S3, Ep 138: Spencer Durrant of Spencer Durrant Outdoors

**Marvin Cash (00:00:03):**

Hey folks, it's Marvin Cash, the host of The Articulate Fly. On this episode, I'm joined by Spencer Durrant of Spencer Durrant Outdoors. Spencer shares his love of the outdoors and we talk about fly fishing, guiding, writing, and everything in between. I think you're really going to enjoy this one.

But before we get to the interview, just a couple of housekeeping items. If you like the podcast, please tell a friend and please subscribe and leave us a rating and review on the podcast catcher of your choice. It really helps us out.

And a shout out to this episode's sponsor. This episode is sponsored by our friends at Nor-vise. Their motto is, "Tie better flies faster," and they produce the only vise that truly spins. On October 16th, the folks at Nor-vise will be unveiling a new product at Tuckasegee Fly Shop's Demo Day. The event will run from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Tuckasegee Fly Shop's new Waynesville location. Stop by and meet the folks from Nor-vise, watch them tie up everything from size 20 midges to Game Changers, and of course, check out the new product release. If you can't make it, be sure to head over to www.nor-vise.com and check out all of Nor-vise's great products. Now, on to the interview.

Well, Spencer, welcome to The Articulate Fly.

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**Spencer Durrant (00:01:21):**

Hey, Marvin. Thanks for having me.

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**Marvin Cash (00:01:23):**

Well, I'm really looking forward to our time together this evening. We have a tradition on The Articulate Fly — we always ask our guests to share their earliest fishing memory.

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**Spencer Durrant (00:01:33):**

Oh, earliest fishing memory. So if anybody's read anything I've written, I apologize because I've told this story multiple times. I think I was five or six — I can't remember which, but it was one of those two. My dad and I hopped into his old Nissan Sentra, and I remember what he was driving because he had a CD that I think the only track on there was "Cotton Eye Joe". I don't know if that was the only track or if that's just the one that I hit repeat on because I loved it. I was a little kid.

And I remember mom telling us that we needed to go into town to get groceries. Because where we lived at the time, the closest grocery store was 15 or 20 minutes away. So we hopped in the car, but we didn't go to the grocery store. Dad took me up to the river. There's this little creek that we've been fishing — and by "we," I mean our family. We've been fishing it since my family settled out here in Utah in 1847.

He took me up there and he gave me a fly rod and said, "When you get it tangled or lose a fly, you're done fishing." So he sets off upstream. I set off downstream. And I was done within like five minutes — I was hopelessly tangled. So I bring the rod back to my dad and he's like, "All right, well, you're just going to watch me because you can't handle your crap for more than five minutes, so you just get to watch."

So I'm sitting there and he's fishing dry flies. It's dusk and there's caddis and mayfly everywhere. I'm freaking out because I thought the bugs were going to eat me, and my dad had to explain these were the good bugs — these weren't the bad bugs. And he's pulling fish just left and right on dry flies. He catches one, lets it go, and I remember I was just wearing sandals. The fish just slammed right over my feet to go downstream. And I couldn't believe it. That was my first exposure to it that I remember.

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**Marvin Cash (00:03:46):**

Yeah, that's super neat.

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**Spencer Durrant (00:03:49):**

It was a good time. And then I've been fishing that stream — I fished it pretty religiously until the big fire that was caused by incompetent Forest Service officials in the state of Utah. It was completely their fault. It came in and burned 120, 130,000 acres and decimated half a dozen trout streams. But I'm not bitter about that at all.

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**Marvin Cash (00:04:22):**

Yeah, and just for folks that are kind of over here on the East Coast, away from you — basically what happens is you get just massive silt and runoff, and it just chokes the streams.

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**Spencer Durrant (00:04:33):**

Yeah, the fires burn so hot and so fast that they just burn up all that brush that holds up the soil, so then you get rain and everything floods and the stream channels get rerouted. I mean, the first big rainstorm we had after that fire, I was talking with some of my buddies who work in the Division of Wildlife here in Utah, and they were netting dead fish out of the Spanish Fork River. Nobody really thinks to trout fish the Spanish Fork River — it's always kind of off color. A lot of folks will catfish it or go for bass, or you can get pike down by the mouth of the river where it dumps into Utah Lake.

But they were netting some 30-inch brown trout that were living in there that had just died before anybody even had a chance to catch them, because they just suffocated in that silted runoff. There were a lot of angry emails and phone calls from myself and a lot of other folks to the Forest Service. There's still one road up there — it's been three, maybe four years, I can't even remember now, probably three years — and there's a road that still hasn't even been opened yet because they just haven't gotten around to clearing the flood debris off of it.

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**Marvin Cash (00:06:04):**

So you started young with a fly rod. Did you stick with it or did you fish gear? How did that kind of work?

