Ted Leeson

Ted Leeson and Jim Schollmeyer team up to pair incredible photos with descriptions of insects and solid information on the hatch, life cycle, fly patterns, and step-by-step tying instructions in this authoritative reference to imitating the important trout food forms in rivers and streams of the West. This comprehensive guide includes 150 patterns to match the super hatches of greatest significance to western anglers: mayflies, caddisflies, stoneflies, midges, terrestrials, aquatic worms, baitfish, sculpin, fish eggs, leeches, scuds, and sowbugs. With 1,356 photographs including the undersides of insects to give the trout's eye view, ideal for matching what the trout sees.

Every summer for two decades, Ted Leeson and a maverick group of close companions have returned to an old ranch house on the benchland overlooking the Madison River. Trout and fly fishing may be at the heart of their ritual return, but their experience goes far beyond the fishing. Leeson contemplates both the human and natural landscape brilliantly: the fly-anglers’ passionate, ironic, and sometimes hilarious allegiances to what they do; the intriguing Madison Valley and its creatures and flowers; the trout town of Ennis; maps and their revelations; the ?green-card” experience of living in a place in which you are not native; the nature of leisure. Full of wit, surprise, shrewd observation, and wisdom, this book tells a story about creating a place of temporary liberty, and inhabiting a world fashioned of your best imaginings, where you might, for a time, live the potencies of a place that you have shaped and has shaped you. No lover of the very best writing about fly fishing and the natural world can afford to miss this stunning book.

Originally published in 1994, this book was a fly-fishing phenomenon in the way Howell Raines’s Fly Fishing Through the Mid-Life Crisis was. Taking his fishing hobby to near metaphysical levels, Ted Leeson tells about his passions: rivers, trout, and fly fishing. With wry humor and rare insight, he explores questions that engage most fishermen: What is it about rivers that draws us so irresistibly, and why does fly fishing seem such an aptly suited response? Above all, The Habit of Rivers is about ways of seeing the wonderfully textured world that emanates from a river.