The dust has finally settled on a damned hectic two months for most of us posting here on Chi Wulff.

Jake has finally made it back to Bozeman, damned fishy place that it is, and is carving out a new reality in an expensive mountain town. An expensive mountain town with more fly fishing options in a 100 mile radius than you can shake a stick at (or find in many other places in the lower forty-eight). Fly fishing options that a lot of folks around would walk out of their uptown city lives to fish up close and personal for a year or two.

He has a penchant for writing, and despite having a book in progress, he’s going to be writing a bit more on the blog.

Jess has, in a relatively short time-frame, been hired as the assistant manager of the Ponoi River Company’s Ryabaga Camp on the Kola peninsula. As of today she’s wrapping up a job in Austin and preparing to head up to the Seattle area to spend a few weeks and then head for Russia mid-May.

She’ll be writing a weekly column for Chi Wulff about life in camp from mid-May through mid-October, running her ass off with camp duties and grabbing pics, writing interviews and collecting stories for future posterity. Her work permit has been approved by Russian authorities and she only has to tag the somewhat hard to get visa now….

As I shared a few weeks ago, She Who Must Be Obeyed and I have relocated to the southern end of Puget Sound to capture an opportunity that popped up for SWMBO. My work can be done from anywhere and I’ve lucked into a part-time gig as the marketing director / tech flunky for the Gig Harbor Fly Shop.

After nearly three decades of plunking down cash in shops all over the country and wondering if I’d ever really want to own one someday, the stars aligned to allow me to join a team of savvy and very innovative guys who I think are beginning to understand (at least as well as anyone out there right now) what the future of the small independent fly shop might hold.

We’re hip deep in conceptualizing a new web site and store portal right now and the next few months will prove most interesting as several big changes in the industry begin to shape the new face of the retail side of the sport.

Quinn is still working hard on his book and still getting out to fish a bit. We’ll try and coax a few more posts out of him along the way.

We’re looking to expand our team and will likely be adding a new face or two over the next few months….

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Come May we should be able to start a fairly unique series here on Chi Wulff – one of the team has just signed the contract to become the assistant camp manageress / hostess for the Ponoi River Company’s Ryabaga camp on the Kola Peninsula in the Murmansk region of the Russian Federation.

Five(+) months above the Arctic Circle on what is arguably one of the most outrageously productive salmon fisheries in the world.

Wheels are spinning pretty fast pulling things together – more details to come shortly. We’re roughly planning at least a weekly post chatting about ‘life on the river’ and a pocketful of images too.

Now this could be interesting….

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We’ve been somewhat conspicuously absent from Chi Wulff over the weekend.

She Who Must Be Obeyed and I secured new digs in the Olympia area on Friday and unloaded the moving truck on Saturday. There’s been precious little time for thinking and writing about fishing and damned well no time for fishing recently.

Had an interesting discussion along the way with our moving crew who were increasingly dismayed to note that we something in the neighborhood of 60 boxes of books to unload. They had a hard time getting their minds around the fact that anyone would even want to own a pile of books like this much less move it from place to place.

We almost sheepishly offered our usual explanation that we’d rather read or write than watch TV; our act of giving up TV watching 10+ years ago was deemed incomprehensible.

(That said, it should be noted that right now SWMBO is damned pissed that we can’t find her Mario Cart gear for the Wii; she’s a demon behind the virtual wheel and almost unbeatable as Toad on the bit bike.)

For the first time since SWMBO and I married some years ago, we even gave away / sold a truckload of books before the move, though not without some wailing and gnashing of teeth on SWMBO’s part. It hardly made a dent in the stack(s) though and I just can’t get SWMBO interested in reading ebooks as of yet.

So I guess the hassle of moving books (and other sundry possessions) from place to place is one of those damned if you do and damned if don’t quandaries in life, though it will be a thing of increasingly distant memory over the next few days.

Jake (the lucky bastard) has been on the ground in Bozeman since Friday and should have his mancave up and running in the next few days.