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**Spencer Durrant (00:06:12):**

I ended up fishing gear because I couldn't figure out the fly rod. I'd always fish flies when I was with my dad, but if I didn't go fishing with my dad, then I was fishing gear. I was a firm believer in Power Bait and treble hooks for a while there, and I killed my fair share of finless, spreading rainbow trout fresh off a hatchery truck at all the local community ponds. And then thankfully I didn't really start fishing any of the wild trout around here in the Rockies until I was either throwing jigs on a spinning rod or I was throwing flies.

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**Marvin Cash (00:07:00):**

And do you mostly fly fish now, or are you kind of looking for the best tool for the job?

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**Spencer Durrant (00:07:05):**

I mostly fly fish now. I mean, if we're going out and there's some reservoirs around here that are really just good bass reservoirs, I'll go and just throw gear all day because everybody else is throwing gear. It's hard to be the one guy that needs 10 feet of space at the bow or the stern for his fly rod, so I don't want to be that guy. I just take a spinning rod and go for it.

I still do a lot of trolling for kokanee salmon — that's a big thing here in Utah and a couple other western states. There's kokanee everywhere, and trolling for them is to conventional fishing what Euro-nymphing has been to fly fishing. Everybody's doing it, so it's an interesting dynamic.

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**Marvin Cash (00:08:00):**

Interesting. And obviously your dad was an important part of your fly fishing journey. Who are some of the other folks who have mentored you and what did they teach you?

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**Spencer Durrant (00:08:10):**

My good buddy Chad Argyle — he taught me the importance of presentation more than anything else. We were on a trip in the Boulder Mountains in central Utah, which is a terrible place. Don't ever go fishing there. Don't waste your time — doesn't even have fish, hardly. No, it's fantastic fishing.

We were fishing this pool in this little stream and every cast we were getting fish to chase our — I think we were just throwing some salmon eggs on a treble hook or something like that — and fish were chasing them like nobody's business, but we couldn't get the hook set. The fish would chase it and then turn away at the last minute. Chad finally came down and took a look at our rig, and our knots were terrible. We hadn't trimmed any of the line and our hooks weren't hidden or anything. He really gave us a masterclass in presentation that day. And then we caught a whole pile of fish and ate them all that night around the campfire. We were actually on a Scout trip, back when being in the Boy Scouts meant something.

And then my buddy Hiram Weaver — you've got to give him a shout out too. He's been a big help. He rescued a fly rod that I threw into Pyramid Lake one time, so I owe him a lot just for that. That trip to Pyramid could be a whole podcast.

Alex Patterson is another guy. What I learned from both Alex and Hiram is their dedication to the rigs that they've fished for years and years. Hiram's a true believer in the dry-dropper dropper system because you can fish three flies in Utah. That's what he fishes 99% of the time and he catches more fish than anybody else I know. I learned to dedicate myself to something and switch my flies out before I switch up the whole rig — so I'm not just saying, "Oh, well, they don't want any of the nymph today, I'm just going to fish two dry flies or whatever."

Same with Alex. He's that way too, but he's a lot more malleable — he'll change based on the situation. And the guy ties — he's colorblind as a bat, but he ties some beautiful flies. The tying with him is an adventure because if he doesn't have any of his colors labeled, some of his stuff turns out kind of fun. Those two guys did a lot for me.

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**Marvin Cash (00:11:16):**

Very neat. And you're a pretty prolific writer and content creator. When did you get the writing bug?

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**Spencer Durrant (00:11:25):**

Prolific's a strong word there, don't you think?

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**Marvin Cash (00:11:28):**

No, I mean, you create a lot of content. You're regularly putting out content for MidCurrent. You've got stuff on your own page. You've got a podcast. I know some people call themselves outdoor writers and they might write something once every three years.

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**Spencer Durrant (00:11:45):**

I guess that's true. I just feel like a slacker because I don't get half the stuff done that I need to. But no — I started out writing in professional sports, actually. I was always that weird kid in school who was writing fantasy stories instead of doing what he should have been doing, and then I grew out of that a little bit.

Me and all my buddies — a group of 13 or 14 of us — we all went out for the freshman basketball team and everybody made it except me. So I was kind of up a creek because I wasn't going to see my friends. I did the only logical thing and said, "I'll write for the student paper — I'll cover the basketball team for the student newspaper." We had one at our high school, and that ended up working out to where I was doing some regional high school sports coverage for the Deseret News and KSL, which are two local outlets here in Utah. I parlayed that into a job with the Utah Jazz fresh out of high school. I worked for them for a year, then worked for the Associated Press and Team USA for a little bit, and then just slowly transitioned out of sports into outdoors writing.

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**Marvin Cash (00:13:29):**

Do you remember the first piece you got published and got paid for?

