Flylab Interview: Todd Tanner
Todd Tanner is an outdoor writer, conservationist, former fly-fishing guide and the founder of the School of Trout.
Todd spent years guiding anglers on the Henry’s Fork, Madison, Yellowstone and other western rivers before becoming the fly-fishing columnist for Sporting Classics magazine. A long-time outdoor writer, Todd has contributed to Fly Rod & Reel, American Angler, Field & Stream, Sports Afield, Hatch Magazine, The Flyfish Journal, Salmon & Steelhead Journal, Big Sky Journal, Writers on the Range, Backcountry Journal, Men’s Journal, Newsweek and the New York Times (whew, that’s a mouthful). He was instrumental in producing the short Conservation Hawks films Cold Waters, Chrome and Convergence for the Fly Fishing Film Tour, and In The Heart Of The Rockies for the Sportsman Channel. Todd is also the founder of the School of Trout.
I would call you a writer, conservationist and business owner, but can you describe yourself?
I don’t know that I’m particularly well equipped to describe myself, but I’d say that I’ve been writing about fly fishing and hunting for a long time. More than 30 years now. I love to fish. I love to spend time outdoors. I love to be outdoors with friends and family. I think using the outdoors to connect with other people–especially people who look at the world the way I do–is a really wonderful thing.
I run Conservation Hawks, which is a nonprofit that focuses on educating anglers and hunters about climate change and its impacts. I also run the School of Trout, which is an opportunity for me to get together with some really outstanding instructors who love to teach and share their wisdom. As you know, Tim, they’re expert anglers who are very generous with their time and knowledge.
One of the things I’ve done a lot over the years is wonder, “Why am I here?” Why am I doing this as opposed to something else? Why am I standing here midstream casting a fly at rising trout instead of hanging out in a bowling alley?
I can tell you why you’re not doing that…(laughing)
I do think it’s important that we understand why we fly fish, rather than simply doing it because somebody told us it was “cool.” It’s helpful when we know why we’re doing things. We can get deeper into it. We can enjoy it more. The entire experience grows more interesting and more life-affirming.
I was trying to think how long I’ve known you and feel like we’ve spent a lot of time together, but I still don’t really know Todd’s origin story on the writing side or fishing. What’s life like as a writer and how did that segue into fishing, or was it the other way around?
It was actually the other way around. I’ve been fishing since I was a little kid. I probably started when I was three or four. There was a brook that ran by my parents’ house back in New York. I only had to walk 15 feet from the house and I could look down and see little brook trout. Man, I wanted to catch those guys. In my mid-20s, a buddy of mine and I decided that we were going to spend some time out West, and we drove all through Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and a little bit in Idaho (messing around) and came to realize that we were pretty good at catching trout with our spinning rods. It got to the point where it really wasn’t that challenging. And if it’s not challenging, I’m not all that interested.
So, we both decided to take up fly fishing and I thought to myself, “Wow, this is the coolest thing ever, and I need to do a lot of it.” And I did a bunch of fishing in a very short period of time. To the point where, within a few years, I was probably fishing 300 days a year…
Were you a guide?
No, this was just personal fishing. I’d fish every day after work. I would sneak out and fish for an hour or two, because I didn’t have far to go to fish the Ten Mile, or Wappinger’s Creek, or the Housatonic.
After I started guiding back in ‘92, a really good friend of mine, Tim Linehan, who I used to work with, and who runs the Linehan Outfitting Company up in Northwestern Montana–LOC is one of the premier outfitting businesses in the country–asked, “What are you going to do through the winter?” Because we weren’t going to Argentina or New Zealand to guide in the winter. (And neither of us was particularly well-to-do.) I said, “I’ll probably go back East and work for the winter.” And he said, “I’m going to try and write.” And I thought, “Wow, that’s fascinating.” It had never occurred to me before. I had written some stuff just for myself, but I had never written for anyone else.
I asked Tim, “What’s your plan?” Because Tim always had a plan for everything. And he said, “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to start out writing for small regional fly-fishing magazines, and we’re going to sell some stories and build up our reputations, and then we’ll move to the larger regional magazines. After a while, we’re going to move to the smaller national magazines. And then in 10 years, if everything works out just right, we’ll start writing for the larger national fly fishing magazines.” And I said, “Okay, Tim, I love your idea, but your plan needs tweaking. We’re going to send stories to the largest fly-fishing magazine out there. If it works, great. And if it doesn’t, oh well, we gave it a shot.”
