About
Someone had to
write down
the numbers.
This site is a public copy of the notebook in my glovebox. It exists because I got tired of trip reports that told me a river fished well without telling me what it was running.
What this is
A personal log, kept since 2019, of trips that combine a long drive on bad roads with a few days of fishing at the end of them. Mostly the Northern Rockies, mostly small water, mostly wild fish.
Every entry carries the same data block: discharge, water temperature, drive distance, high point, and the fly that finally worked. Those numbers are the part I'd actually want from someone else's report, so they go at the top rather than buried in a paragraph.
Why it's called that
Slackwater is an ordinary working word. It is not a metaphor I invented, and it means two useful things depending on who is saying it.
On a river it is the slow water lying against the fast. Behind a boulder, inside the curve of a bend, along the shear line where a current runs past dead water. It costs a trout almost nothing to hold there, and the food comes past in the quick water an arm's length away. That seam — the edge between moving and still — is where the fish are, and it is the first thing you learn to read.
At sea it is a span of time rather than a piece of water: the interval when the tide has stopped running and has not yet turned, the twenty-odd minutes in which a passage that is otherwise unrunnable can be run. Mariners do not guess at it. They read tables, and they turn up early.
Both senses describe one thing — a window inside a system that is otherwise moving too hard to work with — and between them they cover what this site is for. The trip logs are the first sense: where the seam was, and what was holding in it. The water page is the second: 47 gauges reporting live, so the window can be found from a thousand miles off instead of guessed at from a driveway.
The road half is no longer in the name, but it has not gone anywhere. Nine hours of washboard for four hours of good water is still the arithmetic, and the chart on the front page is still that joke made literal: it reads as a river's discharge and a road's elevation at once, because on paper I have never been able to tell them apart.
This site was called Slackwater & Switchback until 2026. Same notebook, shorter name, and every old link still works.
What this isn't
- Not a guide service. I'm not selling anything, and I don't take clients.
- Not sponsored. No affiliate links, no gear sent for free, no discount codes. If I recommend something it's because I paid for it and then kept using it.
- Not a map. Named rivers stay named because they're already in every guidebook. Small tributaries and the two-tracks that reach them stay vague on purpose.
- Not written by a machine. Every word on this site is mine. There is a Claude model on the Ask page, but it is a reading assistant — it looks things up in the site's own live data and answers questions about them. It doesn't write the logs, it isn't me, and it follows the same rules I do about warm water and about not naming small water.
On not burning spots
The overlap between overlanding and fly fishing is exactly the set of places that can't absorb much pressure — small streams at the end of long roads, with thin populations of wild fish and no hatchery truck coming. A geotag is a permanent decision made by someone who won't be there to see the consequences.
So: drainages, not coordinates. If you recognise a place from a photo, you already knew it, and I'd appreciate you keeping it to yourself too.
Get in touch
Happy to talk about flows, road conditions, tire pressures, or why my rear main seal failed. Less happy to answer “where exactly is that.”