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**Spencer Durrant (00:13:35):**

That's a good question. I can remember the first fishing story that I published and got paid for. That was a piece in Hatch Magazine about cutthroat restoration in Utah — that was the first outdoors piece that I ever got paid for. I don't remember when my first paid piece of writing was overall. That kind of concerns me. I'm going to be thinking about that all night now, Marvin. Thanks.

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**Marvin Cash (00:14:15):**

I didn't mean to do that to you. No worries. That makes me feel bad, because if you wake up at three —

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**Spencer Durrant (00:14:23):**

— o'clock in the morning and you're like, "I remember!" — well, I'll text you. I'll text you so you're up too.

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**Marvin Cash (00:14:29):**

Fair enough. That'll be five o'clock my time, so it'll actually work out a little bit better for me than for you. So you say you're really busy, and I know you do a lot — you're making rods, you're guiding, you're teaching middle school English. How do you like to write? Do you block out time, or are you one of those who wants to write a little bit every day when it's quiet, either at the beginning or at the end of the day?

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**Spencer Durrant (00:14:55):**

I make every writing teacher in the world faint because I just write when I feel like it, which is not good. It's kind of a habit I fell into, but it works out. I have a few deadlines that I have to keep, and I've been terrible at the horse — I haven't even really been keeping them. I need to apologize publicly to Chad Shmukler over at Hatch Magazine, because I've been late with every single story this year, I think just about.

I really write a lot after a fishing trip. And then I write a lot late at night — usually after my wife goes to sleep, I'll stay up writing. Thankfully she falls asleep and stays asleep, so I can sit in bed and write. I used to be really religious about sitting down at my desk every morning or every evening and cranking out a thousand words on whatever I was working on. But that was when I was putting a book together and a few other things, and I don't have that same urgency now, so I don't need to produce 80,000 words every year.

But I do take time to work at it, to make sure that I'm keeping my skill level up as well. I really pick away at pieces — I write a little bit here, a little bit there, and I go back to it. It takes me — I'm working on a story right now. I'm a week and a half into it, and it's probably going to end up being maybe 2,000 words. And I'll probably spend another two weeks on it. Three and a half weeks spent on a 2,000-word story. When you look at where you get paid for it, that really makes you want to cry. But it's part of the gig.

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**Marvin Cash (00:17:18):**

Yeah, no, I get it. It's interesting — we'll talk later about what's happened in the outdoor writing space in terms of being able to make a living doing it. But I was also curious — I always like to ask all of my writers to share some of their favorite authors and writers that they like to read and follow.

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**Spencer Durrant (00:17:32):**

My favorite fishing writers — John Gierach is going to be at the top. I've had a chance to fish with John and Bob White. We did a trip together a couple years ago and that was just an absolute blast. Tom Rosenbauer obviously has to be up there. I love any of Lefty Kreh's instructional work — that was really helpful to me. And then Michael Tougias — he's not a traditional fishing writer, but I love his writing. It's outdoors writing and he's just fantastic.

And then — I'm going to butcher the pronunciation because he's Welsh — I believe his name is David Niall, N-I-A-L-L, and he wrote a book called Trout from the Hills. It has some of the most lyrical prose that I've ever read. It is just amazing.

And then Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, and Edith Wharton are all great. I'm a big sci-fi thriller junkie, so Jonathan Maberry, Larry Correia, and C.J. Box are all great authors. I read tons of their stuff. And then since I'm a middle school English teacher, I end up reading a lot of young adult stories too, to figure out stuff for my students. Robin Schneider has been one of my favorite authors there lately. She's fantastic with what she puts together.

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**Marvin Cash (00:19:29):**

That's interesting, because when you mentioned fantasy earlier in the interview — when I was in middle school and early high school, I read a ton of science fiction and fantasy. And I've actually, just because life has gotten so serious lately, gone back and started rereading it. I'm rereading Dune now, but going back and looking at Anne McCaffrey and Piers Anthony and Michael Moorcock and some of those guys. It's kind of interesting to see what — Dune was published in 1965 — what people thought the future was going to be like before I was even born.

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**Spencer Durrant (00:20:09):**

Oh, yeah. When you go back and you read any Isaac Asimov, it's the same thing. Some of his predictions were just way too on the nose for comfort.

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**Marvin Cash (00:20:18):**

Interesting stuff. Yeah, we'll have to swap some paperbacks sometime instead of flies when we meet up, because I've got a ton of them. So too, you write in a lot of different media. I know you write for people, you write for yourself. Do you have a specific style or approach or goal when you write?

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**Spencer Durrant (00:20:43):**

I think more than anything, I'm just trying to tell a story and have it be — "entertaining" is the wrong word, and "distracting" is the wrong word. More like — and "captivating" is the wrong word too.

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**Marvin Cash (00:21:00):**

How about honest?

