Of Interest: Seven female fly guides in a male dominated field

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s a woman working in the outdoor industry, I have experienced both a warm welcome and a healthy dose of curiosity about my career choice. I’m surrounded by more men than women on boats, in camp, and around our conference-room table here at F&S. My gender’s novelty can be powerful, and it can be frustrating. The seven female fly guides in this story can definitely relate. After all, guiding is a tough business for anyone—it’s competitive, physical, and dependent on your ability to produce fish no matter what the conditions. Their skills fall under scrutiny on the river, and their looks are often emphasized in the outdoor media. Blogs such as Pacific Northwest steelheader Kate Taylor’s Rogue Angels, where all the fiercest females of fly seem to intersect, have helped build a community of women within the industry that has been key to their success in facing these challenges. I wanted to give these women the chance to tell me who they really are in their own words. The answer, I found out, is passionate, skilled, no-b.s. anglers looking to put clients on fish and food on the table.

Kate Taylor: When I see pictures of women flyfishing in the media, they don’t always resonate with me. One really important thing to recognize is that there are the women in the spotlight and the ones under the radar—so many that it’s mind-blowing—and they are very divided. For every beautiful young woman on the cover of a magazine, there are many who feel like, Screw it, I don’t want to be recognized for having boobs and long hair. When I have to be up at 5:30 a.m. and didn’t get to bed until 11 p.m., because I was planning the next day with my guides, the time I’d spend doing my hair or makeup in the morning is another 20 minutes I get to sleep.

Charity Rutter: When you see female guides in magazines, you often see shapely young women with long flowing hair. I want to see a woman like me: I’m a guide, a business owner, a wife, and a mother. I think it’s cool if someone reads that I’ve made this lifestyle doable, and that inspires more women to guide full time.

Kim Bryant might have been one of those women when she started flyfishing at age 17, but at the time, she didn’t think guiding was a viable career option for a woman. She’s just now trying to break into the business.

Kim Bryant: Pictures of female guides are sexualized, like all women in the media. I want my two little girls to see a photo of a woman fishing not because she’s wearing a bikini, but because she’s awesome at what she does. I’m not a super tomboy. I wear mascara on the river, get manicures, and highlight my hair. But I want to be seen as a guide, not just a girl.

Taylor: It isn’t that it doesn’t seem genuine, and I’d never want to hurt anyone’s feelings, I just relate more to something like the picture of Erin Block in Trout Magazine, where her hair is all messy and she’s tying a fly streamside with her dog running around. That’s natural in the setting. She wasn’t looking at the camera, like, Cheese! I thought, That could be me.

I mention Taylor’s point to Mia Sheppard, a steelhead guide on Oregon’s John Day River. She and her husband have a young daughter and recently purchased a jet-boat business.

Mia Sheppard: It’s so ironic that [Kate’s] feeling the same way I do. Everyone is getting into video and it all looks very big and dramatic, but I don’t need people to see how cool I am. It’s more interesting to look at what makes a person driven to pursue this lifestyle. For me, it’s about being in touch with my soul through the outdoors. That’s how I feel when I land and hold a steelhead.

For Hannah Belford, it’s family. Her parents established the homestead-style Damdochax River Lodge in Smithers, B.C., in 1977. She has been guiding anglers there since her late teens.

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