We’ll be back to being fishy here on Chi Wulff shortly. (As long as the roof stays on – just watched an arm sized limb launch from a tall tree across the street in this morning’s wind storm and nail the windshield of the neighbor’s truck.)

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By the time this post pops on Sunday morning, She Who Must Be Obeyed, Fire Girl Jess and I should be motoring west out of Durango, coffees in hand, climbing the hill on the way to Mancos, Cortez and then on to the Canyon and Red Rock country of Southern Utah.

SWMBO and I are quite literally in the process of moving to Olympia (from Austin) this weekend; if all goes according to plan (recognizing that it rarely does on ventures such as this) we should have dinner tonight in far western Idaho or eastern Oregon.

We’ve had the pleasure of living in a number of different places over the years. While admittedly our hearts and minds have never left the Greater Yellowstone Country during our most recent foray for business in Texas, we’re excited as hell about the chance to spend some time in what for us will be new and very different country.

I suppose by geographic reckoning we’ll be living in the Puget Lowlands, situated between the OP and Cascades, though how can a fly fisher live in that country and not think of the region in terms of fish and fisheries?

I sure have been. Here’s to having the OP right in the neighborhood.

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Have you ever seen the classic movie Jeremiah Johnson?  Near the end of the movie, Jeremiah comes across his old friend Del Gue.  As they part ways, Del says something that has always resonated with me: “The Rocky Mountains is the marrow of the world”.  It’s one of those quotes that if you get it, you get it, and if you don’t, you don’t.

After almost two years of self-imposed exile for work in the barren land of Texas, it is time to go home.  All my goals have been accomplished, and I’ve gotten done everything I needed to.  As previous posts will show, Montana has been on the mind lately.  And it’s Montana I’m coming home to.

If luck and planning holds out, I’ll be departing for Bozeman early on the morning of March 10.  While I was thinking about my return to the West, I thought about moving someplace new, like Colorado or Idaho.  But Montana will always be home.

Once I get home and get settled in I’m looking forward to making the rounds and introducing myself to some friends we’ve made on here.. Headhunters, Yukon, and the FCFT guys, to name a few.

As for my Texas friends, it’s been great guys.  You are always welcome to come visit.  My couch might suck, but it’s a couch in Bozeman.

In three weeks, I’ll be sitting in Old Chicago in Bozeman, sipping on a Salmonfly Honey Rye, swapping stories with old friends.

Hot damn.

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Lately She Who Must Be Obeyed and I have been having one of those running ‘fork-in-the-road’ discussions that come up in life now and again.

For those who have been reading Chi Wulff any time over the past couple of years probably know by now that we’re mountain folks who’ve been living in Austin for just under two years to establish a foothold for a business we own in the south. Our hearts have remained in mountain country, and for months we’ve been planning a return late this spring to Montana.

An interesting twist to the story has arisen in the past few weeks – a large retailer that She Who Must Be Obeyed has been working for has offered her a notable move up, which entails a move to their leading district in the country, which just happens to be in western Washington state.

Offering a rare glimpse of candid honesty, my first thoughts were of coastal cutthroat, steelhead and finally having a legitimate chance to see Bigfoot.

As we’ve pondered the nuts and bolts, it appears we can live on the Sound and out of the Seattle metro in a small community; her work looks damned interesting and my business can be done from just about anywhere there’s an internet connection and phone coverage.

The way things are shaping up, she has to make a two year commitment to the new option and I figure that’s enough time to passably learn to manage a two-hand rig and begin to learn the very basics of steelheading.

Coastal cutthroat sound damned intriguing; read a bit about them here on the Western Native Trout Initiative site (that’s their image above by the way).

I’m firing an email off to the Moldy Chum guys today given their obvious interest and expertise in Bigfoot lore (58 entries on a ‘bigfoot’ search);  just maybe, if we’re lucky, they’ll consent to an interview and share some of the their hard-earned, vast store of knowledge with us.