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**Spencer Durrant (00:21:03):**

Honest, yeah — but I want something that grabs your attention. That's why I said "captivating" is wrong, because it's got a romantic undertone to it, and I'm not trying to seduce anybody. I want to grab your attention enough. I want to give you a story so that you forget all the crap that you're dealing with, because 90% of what I write is read by people like me sitting in an office at two in the afternoon, staring out the window and thinking, "What am I doing wasting all my time here? I should be on the river." And they go get their fix, whatever publication it is they turn to. I just hope that whatever I write gives people that break they're looking for.

I worked in corporate settings for way too long and it was miserable. I read so much fishing writing during that time because I just sat there — and when you're in Utah, at least the Salt Lake area, mountains are all you see. And we all know where the trout are: they're up in the mountains. So it's kind of like being stuck in a veil but not being able to ski except for night skiing — it's still skiing, you're still at Vail, but it sucks because you're sitting there all day watching everybody else go down the list on a bluebird day. I'd always joke that I'd be sitting in my office and I could hear the trout rising on the Provo River. I couldn't, but it felt that way a lot.

So I just try and give people that sort of escape. And then obviously, if I'm doing gear reviews or instructional stories, the focus is there — but with the writing that's not gear or instructionally focused, that's what I'm trying to accomplish.

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**Marvin Cash (00:23:16):**

And who are some of the folks, kind of like your fishing, that helped you with your writing?

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**Spencer Durrant (00:23:22):**

Oh man, this is going to be a long list.

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**Marvin Cash (00:23:27):**

That's good. That's fine.

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**Spencer Durrant (00:23:29):**

Chad Shmukler has to be a big one. Tom Rosenbauer has been kind enough to help me out. Bob White has also been kind enough to help me out. Faith Jolly, one of my old editors at KSL. And Kristevich — she was an old editor at a local paper here in Utah.

And now I'm blanking on names. This is the part I hate — I can see the first face but I can't remember their name. My good buddy Ryan McCullough. He's been a good sounding board for writing and has helped me a ton. All those folks have been supremely helpful in getting me to where I'm at now.

I'd also have to say Kirk Deeter over at Trout Unlimited — he's helped out as well. So basically every editor I've worked with — I'm going to cover them all that way. Every editor I've worked with has taught me something. If I've written something for you at some point, you've taught me something. John Shuey over at American Fly Fishing Magazine was the other one I was trying to think of. Yeah, absolutely.

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**Marvin Cash (00:25:07):**

It's interesting too, Spencer, because you've done old-school writing, but you also write for some online platforms. I was curious to get your thoughts on how electronic and digital media is impacting outdoor writing.

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**Spencer Durrant (00:25:26):**

I don't think it's the medium as much as it is the fact that pay for everything has stayed about the same, but cost of living and inflation have skyrocketed. That's been the biggest impact more than anything. Having more voices to write isn't a bad thing. Having more platforms isn't a bad thing. But people aren't willing to pay to read anymore, either.

That's why I admire the heck out of what the folks over at Fly Fish Journal are doing, because they're putting together a very top-notch printed copy — I believe it's a quarterly magazine — and they're getting people to pay for it. Same with Pete Tyjas over at Fly Culture. He's based in the UK and he's getting people to pay for it. He's got international readership. So there are a few folks out there who are making it work.

But I think that's just been the biggest stumbling block for all of us — nobody wants to pay for it. So we're almost completely reliant on ad dollars to pay writers, and because of that, we can't pay writers what they're worth anymore. You end up with subpar writing because unless it's going to go in a Gray's Sporting Journal, Trout Magazine, American Fly Fishing Magazine — unless it's going to go into one of those big magazines, you're not going to get paid what you should for it.

So quality goes down because you want to save the really top-shelf stuff for when you're writing a book or when you're putting stuff on your own website, because then that content is yours forever and you're able to monetize that to your heart's content. You can't do that when you're writing for other people. Personally, I hope that my writing quality doesn't differ based on how much I'm getting paid for it, but I know I've seen that. And I know that sometimes it is hard for me when, for whatever reason, I agreed to do a piece for a discount or grade — it's hard to motivate myself to do it. So I know I've turned in less-than-stellar writing before. Everybody's done it. If they say otherwise, they're lying to you.

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**Marvin Cash (00:28:40):**

And do you think that the shift away from subscription dollars to more ad dollars also — the business gets in the way of the art?

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**Spencer Durrant (00:28:57):**

I don't know if it does as much. I think it can, depending on how principled you are as an individual. If there are brands out there doing things that you don't support, you don't want to write for a magazine that takes their ad dollars or a website that takes their ad dollars. I've become that way lately, but I wasn't that way when I first started out. It's important enough to me now that there are some places I choose not to write for anymore, because certain companies advertise with them and I don't agree with the way certain companies are doing business. I don't think it's viable long-term for the health of fly fishing or the finite ecosystems we have for trout.