And for whatever reason, John Randolph, the editor at Fly Fisherman, bought the first three stories I ever sent him.
I was like, “Damn, this isn’t that hard.” I was also guiding, so I had a huge amount of material to pull from.
Was this a competition? Did Linehan also get picked up?
Tim definitely sold some stories back in the day. He has a more artistic flare for his writing, though, so, his style might not have been quite as well-suited to some of the “how-to” fly-fishing publications.
Did you have any formal training as a writer?
No. That said, I had the very best training as a writer, because as a kid I loved to read. I still do. My son Kian wants to be a writer, but he doesn’t read enough. And I keep telling him, “If you really want to write, then you have to read. You have to read good stuff. You have to read people who really know how to write.” After a while, at least if we’re lucky, that flair for language, and for writing, starts to seep in. The danger, of course, is you don’t want to sound like somebody else.
Back in the ‘90s, some of my work started to sound too much like John Gierach. I was reading a lot of John’s writing at the time and I truly enjoyed his style. I had to consciously say to myself, “That’s not my voice. My voice is different than John’s.”
So, you were guiding all summer, then writing in the winter–that’s how it started…
Yes, and I was working for my old man, too. My dad owned an electrical contracting business back in New York, so I’d go back and help out for a month or two. I was writing and doing electrical work during the winter and living the dream during the summer.
I should also point out that I really do love to fish. For better or worse, anglers are my people. They’re the people that I feel most comfortable talking to. We have this one incredible thing in common, right? We love to stand in water and wave a stick. And while that’s a little weird, it’s also incredibly endearing.
Tell us how you became involved with Conservation Hawks.
Essentially, I shifted my writing from “fishing and hunting only” to “fishing, hunting & conservation” because our landscapes and waters are such an important part of what we do. If we don’t have beautiful, pristine waterways, if we don’t have healthy landscapes, then our hunting and fishing goes away. When I finally recognized that, I had to start writing more about the conservation side of things. I started paying attention to climate change, because it seemed like things in our environment were shifting. This would have been in the early 2000s, and I believe that in 2005 I wrote the first-ever story on climate change for a national hook & bullet publication. It just struck me that this was a really serious challenge for those of us who love to fish or hunt. I thought it was my responsibility to make other folks aware, if they weren’t already. Then Conservation Hawks came about five years later–we started in 2011. I realized I could amplify my voice by starting an organization that would focus on the single largest issue for hunters and anglers: climate.
Certainly, there are other things that are really important as well–public lands have been in the news recently, because there’s been an increased threat to sell them off–but from a global perspective, nothing impacts us like climate change.
I’ve been lucky to do a bunch of stuff with you guys on films–are you doing mostly advocacy work and getting the word out there? Rather than mobilized, “boots on the ground” kind of stuff, right?
You could almost think of us as the angel on your shoulder saying, “Hey, please pay attention to climate change.” We focus on education, and we try to get people engaged, but we’re not a membership organization. It’s not Trout Unlimited where everybody is meeting next Saturday to plant willows alongside the stream. There’s definitely a spot for that, of course, but our goal is to get folks to understand that climate isn’t some far off, amorphous challenge that may or may not impact our grandkids in 50 years. It’s something that’s happening right now. As I sit here today in northwest Montana, on June 12th, smoke from huge Canadian wildfires is wafting down here and filling up our valley and making the air really unhealthy to breathe.
When did you start the School of Trout? Tell us a little more about it.
The School of Trout is an excuse for me to hang out with a bunch of people who put a smile on my face. I’ve been very fortunate. I’ve been part of the fly-fishing world for a long time now, and I certainly would never consider myself famous, but I’m reasonably well known in the “industry,” if you want to use that term.
Basically, the school is an opportunity for me to spend time teaching, which I really enjoy doing. I think those of us who’ve been in fly fishing for a long time have an obligation to give back and this is one way for me to do that. There are other ways, of course, and I try to take advantage of those as well. But the school is a way to share my love for the outdoors, and the wonder and joy I find in moving water. Hopefully, the students can experience that same thing and benefit from their time with some of the world’s finest fly-fishing instructors.
