Foot blisters are the number one injury on the trail, and most of them show up when you least expect them. Research cited by podiatrist Rebecca Rushton shows that on multi-day hikes, the majority of blisters form on day two, not day one. That means even experienced hikers who do everything right on the first […]

Learning how to portage a canoe solo changed my backcountry trips forever. After fifteen years of solo tripping in the BWCA, Algonquin, and the Adirondacks - and one near-miss that put a 17-foot canoe on top of me in a bog - I can tell you the solo lift is the single most important skill […]

To pop up on a surfboard, you need to execute a fast, explosive push-up that brings your feet underneath your chest in a single, fluid motion. I've been teaching beginners to pop up for over a decade, and I can tell you: the pop-up is the single bottleneck of surfing. Every other skill depends on […]

If you have ever watched a topwater lure barely wiggle when it should be walking side to side, the knot at the eyelet is usually the reason. I learned how to tie a loop knot for lures the slow way, losing three walk-the-dog plugs in one trip before a friend handed me a pair of […]

After 30-plus years on the water and more than a thousand hooks tied on everything from 4lb trout test to 80lb braid for tuna, I keep coming back to the same knot for roughly 95% of my connections: the uni knot. It's the knot I taught my daughter on her first spinning rod, the knot […]

If you've ever fished from a kayak with a fish finder dangling off a piece of PVC pipe and your rod holders sliding around the tankwell, you already know why anglers keep asking how to set up a kayak fishing console. A center console pulls every critical tool - electronics, rods, battery, tackle - into […]

I have spent the last four summers sleeping in hammocks across the Appalachian Trail, the Rockies, and the sandhills of Nebraska, and I can tell you that learning how to set up a hammock camping system is the difference between a restorative night under the stars and a miserable, cold, banana-shaped struggle. In this guide, […]

When my teammate first flipped in a Class III hole and couldn't roll back up, he spent the next forty minutes swimming through cold rapids before anyone could reach him. That scene plays out every weekend on rivers around the world, and it's exactly why learning how to roll a whitewater kayak is the single […]

A Texas rig for bass pairs a bullet-shaped slip sinker, an offset worm hook (or extra-wide-gap hook), and a soft plastic rigged weedless so the hook point sits inside the bait. It's the most versatile freshwater bass rig we teach at our shop, and one I personally lean on from January through December on everything […]

I lost more walleye in my first two seasons than I care to admit, and almost every one of those losses came back to the same lesson: I did not know how to rig a live bait for walleye the right way. I was tying my hook straight to the mainline, skipping the swivel, and […]