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**Marvin Cash (00:29:58):**

Do you think, for example, with advertisers that are getting gear reviews — do you think that's a problem or can create a problem?

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**Spencer Durrant (00:30:04):**

No, because gear reviews are gear reviews and they make the money. They really do — they get the eyeballs because gear is sexy and gear sells. And I write gear review stories so that I can go spend a week in the backcountry with biologists learning about the intimate genetics of Colorado River Cutthroat Trout — certain strains of Colorado River Cutthroat Trout and how they exist in little streams — and then write a story about that. Probably half the people are going to read that story compared to the gear story. But the gear story pays for the opportunity to go do the conservation story, which is the most important stuff.

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**Marvin Cash (00:31:04):**

Got it. And I know too that you also write professionally for content creation for businesses, and in prior lives you've done even more social media content strategy work. I'm always interested to hear from people who are really doing that kind of work — what their approach is to social media and content strategy.

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**Spencer Durrant (00:31:25):**

It's to be the opposite of every person on Instagram that you hate. Don't be that guy who's telling everybody that they're fishing wrong. And certainly don't be that guy who gets all riled up because somebody's got a grip-and-grin photo of a fish and they've got their hands in the trout's gills. Because 90% of these fish that we catch aren't wild — they're stocked fish. And chances are that fish is going to die after the fight anyway.

That's a pretty pessimistic view to take of things, but your keyboard warrior crusade isn't going to change the mind of that person. You've got to set the example instead. I think what the folks over at Keep Fish Wet have been doing is fantastic, because they don't sit there and comment on everybody's photos about how you need to hold that fish in the water. No, they just lead by example and they put content out there that says, "Hey, this is how you should take pictures of trout to ensure trout health." Not "to be a good fisherman" or "to be a responsible outdoorsman" — it's "hey, if you want to take care of a fish, these are the best ways to do it." So your messaging and your tone have to be right.

And then the biggest thing too is — be honest. Because we see through all those fake people. We see through all the people that are demoing rods or gear who have no clue what they're doing, but they got it because they look good in front of a camera, or they bought a couple thousand followers, or they're willing to pose in compromising situations that a lot of us wouldn't want to be in. They'll do it because they're getting the gear and the money. That's an issue.

But I think we see through a lot of that stuff. The problem is that brands still haven't caught on to the fact that all publicity is not good publicity. I still to this day get people making fun of me for fishing some of the Orvis gear I do — "Oh, they make dog beds. Oh, that was my grandpa's fly rod." And I'm like, "Yeah, they make dog beds. That's why I buy fly rods from them, because I know they've got a sound business model. They're not going to go out of business when the economy takes a turn for the worse."

It's all about just being honest more than anything else. And it's funny, because we tout social media as a way to connect, and it's a fantastic way to connect. I've met some of my best friends off of social media. But we tout it as this end-all, be-all of connecting, and when it comes right down to it, people just won't be authentic about it. They're too scared of what other people think. And that's really screwed us more than anything else — everybody's so scared of what somebody else is going to think that everything is so crafted and produced, and they're not willing to just be honest and up front.

And I don't think that's asking too much of folks. That's what I try to do. I'm pretty open on all my social media platforms with all sorts of things. When a year and a few months ago my grandparents both died in a car crash — a head-on collision, they died instantly, thankfully no suffering — that was a really terrible time. Being a religious person, I asked folks for prayers at that point, because I was not taking it very well at all. And people that I only ever interact with to discuss fishing or hunting came right out of the woodwork and they were there. I didn't use that as some kind of brand-building thing — I would never do that. But that's an example of how, if you really want to use social media for what we claim it is, you've got to be willing to be that honest. And it'll surprise you and touch you how many people are willing to be honest and willing to help you and support you when you're honest with them.

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**Marvin Cash (00:37:14):**

It really is pretty eye-opening. Yeah, it's interesting that you say that because I always tell people social media is not inherently good or bad — it's like a shovel. I can dig a hole or I can hit you in the head with it. And it's interesting because I think you have phenomenal reach and a great way to find your people. But the danger is it has this seductive quantitative nature to it that makes people — I have these running conversations with people all the time about, "Well, if you like it but you don't listen, what does that really mean?" And I've noticed recently, kind of to your point, you see brands and people really aggressively trying to hack people's attention. And I just think — well, just be yourself and try to show up every day.

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**Spencer Durrant (00:38:20):**

And attract the people that want to be around you. That's the only way to do it. You've got Patagonia, who has overproduced their content to the point that I just hate their content — and that's not a comment on their gear, but their content is so polished and overproduced. It's just frustrating because it's that ideal of fly fishing — every day is going to be an amazing day. And they've got to say that; they're trying to sell gear, I get it. But it's just so polished and produced that it feels out of reach. Even for somebody as fortunate as I am, in a position where I'm able to fish with a lot of different fly rods and gear and test it all out — and granted, 99% of that all goes back to the companies that sent it to me; I rarely keep any of that stuff — even then, I still feel like sometimes I see these ads and I'm like, "No, that's out of reach even for me." I can't afford half the gear that I review, but I get to review it, so that's a saving grace. But it's just about reaching people where they're at. It's not about trying to get people to where you want them to be. I think that's the biggest mistake that we all make with social media.