I originally started working on the idea in 2016 or 2017. We held our first classes in 2018 and we still only do two classes a year. They’re both reasonably long. About a week. That’s a little challenging, because we’re trying to squeeze 10 days worth of information into a week. My experience is that the people who attend have found it extremely valuable, and very interesting, and we have quite a few people who come back and take a second or third class with us. The school is a place for people who are interested in, and focused on, learning, rather than simply catching fish.
How would you describe the students? It seems like most of them are highly curious people.
I would say that our students are passionate about learning, and about being outdoors. Some of them are pretty serious anglers when they come to us. Others are just getting started. But I think they all see our classes as a way to experience the natural world from a unique perspective (fly fishing).
We never tell anybody that you have to do things this way, or that way–that you can’t fish nymphs, or dry flies, or that you have to fish from a boat, or you have to wade fish, or whatever. We want people to understand that there are myriad ways for them to experience the world of fly fishing and to maximize their enjoyment. But our students really want to learn. They’re really stoked to learn. And I guess the one thing I did not anticipate about the school was just how great the students would be. By the time our students leave, I always say, “Man, I can’t wait to see them again. I can’t wait to hang out with them again.” And when you throw in the instructors, who are absolutely wonderful, it’s a great mix of people.
I would agree. It is such a treat to hang out with these folks. It’s a good group of people and they’ve all become friends.
It’s a neat thing and a very organic experience. Every time we hold a class, even if we’ve done the same class a bunch of times before, I’m sitting down and calling John Juracek or Pat McCabe or Brant Oswald or whoever it might be and saying, what can we do better? How can we make this better? And as we’ve talked about in the past, I didn’t come up with the idea for our annual hosted trips. Hell, I was really against it in the beginning. But a couple of our students–Mitchell Quaranta and Chris Elbow–said something along the lines of, “Todd, you absolutely have to do this. We want to fish with the folks we went to the classes with, and rather than do that on our own, we’d like to do it through the School of Trout…”
As you know, we get a handful of students together, and a couple of instructors, and we go someplace fun and fish for four or five days–and we have a blast. It’s really nice because the instructors get to see how the students have advanced and grown as anglers. We also get to interact with them in a less-formal setting. Not that the School of Trout is particularly formal, but there’s a hierarchy of instructors and students. With the hosted trips, it’s more like a bunch of friends getting together and having a great time.
I won’t name names, but there are a few students who, at this point, I think could be teaching me, rather than me teaching them. So yeah, the concept seems to work. A big part of the School of Trout is casting. And you’re a dry fly nut. Why do you like dry fly fishing so much?
I like dry fly fishing because it’s visual. I can see what the fish is doing and how it’s reacting to my fly. I can see everything. Blind fishing with nymphs is a really effective way to catch fish, but I can’t tell how the fish reacts to any particular drift. Most of the time, I can't see the fish. It’s just a different experience. In a perfect world, I would dry fly fish 80% of the time, I’d fish streamers 10% of the time, I’d fish nymphs 8% of the time and maybe soft hackles 2% of the time. I like to do everything.
That’s very specific, Todd.
Well, if you ask me tomorrow, I’ll come up with completely different percentages. I like to fish with dries, nymphs, streamers and wets, but the dry fly stuff is my favorite. If I was fishing out of a boat, the percentages might change a little bit. Maybe I’d bump up the streamer fishing percentage. But I was in a boat so much 30 years ago as a guide–it felt like I would never be able to get out of the damn thing…
That’s funny because one of my questions is why do you hate fishing from a boat?
I don’t hate fishing from a boat. I actually enjoy it. The thing that’s really cool about boats is our ability to fish with other folks and have a social experience together. If I’m wade fishing with you and we meet up, I’ll say, “Okay, Tim, are you going up or down?” And you’ll say, “I don't know. Pick one.” And I’ll say, “Okay, I’ll go up. You go down. We’ll meet in four hours.” That’s how guys fish together, typically, unless they’re on a really big river. In a boat, it’s great because we can fish together and talk to each other the entire day. I enjoy the social aspect of fishing out of a boat. It’s just that I don’t like the work that it takes, and I don’t like the fact that I’m always the guy rowing. (Because I have a lot of experience rowing.) Unless I’m fishing with another crazy angler who’s completely immersed in the sport, chances are good that I’m the one rowing the boat.
I hear you, but I like rowing as much as I like fishing, maybe more.
