While you clearly wouldn’t know it from the pic taken of her this past fall at the Greek Creek campground on the Gallatin, we’re adding a pretty damned active Jess back to the Team Chi Wulff roster.

[In an attempt to offer somewhat of a limited defense of her obvious sloth, she had just completed a 28 hour drive the two days before and been run off the river in a very close - almost a reach out and touch - bear encounter about an hour before this rest break.]

While living in Missoula a few months / years back she helped Al the Pal cover the Clark Fork, Rock Creek, Bitterroot and Blackfoot rivers.  She’s now grown up a bit and spends her days wrangling expensive horses, cameras and fish along the Colorado front range.

Here’s a more upscale and highbrow biography -

Jess divides her time between the camera and the saddle.  Living a dual life as owner of Fire Girl Photography and manager / trainer at Legacy Hill Farms in Castle Rock, Colorado, she stays insanely busy and likes it that way.

Growing up playing the the mountains and river of the West, Jess’ passion for the outdoors started early.  She loves to hike and fly fish and spends much of her time practicing with either bow or pistol.  Photography found her in the summer of 2009 when she researched and published an investigative article / photo series for American Angler.  She has since photographed and written for several Western magazines, including the Big Sky Journal and Mountain Gazette, and continues to be a contributor to American Angler (ed – including an article in the current issue.)

Look for Jess in the March 2011 Cowboys & Indians magazine as one of their featured photographers of the year.

Jess recently relocated to Castle Rock, Colorado to explore her other passion – upper level dressage.  She has taken over management of Legacy Hill Farm and looks forward to growing and developing the business.

Life is too short to bored, after all.  Jess laughs that her two chosen careers – photojournalism and training horses – leave her in body protection much of the time.  She counts herself lucky when she gets any time away from the barn and the computer and loves to escape up into the hills.

Look for Jess’ posts featuring outdoor photography once a week on ChiWulff and be sure to check out her blog, the aptly named Fire Girl Photography Blog, where she posts more frequently on a variety of topics.

We’ll have Jess throwing in her two cents about photography related topics, and are having her work on covering some of the fly fishing happenings in CO.  Maybe she can get us into the Carp Slam this year…..

Tags: Chi Wulff

We’ve just fired off the 4th issue of the Good Chi Newsletter this morning.

There are waters that remain fishable in the area, mostly tailwaters as you’d expect, and the Firehole, upper Gallatin, and even the Madison in the Park are fishable (particularly the Firehole).

Congrats to Bob on winning this week’s Rivers in Motion river video from Dry Fly Media; that’s the second “Bob” winner this month.  We’ll be mailing his choice of river vid out as soon as we have Bob’s address.

Sign up in the right sidebar of any page if you haven’t already….

Tags: Chi Wulff

The entire team here at Chi Wulff is pleased as punch to announce the delivery today of our first Good Chi newsletter. 

I’m almost as happy has Larry Hagman used to be all the time on I Dream of Jeannie.  She that show was inspiring.  Missouri River Steve claims to dream of Jeannie now and then; at least he’s honest about it. 

We can’t promise you’ll be as inspired after reading the Good Chi newsletter, but we’ll try.  Sign up in the right sidebar or on the Good Chi page (top tab).

(We’re testing a couple of different ‘mailers’ today, so if you see a version of the newsletter than looks a bit different that the one you received, don’t fret, the content is the same.)

Tags: Chi Wulff

We’re humbled and amazed at the response to the announcement of our Good Chi newsletter yesterday – it appears that we’ve had so many folks sign up that it temporarily overwhelmed our subscription service.  My apologies if you tried to sign up via the blog post link yesterday and were unable to. 

The subscription / mailing service we’re using (temporarily until we install a much more robust system) is aptly named Mail Chimp.  Our own Chi Wulff Tech Chimp (Jake) worked on the issue a bit, though has just run off to the fish the lower Madison in the snow this afternoon with an attractive member of the opposite sex.  She also happens to be an expert fly fisher.  

When faced with the difficult dilemma of choosing between working on the web site and the excursion mentioned above, he took about 0.00452 seconds and made the right choice to go fishing.  April 29th only comes around once each year. 

The Good Chi sign up box in the first side bar to the right is still working, and we’ll have a signup widget posted on the Good Chi newsletter page (tab above) by this evening, provided Jake returns to his Tech Chimp cage as scheduled.

Your interest is very much appreciated; the first Good Chi newsletter rolls out 7 May.

Tags: Chi Wulff

The Chi Wulff team is pleased as punch to announce the arrival of our new weekly newsletter:  Good Chi – A Weekly Journal of Fly Fishing in Yellowstone, Southern Montana, and Around. 

We’re doing this primarily in response to a hoard of requests that we’ve received during the past two years that we were blogging over at Best Fly Fishing Yellowstone.  For the past two years, guys and gals who have ventured to our site have requested that we provide a ‘cheat sheet’ type report covering all the rivers that we update during the week. 

Being folks that would rather fish than write stuff for the most part, we thanked our kind visitors for their interest and promptly filed the requests in the round file. 

Now that we’ve expanded our team a bit and have a bit more horsepower as well as several 8 packs of crayons to share, it’s our pleasure to start the Good Chi Weekly Journal next week. 

Here’s what we plan to include –

For each river we’re updating every week, we’ll provide a short and sweet summary of what’s happening in one sentence or less.  Coverage will include:

Montana and Idaho Rivers

• Beaverhead
• Big Hole
• Bighorn
• Bitterroot
• Blackfoot
• Clark Fork
• Gallatin
• Henry’s Fork
• Madison
• Rock Creek
• Yellowstone

Yellowstone NP Rivers (late May to early November)

• Cascade Corner (Bechler and Fall)
• Firehole
• Gardner
• Gibbon
• Lamar
• Slough Creek
• Soda Butte Creek
• Yellowstone
• Smaller waters

Good Chi will also include comments on area still waters, events in the neighborhood, and maybe a comment or two about shops, eateries, and other things you’ll want to know about when you’re up this way.

Good Chi won’t just cover things happening here in the area – we’ll highlight interesting, unusual, noteworthy, or just freakin’ weird stuff from around the fly fishing world. 

Good Chi will be FREE (always a good thing when the economy sucks) and delivered electronically more or less every Thursday to save those beautiful trees.  We’re going to play by the rules and have a real sign up process so that we don’t spam – all we need is a functional email and your first name so that you can confirm your desire to receive this soon to be released work of crayon genius. 

The Chi Wulff team promises upon pain of death and, much more importantly, destruction of all our personal fly fishing gear, that we will NEVER EVER sell, lend, disclose, barter, distribute, publish, ransom or otherwise mistreat, misuse, or malfease ( I know that’s not a word but I needed another ‘m’) your contact information. 

The Chi Wulff team does NOT promise that all the content in Good Chi will be absolutely ‘fresh’ – there will perhaps be a link or two to things other great minds (or we) have recently written, recorded in video or still photos, cooked, caught, or eaten.  

The Chi Wulff team does NEITHER promise NOR guarantee that you’ll be amazed, impressed, inspired, uplifted, motivated, educated, enlivened, encouraged, animated, moved, energized, dumbfounded, stunned, overwhelmed, or otherwise excited by Good Chi – but we’re damn sure going to try. 

There will be a tab at the top of the site up today titled Good Chi; we’ll have a sign up widget up there and in the first sidebar to the right, and will be posting archives of the newsletter on the Good Chi page. 

Sign up today, we’re coloring like mad for the first issue debuting on Thursday, May 7.

Tags: Chi Wulff