Jake is without a doubt headed back to Bozeman in a matter of a few days / weeks; he’s got some interesting things lined up and has it figured as to how he can fish 5 of 7 days per week. We’re guessing that having a hand in a couple of different environs / fisheries might make for a bit more interesting reading on the blog here as well.

Here’s to new adventures.

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We’ve just popped our head back into the cyberworld after being off line since about 8 pm on Saturday night, right in the middle of dinner in fact.

That’s when our hosting service fired an email stating that our server load over the past several days had crept into red-line territory and yesterday finally crossed the threshold that forced an automatic lockout for a period of time.

For several weeks Jake and I’ve been chatting about the fact that a hosting service upgrade was going to be pushed upon us here before long; it appears the time is probably here.

We’ve done some of the routine urgent stuff – trimmed some database fat, optimized the database, upgraded a caching routine – and have at least passed muster to get back up and running for a trial over the next few days.

We have some great stuff coming up when we resume scheduled programming over the next few hours, including an interview with the Headhunters gang in Craig, some positive stuff to say about urban fly fishing for Texas native bass (even more astoundingly from Jake), more on the Madison River recreational plan and so on and so forth.

We’re working to hold future outages to a minimum. Appreciate your patience.

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Ok, we’ll readily admit we’ve been living under a rock for the past year or so as far as some aspects of social media go.

True, we’ve been feeling a bit sorry for ourselves being out of pocket and all, and my (Mark) meniscal tear and tibial fracture this summer, besides being a literally pain in the knee and figuratively in the ass, curtailed fishing options dramatically.

Life’s looking a bit better these days; despite it being mid-winter we’re all planning various returns to mountain country, with Jake in line to escape back home before any of the rest of us.

That said, as we’ve crawled out from under our rock we’ve been having fun being a bit more social on Twitter and Facebook.

We’ve overhauled our Chi Wulff twitter page and are slowly getting back in the groove there; we’ll be posting some version of our twitter feed in the sidebar once we figure out a format we can live with.

For our Friday Feast and Thirsty Thursday fans we also launched a Chi Wulff’s Friday Feast twitter feed and will be ramping up our discussion there over the next few weeks. Turns out a hell of a lot of fly fishers love good food and tasty adult beverages and would like to chat a bit more about those things than we’ve been doing in the blog. Look for the Friday Feast twitter feed in the sidebar as well.

Jake’s been in charge of cranking up our FB page again and we’ll be more active there as we’ve had a hell of a lot of fun interacting a bit more with fishers and friends around the country and the world.

We’re even tossing around the idea of a big riverside party sometime this summer – who knows, it could happen.

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We have a couple of small projects for a fishy graphic artist / designer and are having a harder time that we thought we might digging up some one who has time and the inclination to take on the little stuff.

None of us progressed much further than the 8-pack crayon stage.

Anybody know someone who might fit the bill?

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A hearty Merry Christmas and best Holiday wishes from Team Chi Wulff.

May we all be standing underneath this tree (located near a small vent about 30 feet from the Firehole) next December 25th.

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We’re rolling out a few new features and tweaks this morning for Chi Wulff; nothing earth shattering but these are all ideas that friends have been asking us to do for months (and maybe even years for one…).

People of Fly Fishing. Interviews with fly fishing notables are popping up all over the place these days. When we first started doing a few in the early spring of this year during the Montana Stream Access debate it was clear that folks enjoyed a more in-depth glance into the issue de jour or taking a peek into the mind of a fly fishing pro.

We’ve continued doing an interview or two per month since late July and have added a link in the header bar to a new People of Fly Fishing page where we’ll keep a running list of all the interviews we’ve done to date.

There will soon be two new collections of folks we’ll be interviewing. Jess of Fire Girl Photography will be interviewing notable fly fishing and outdoor photographers and videographers, while Jake will be interviewing folks as part of a new feature we’re adding to the site – Thirsty Thursday (more below).

The Friday Feast. We had no idea how popular the Friday Feast might become when we started posting recipes on the now vanquished Best Fly Fishing Yellowstone in the summer of 2007.

Folks have been asking us to do two things with the Friday Feast almost from the get go.