And that’s okay. I’ve caught so many fish, I don’t really need to catch a lot more. But there is something to be said for fishing as opposed to rowing the whole time.
Can you give me one embarrassing story from the School of Trout that sticks in your mind?
A few years ago, we did our Tao of Trout class on The Ranch at Harriman State Park. Toward the end of the class I was messing around during a break and our head casting instructor, John Juracek, was there with a few students, and I did something I do on occasion, which is cast left-handed. I don’t remember how it came up, but somebody asked John about my left-handed casting (I am right-hand dominant), and John said, “I think Todd’s left-hand cast is more fundamentally sound than his right-hand cast…”
That’s rough, haha!
In one sense it’s good, because it means I’ve been paying attention to John, and in another sense, it’s a challenge because we’ve all built up some pretty serious muscle memory over the years.
I work on that a lot, but I’m still not quite there. John is both the best caster and the best fly casting instructor I’ve ever seen. Sometimes he’ll say, “No, Todd, you’re still not using your wrist enough.” It’s funny because I like to think that I’m a pretty accomplished caster. Yet at the same time, it’s wild to have someone who’s at the very pinnacle of fly casting look at you and say, “Yeah, there are still places you can improve.” On one hand, that’s a little daunting and I’m fighting decades of muscle memory. On the other hand, it’s nice to know that there’s something I still have to strive for. As John points out on a pretty regular basis, it’s my responsibility to model excellent casting for the students.
As anglers, what’s the most important thing an individual can do right now to protect the fishing spots we all love?
I would say there are two things and they’re related, but they’re not the same and they’re going to be counterintuitive for a lot of folks. The first thing is to vote for people who are going to protect our streams and rivers, our lakes and oceans. If we have people in power who don’t care about our landscapes and waters and who are willing to sell them off to the highest bidder, or simply ignore them, our fishing will be trashed. We’re going to lose a lot of the stuff that we care about, maybe all of the stuff that we care about. Vote for people who share your values and who care about the same things that you care about as an angler.
And the second thing would be to talk to other people about the stuff that you’re seeing out there–your concerns–and share your views as often as you can. We need to take strong action on conservation. A lot of people treat conservation almost like they’re buying indulgences. You throw a few bucks at it, then you go about your life in whatever way you want, without worrying about whether you’re holding up the values that you claim to have. I see a ton of that in conservation. People don’t do everything they can. They’ll throw some money to whatever organization they care about, and that’s great. It’s important. Those dollars are vital, because it’s harder than ever for conservation organizations to raise money. But while the money helps, it’s actually more important to share your views with your friends, family members and co-workers. Just be upfront and honest about it. The challenge is getting other people–who care about clean water and healthy ecosystems–to talk about the threats we face.
I read one scientific paper on climate change that claimed the single most important thing we can do to address the issue is to talk more about it. That’s because it’s something that people aren’t comfortable discussing. So, whether your focus is on climate, or public lands, or any of the myriad issues that are affecting our fishing and time on the water, talk about that issue with other people and make sure your concerns get out there and get amplified. The more we talk, the more the politicians, policy makers and decision makers will have to pay attention.
Did you have a life-changing moment?
My life-changing moment was a little over 20 years ago when my son Kian was born. It was no longer about my relationship with the world. It became, “What kind of world am I going to leave to my son?” It’s an uncomfortable realization for a lot of folks, but if we want to pass along a viable natural world to the folks who come after us, we have to hold up our end of things.
We have to speak up. We have to share our thoughts, views and hopes with other people. And these conversations, hopefully, will start breaking through all the anger and the political craziness. It’s time to start treating the world around us with a little bit more respect. We should do our best to leave our landscapes better than we found them…
I agree, Todd. This is a good place to end.
The School of Trout is a small, exclusive fly-fishing school providing the very finest in personalized instruction. The week-long classes accept a maximum of 12 anglers, while students learn from, and interact with, some of the world’s most respected fly fishers.
Flylab members who attend the Tao of Trout class in October will receive a Montana Brothers Rodworks 904M or 904L fly rod ($925). Flylab members who attend the Dry Fly class in August will receive a Hardy Lightweight fly reel ($499).
Learn more about Flylab memberships and our cool perks. Save on flies, gear, boats, guide trips, schools and travel from the best fly shops, outfitters and brands in the outdoor industry.
Amen, brother! Thanks for all you do.