Blue Ribbon Bow
A Fly- Fishing History of the Bow River -  Canada’s Greatest Trout Stream   

Foreword by Charles F. Waterman.  

This book explains the history of the Bow River valley and the development of the river into one of the world’s most celebrated trout streams. The first edition, published in 1986 as a large-format, coffee-table book, received the  Book of the Year Award from The Outdoor Writers of Canada.  That edition is now out of print, and occasionally fetches high prices in used bookstores.  However the revised and updated edition was published in 1998, and is available in hardcover or softcover.

Chapter titles:  The Whole of the Bow; A History of the Bow River Valley; A History of the Bow River Trout Fishery; The Bow River Trout Fishery Today; Fishing the Bow River; The Upper Bow River; The Middle and Lower Bow River; Fly Patterns; The State of the Bow River Trout Fishery

Blue Ribbon Bow – (184 pages) hard cover - $37.95 (Cdn) + GST.,  $30.95 U.S. 
Blue Ribbon Bow – soft cover - $22.95 (Cdn) + GST,  $19.95 U.S.

Blue Ribbon Bow
An Excerpt from the  Introduction 

            The Bow River and I go back a long way—back to a time when, as songwriter Ian Tyson would put it, I was young and limber, and when the river was something of an upstart, too, breaking all the rules of trout riverdom.  I note with pleasure that my affection for this river has not diminished in the 30 years since I first stepped into it; I note with less pleasure that the river seems to have aged more gracefully than I have.

            A river’s reputation, like a young athlete’s or artist’s, grows in a fairly predictable fashion: the first to notice their gifts are family members, then a few friends, then a writer from the local newspaper.  Next is the national press, then an American TV network.  Publicity reaches its zenith when yokels who knew them when they were nuttin’ write books about them.

            Things didn’t work exactly this way for the Bow River—except for the book part.  While I would never claim to have been the only guy around in the early days who appreciated the Bow and its trout fishing, in the mid-1970s the group of us was pretty small.  If one of us saw somebody across the river with a fly rod, it wasn’t hard to figure out who it was.  Those of us fly-fishing the Bow then knew its trout were big and strong; we just didn’t appreciate how much bigger and stronger they were than trout everywhere else.

            In typical Canadian fashion it took high-profile outsiders—Lefty Kreh, A.J. McClane, Gary Borger—to point out that the fish in the Bow were bigger and stronger that the fish in the famous American rivers they had been writing about for many years.  Ironically, among the last to find out about the quality of the Bow River was the average fly-fishing Albertan, who might have lived within sight of the Bow but continued dutifully plotting obligatory trips to the Madison, Snake and Henry’s Fork.  The last to meet and appreciate the charms of the Bow as a trout stream were the provincial government and the city of Calgary, both of which have made progress—albeit grudgingly at times—toward better stewardship of the resource.

            The Bow has been pressured and abused by technology, pollution and simple accumulating humanity.  But the river and its fish have survived, and just as importantly the river’s appeal has survived.  Solitude, the core element of fly-fishing, is still out there, even if it now must be sought more diligently.  I still find it in the gold light of daybreak at McKinnon Flats or in the brittle, tangy aroma of an October afternoon.