One, post an index of recipes so you don’t have to fish around on the site to find a recipe – it’s now up and running as of this morning. There’s a new Friday Feast link in the header bar above with the Recipe Index link one of the drop downs.

Two, folks have been asking us to produce a cook book / recipe collection. The project is in process as of Monday of this week; we’re playing with the idea of an ebook with videos versus dead tree version (favored by She Who Must Be Obeyed). It’ll be a few months.

Thirsty Thursday. Jake will be adding a new series to the site covering primarily artisanal beers though there’ll surely be the occasional mixer or wine post thrown in. He already has interviews lined up with several of our favorite local Montana brewmeisters and will leave no good local brew undiscovered. Suggestions are welcome.

CW Swag. After years of claiming we were working on it – we’re now actually working on it with a nifty shirt company called ProNaked. Shirts, hats and decals are in the works.

Other Stuff. We’ve reshuffled the top navigation bar and will be redoing our links page (long overdue) soon.

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Though she fully understands that it will bring forth a bellowing chorus of moans and groans, a certain feminine fisher we know still likes to say fly fishing is like a box of chocolates.

You never know what you’re gonna get each time out.

The same could be said about fflogging (blogging about fly fishing); you never know where the daily (more or less) fflog may lead.

When we brought Chi Wulff back from hibernation just over a year ago we weren’t sure where things might go.

To our genuine amazement, four days ago marked the end of our busiest month (highest traffic month ever) in Chi Wulff history. We’ve been nothing short of dumbfounded at the increasing stream of folks emailing, commenting or calling with ideas, suggestions, corrections, kudos and even the occasional threat (big gear manufacturer in the mountain West).

[Hell, we don’t mind the threats - it’s credible evidence that 1) somebody’s reading the blog out there, 2) we’ve poked the corporate fly fishing beast once again and 3) there must be a grain of truth in whatever we’ve poked ‘em about.]

For a host of reasons our format has changed quite a bit from the days when we were basically just reporting current conditions on neighborhood rivers; we’d guess our readership has changed a fair amount from those days as well.

To wit, the other day a friend likened Chi Wulff to an addled fly fisher with multiple personality disorder; he said we can’t seem to decide who or what we want to be on any given day.

We took that as a compliment of the highest order.

You have a lot of interests in today’s world. So do we.

Just like you we’re rabid about fly fishing (which may take any one of an infinite number of forms), fish and fisheries. We’re huge fans of good fly fishing photography and videography, rivers, riparian zones, tidal marshes and salt flats.

We enjoy fish porn as much as the next guy (maybe even more), though honestly we’d probably prefer to interview a notable fisher or photographer and get a deeper look into the why behind their approach to fish and fishing, stewardship and life in general.

We’re figuring out that part of being a fly fisher and lover of rivers these days means that you can’t just sit on your ass and expect that things will forever remain the same.

We’re passionate about access and think fantasy fly fishing sucks big time (starting a series on this one shortly).

Though our hearts and home base are located in the Greater Yellowstone area and Montana, we’ve come to understand there’s a lot of nifty water, fish and fishers all over the map out there. (And, as you know well, there are some asshats out there too. We’ll try and irritate one for you.)

Bottom line, we’re not sure what Chi Wulff wants to be when it grows up.

We genuinely appreciate your readership and hope that at some point we’ve brought a smile, pissed you off, motivated you to do something reasonably constructive or even inspired you to broaden your culinary horizons.

Thanks.

And we mean that.

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Best Thanksgiving wishes from the gang at Chi Wulff.

We’re dining on the early side and headed out for little cast and blast action today.

Eat, eat.

Cast, cast.

Bang, bang.

Eat, eat.

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Just doing some tweaking suggested by our tech brain trust and web host tech gurus (actually on the North American continent) and vaporized a dozen or so new comments today that had slipped into moderation.

Dammit and our apologies if something witty you’ve written today isn’t showing up.

Be witty once again and we promise it’ll make it through.

Finding good help these days can truly be a pain in the ass.

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