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**Marvin Cash (00:40:21):**

And it's interesting too, because you talk about telling an authentic story — not "telling a story" like in a deceptive sense, but I mean that's where the connection comes from. I'm wondering how your more traditional writing experience helps you on the social media content strategy front.

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**Spencer Durrant (00:40:44):**

Probably just forces me to be more conversational, I think, because that's what I was always taught — be conversational, be precise and concise, too. That's kind of what gets drilled into your head in any writing program right now. You've got to have a tone that invites people in, but then you can't lose them either. You've got to say what you need to say and do it quickly. And it's not quite Hemingway bare-bones writing, but it's not far from that either.

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**Marvin Cash (00:41:33):**

It's funny you say that. My oldest son is a college freshman. So during COVID, we were working on college essays together — fun, yes — and I spent a lot of time with him. I read a lot of essays, and I spent a lot of time doing exactly what you're talking about. One of his Christmas presents was a copy of Strunk and White's and The Old Man and the Sea.

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**Spencer Durrant (00:41:56):**

Yep.

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**Marvin Cash (00:41:58):**

Very wordy. I also think it's — in my experience, we don't teach kids to write like we did when I was growing up, and so they don't get to practice it as much as they used to.

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**Spencer Durrant (00:42:09):**

No, they don't. And my students grumble about it because I make them write every single day. But hopefully they'll thank me for it in a few years.

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**Marvin Cash (00:42:25):**

Yeah, well, in 20 years when someone's being interviewed on a podcast and they talk about who helped them with their writing, it'll be Spencer Durrant, my middle school English teacher.

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**Spencer Durrant (00:42:34):**

I sure hope they have somebody more capable than me between now and then to help them.

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**Marvin Cash (00:42:43):**

You inspired them. But talking about storytelling — you also have a podcast called Unhooked. I was wondering if you could tell our listeners a little bit about it.

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**Spencer Durrant (00:42:52):**

Yeah, it's on a slight hiatus at the moment due to me moving and starting a new job, but I should be producing new episodes here shortly. It's just a place for me to kind of mouth off about whatever I want, really. I try not to tiptoe around the issues that none of us want to talk about. I try to address the conservation problems that nobody seems willing to discuss or address in great detail.

Like, there's so much widespread support for switching to so-called "green energy" and carbon-neutral production, but people rarely go past the feel-good headlines and look at what that actually entails. You look at a Tesla, for example — yeah, you might get it and not have to pay for gas, but it was created using fossil-fueled vehicles. It was shipped over here. The rare earth minerals were mined. It was assembled all using fossil-fuel power. And then it's shipped to you, and then you charge it via fossil fuel power. So until we're ready to have a conversation about really reshaping everything, we don't have any kind of moral leg to stand on about adopting that kind of stuff.

That's kind of where I get into with the show and how that relates to fly fishing and conservation in general. And then I hunt a lot too, so I've got hunting stories and some fun stuff planned for this year with the fall hunts. I'm going to do some podcasts around those. That's the show.

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**Marvin Cash (00:45:09):**

Is it really just a place you created to talk about stuff that you couldn't write about and get published in magazines, and also a place to play with a different medium?

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**Spencer Durrant (00:45:22):**

Yeah. That's really what I did it for.

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**Marvin Cash (00:45:26):**

And so all that stuff really kind of rolls up to Spencer Durrant Outdoors, which is kind of —

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**Spencer Durrant (00:45:32):**

— all things digital Spencer? Yes. I've never heard it put that way, but yeah.

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**Marvin Cash (00:45:40):**

The only thing that's not there — when I was doing research for the interview — was the stuff that you really publish for other people. So this is really your podcast, your rod-making business, your guiding business, your gear reviews.

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**Spencer Durrant (00:45:58):**

Yep. It is the place for all my proprietary stuff. And I've got a giant backlog of things that need to be published, so there's going to be quite a bit of content coming soon. But getting a new job and moving has really sucked all my time away — and any ambition, either. I'm not going to lie. The temptation to just lay down and take a nap overrides just about everything else right now.

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**Marvin Cash (00:46:32):**

Well, and also the important thing is you can't let it keep you from getting out in the field or on the water.

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**Spencer Durrant (00:46:38):**

Well, exactly. I woke up this morning — it was 45 degrees — and when I walked outside and took that first breath of really crisp fall air, it just got me thinking all about spawning trout and bugling elk. And it made for a pretty good Monday.

