nature of fish tales, the true story may be elusive. What can be documented is the pastime’s present popularity. A recent study by the University of Montana’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research showed that the state’s cold-water fishery generated $919 million during the 2024-25 fishing season, supporting 15,900 jobs and $1.5 billion in economic impact.
I don’t have illusions that people are going to simplify their lives or their fishing,” Chouinard said. “If you think spending over a thousand dollars for a new fly rod will catch you more fish, forget it.”
Spending more time on the water, however, can pay off. Coauthor Mathews logs 210 days a year fishing, nearly all of that on foot. While other anglers parade past on outfitted drift boats that charge almost $1,000 a ride, he said he’s had far more fortune getting literally eye-to-eye with the fish from the riverbank.
“My contribution to Patagonia’s design team was putting foam knee pads in their waders,” Mathews said. “Fish are really interesting when you observe them up close. You can determine if they’re right-mouthed or left-mouthed — which side of their mouth they feed on.”
By concentrating on what the river tells him to do, Mathews said he’s able to not only have more fun but ditch more gear. Still an obsessive fly-tier at 76, Mathews said he’s cut his personal production in half from about 24,000 lures a year to just 12,000, or as he puts it, “a thousand dozens.” A big inspiration for the new book was the challenge of sorting out what really worked from what had been collected.
“Maruo [Mazzo], he had back issues,” Mathews said. “He was stooping because of all the flies he was carrying. Myself, it seemed like I carried 5,000 flies in my vest, and couldn’t find what I needed. Then we all noticed we all had little boxes in upper lefthand corner, and that’s what we used 99 percent of the time.”
Of those, Mathews most relied on one called the Sparkle Dun, which he developed with business partner John Juracek almost 50 years ago. Another was one his wife, Jackie, designed, known as the X Caddis.
“We tried to come up with patterns that represent what trout feed on, and then concentrate on better presentation,” he said. “You go to the shop and see all these gaudy fly patterns that look like a ‘56 Buick and are as hard to throw as one. It just spooks fish.”
And then there’s the paradox of those who love to fish loving their pastime to pieces.
“We’re destroying the planet with overconsumption,” Chouinard said. “There’s too many of us consuming and discarding endlessly, and it’s totally unnecessary. We’re killing these rivers. The Madison is the worst case. Any time you look, you can see three or four boats in view. The Henry’s Fork is a completely destroyed river because of the way the potato farmers operate the dams. There’s no hatches on the Snake River in Jackson. It’s ridiculous.”
In particular, Chouinard worries about the loss of insect life that sustain the fish species he’s chased for most of his 87 years. Take the mayfly, a common cold-water bug. A size-10 mayfly hook is about long as a penny is wide. A size-20 hook is about as wide as Lincoln’s head on that penny. Chouinard said the living mayflies around his home in Jackson Hole have shrunk to the point he’s mimicking them with size-28 hooks, and considering trying to tie a size-32. That would about cover the date on the penny.
Warming temperatures and over-allocation of water have hurt aquatic ecosystems across Greater Yellowstone and around the globe. Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks fisheries manager Mike Duncan says world-famous stoneflies and salmonflies are especially susceptible to increasing water temperatures and decreasing in both abundance and distribution during the summer. Trout depend on those stone- and salmonflies, feeding in frenzies that in turn attract thousands of human anglers to the action.
Freshwater systems make up just 0.01 percent of the Earth’s surface, yet provide homes to more than 18,000 fish species. That totals almost a quarter of all vertebrates on Earth. And most of those fish are ectotherms, meaning they depend on a specific temperature range in their habitat to survive. So changes in stream temperature, such as warming above 68 degrees in Greater Yellowstone rivers, can be stressful for cold-water fish like trout. Temperatures above 77 can be fatal.
A study in the international science journal Nature published in September looked at 389 freshwater fish species across the United States between 1993 and 2019. For cold-water species like trout, it found population numbers dropped by 53.4 percent.
“Given the magnitude of these changes in a relatively short time span, there is an urgent need to curb degradation of fish biodiversity caused by fish introductions and warming water temperatures,” the study’s authors wrote. Adding additional game fish to streams already experiencing warming temperatures puts even more stress on the native populations, they found.
Convincing anglers to invest in that education remains an obstacle. Mathews recalls watching wade-fishermen splash straight through spawning redds, oblivious of their impact on future trout opportunities. Chouinard laments the numbers of visitors who assume fishing requires a boat.
“Take a river and fish 200 or 300 yards of bank, and you’ll catch more fish walking than you will floating it for five miles,” Chouinard said. “If you really want to catch fish, learn to fish and walk the river. Then you’ll start caring about access, and whenever these rich guys try to close down access, you’ll speak out.”
Chouinard and Mathews co-founded the 1% for the Planet initiative, which now has about 500 business members who give that fraction of their profits to improve the environment. Since Yellowstone National Park’s earliest superintendents started tinkering with trout populations to lure more tourists in the 1890s, Greater Yellowstone has become an international angling magnet. The Pheasant Tail Simplicity authors hope they can redirect their fellow anglers’ attention toward their own impact.
“I must say surfers are more concerned about the environment than fishers are,” Chouinard said. “There are about 30,000 manufacturers of fishing gear, and only 13 are members of 1%. That’s pretty sad. You’d think these companies dependent on having clean rivers and lakes would step up, and they don’t.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: Mountain Journal receives financial support from Patagonia, and is also a member of 1% for the Planet.