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**Marvin Cash (00:47:03):**

Yeah, and that's on a school Monday too.

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**Spencer Durrant (00:47:07):**

Yeah, on a Monday where I had to go to an hour-long meeting before school starts, and they had us in a dark auditorium and then got mad when we started nodding off. Anyway.

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**Marvin Cash (00:47:23):**

You know, you wear a lot of hats and you're a busy guy. You also own a guide business, the Utah Fly Fishing Company. Clearly loving the outdoors where generations of your family have lived is really important to you. But that doesn't always mean you have to become a guide. When did you get the guide bug?

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**Spencer Durrant (00:47:45):**

Three or four years ago, I think. I needed to make some extra money and I'd never guided before. Some folks were willing to be my guinea pigs, and I realized that I actually really enjoy it. It's fun taking people out and getting them into fish. It's fun seeing the progression.

I took a lot of husband-and-wife couples this year with the Utah Fly Fishing Company. We took them fishing and there was one couple — neither of them had ever fished in their life. We spent the first four or five hours of the day on this little small stretch of stream where they just worked at it and worked at it until they got the cast down. And then as soon as they got a decent cast, the fish would come up and rise — it's that kind of spot. So then they worked on getting the hook set and then stripping line in and then a good drag-free drift. And by the end of the day, they were fishing on their own, catching cutthroat in a high meadow stream on really calm pools. And that's not easy dry fly fishing to do. So that's been really fun to watch.

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**Marvin Cash (00:49:04):**

Very cool. Just to help people understand — you guide around the Green River, kind of right around the Flaming Gorge, right?

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**Spencer Durrant (00:49:14):**

Yeah, I guide the Flaming Gorge area — everything except the Green River — and hopefully next year we can offer trips on the Green. That's in the works at the moment, but we'll see how that pans out. And then all the little streams and lakes around it, on the north slope of the Uinta Mountains, basically from Highway 150 all the way east to Highway 191. That whole north slope of the Uinta has some fantastic fishing.

It's the only place I know of where you can catch a tiger trout over 24 inches long at 11,000 feet above sea level. That's a pretty cool claim to fame. And there are all sorts of little backcountry lakes you can hike into. We've got golden trout — trophy-sized golden trout, in the 18 to 21 or 22-inch range. Grayling that would just knock your socks off — bigger than anything I've caught outside of Alaska. We just have a lot of fun stuff that gets overlooked because the Green is right there and everybody wants to go fish the Green. More power to them, because it keeps a lot of folks off my small streams.

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**Marvin Cash (00:50:42):**

Yeah, that's kind of how I am here in North Carolina with everyone fishing Delayed Harvest in the fall. It gives me free reign on all the wild trout streams that I like to fish.

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**Spencer Durrant (00:50:53):**

All that.

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**Marvin Cash (00:50:54):**

So it's interesting — did you build the guide service just from the ground up, or did you do overflow from a shop and then they became your clients? How did you build it out?

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**Spencer Durrant (00:51:06):**

We built it up from the ground up. I got a business partner, Bridger Lyons. He and I have known each other since the third grade. We've been buddies since then, and he fishes and I fish. We sat down one day and I said, "Dude, we need to start a guide outfit." And he's like, "Why are you asking me?" And I said, "Because you have money and I don't." So he provided the capital for our first year, and it ended up being pretty successful. We had folks all the way from Georgia and Texas coming out to fish with us — that was a lot of fun. We just got people into fish.

We did a little advertising on social media and I put the word out to my network that I'm guiding. I got plenty of trip referrals — enough that it worked out. And then Mike James, who runs the Quiet Fly Fisher in Loa, Utah, I've guided for him for a couple of years now. He has been more than helpful — he sends a lot of extra traffic my way as well.

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**Marvin Cash (00:52:35):**

Very neat. And what was it like? It's one thing to fish for yourself and be successful, but what was that transition to fishing to help other people be successful?

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**Spencer Durrant (00:52:45):**

Well, the day sucks until you get that first fish. Once you get that first fish, things are a lot better. That's really the thing that you worry about. We didn't get skunked this year, but we came frighteningly close a couple of times. I was getting real nervous — the fish weren't doing anything. I couldn't get them to do anything. The clients couldn't get them to do anything. And that's really the thing where you try and remind them that you're not there just to catch fish — you're there for the whole experience. But they're paying you money to catch fish, so you've really got to step up.

I can go out and if I don't catch fish I'm fine. I was out the other night and I missed a pretty nice fish — it came up and smacked my hopper, I set the hook too fast and broke the line from an idiot move. So I was grumbling at myself for that. But I go out and fish and not catch something and be okay usually. That's not the case with clients. You've got to do everything you can. You've got to leave it all out there. It's interesting how creative you end up getting.

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**Marvin Cash (00:54:17):**

Yeah. I'm always amazed at how reluctant clients are to tell their guides what they want to get out of the day.

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**Spencer Durrant (00:54:29):**

Yeah, that's something I ask everybody first off. I say, "What do you want? Do you want to catch a bunch of fish? Do you want to just try and catch a few big ones? Or do you just want an experience?" And if they want an experience, then they're in for an experience, because that probably means I'm going to make them hike three or four miles into the middle of nowhere. And we're going to fish this little lake that I've been curious about — maybe I haven't fished since last year, I don't know if the winter killed or not, but we're going to go find out. To my clients' credit, a lot of them are like, "Yeah, let's do it. That's fine. Let's do it."

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**Marvin Cash (00:55:05):**

Very neat. And I always ask all of the folks that come on the podcast who are guides to share what they think the biggest misconception people have about the life of a fishing guide.

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**Spencer Durrant (00:55:23):**

I don't know that it's lucrative in any way at all — because it's not. There are plenty of folks. Charlie Card — he's a good buddy of mine, he's a guy on the Green River — and he guides close to 300 days a year and makes enough to support his family. And he is one of the very few I know who do it.

Landon Mayer out in Colorado, he guides his tail off, but he also writes and he runs a shop. And that's what a lot of guides have to do if you're really going to make a go of it — you've got to have something else there. Because guiding itself doesn't pay the bills like it used to, because you've got to pay for insurance. Depending on where you're at, you're paying a shuttle every day, buying lunches, buying drinks, replacing rods, tying flies, buying leaders — it all adds up. When you're fishing every day for three people instead of one, it gets a little expensive after a while.

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**Marvin Cash (00:56:49):**

It's interesting, because I would always try to explain that to people. And you put on top of that math — if the guide is guiding for a shop, the shop's taking a big chunk of what's left over after the shuttle, the lunches, and all the other stuff.

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**Spencer Durrant (00:57:02):**

Yep.

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**Marvin Cash (00:57:02):**

So it's interesting as we sort of wind down this evening — is there anything, I know you've had a ton going on, and we've talked a little bit about what people can expect to see with the podcast and on your digital hub, as we called it tonight — but is there anything else you want to tell folks to expect from Spencer Durrant in the near future?

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**Spencer Durrant (00:57:25):**

Buy my fly rods. That's what I want to — no, I'm kidding. Seriously, if you want a bamboo rod, at least look at what I'm doing. I love building rods. I don't get to do it enough for paying clients. I build a lot for myself right now. I keep telling my wife, "I'll just practice." I've practiced a lot, so I need some paying clients.

But for what to expect — more of the same as far as gear reviews go. I got my start in this business doing gear reviews. That's how I got started writing about fly fishing. And my first published fishing piece was for KSL.com — I just remembered. See? That's who it was for. Came full circle.

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**Marvin Cash (00:58:28):**

And you can sleep soundly tonight now.

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**Spencer Durrant (00:58:31):**

Yes, I can. So more of the same as far as my gear reviews go, but then I really am trying to branch out into publishing more stories and more essay-style writing — stuff that's a little bit more thought-provoking and more in-depth. I did a story earlier this year called "After Dark" about a UFO experience, and you can read it for yourself and see if you think I'm just telling a tall tale or if there's any truth to it. Stuff like that, that I want to play around with and have a lot more fun with. I've been getting burned out on the gear review stuff — when that's all you do for years, you want to switch it up.

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**Marvin Cash (00:59:30):**

And so what's the best way for folks to follow your writing and keep up with the adventures of Spencer Durrant?

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**Spencer Durrant (00:59:37):**

Follow on Twitter or Instagram at Spencer underscore Durrant, Spencer Durrant Outdoors on Facebook, and then the website, SpencerDurrant.com. You can sign up for a newsletter there, and when I get new content out, you'll get notified.

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**Marvin Cash (01:00:02):**

And I'll drop all that stuff in the show notes too. I appreciate it.

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**Spencer Durrant (01:00:07):**

Thank you.

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**Marvin Cash (01:00:07):**

Oh, absolutely. And Spencer, I appreciate you taking a little bit of time out of your evening. My mom's a retired school teacher, so I get it — you want to get things wrapped up and get ready for the next day. I super appreciate you taking the time.

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**Spencer Durrant (01:00:22):**

No worries. I'm glad to not think about school for a couple hours.

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**Marvin Cash (01:00:27):**

Well, there you go. Well, listen, Spencer, thanks again. You bet, Marvin. Thank you.

Well, folks, I hope you enjoyed that as much as we enjoyed bringing it to you. Again, if you like the podcast, please tell a friend and please subscribe and leave us a rating and review on the podcast of your choice. And don't forget to head on over to www.nor-vise.com and check out all of their great products. Tight lines, everybody.