Meet Jack
Founder, Head Guide, and the Reason Jackalope Anglers Exists
Jack has been a professional fly fishing guide for over ten years and has rowed more river miles than most anglers will ever fish. His path to the Rio Grande is the kind of story that only happens when someone is genuinely driven by a love of rivers and the fish that live in them rather than by convenience or proximity.He grew up in the Northeast, fishing the rivers and lakes of the Adirondack region of New York from an early age. Pulling fish out of the water as a kid planted a seed that eventually grew into a career. His formal guide training began on the Yellowstone River in Wyoming, one of the great trout rivers of the American West, where he learned to row a drift boat and lead fishing trips on water that demands precision and reads different every day. From there he spent time in northern Colorado training with Colorado Skies outfitters on the front range before completing his undergraduate degree at Colorado State University.
After graduating, Jack headed north to Alaska, where he spent seasons working on remote rivers in the central and southeastern parts of the state. He guided salmon runs on wilderness rivers accessible only by floatplane, threw mice patterns to trophy rainbow trout in the rugged Alaskan bush, and built deep-sea charter experience catching everything from salmon to rockfish in the waters off the coast. It was the kind of fishing education that cannot be replicated anywhere else and it shaped the way he approaches every trip he guides today. Back in Colorado, Jack based himself in Silverthorne and spent years guiding on some of the state’s most well-known rivers including the Colorado, Arkansas, Blue, Roaring Fork, and Eagle, along with countless smaller streams, lakes, and high-country bodies of water in between. He was good at it and he kept getting better, but somewhere along the way he started making regular trips south to the Rio Grande near Del Norte and something shifted.
The river got hold of him the way rivers sometimes do. The beauty of the San Luis Valley. The solitude of the canyon sections. The quality of the fish and the diversity of the hatches. The feeling that this place was genuinely special and that most of the people driving through Del Norte on their way somewhere else had no idea what was running right beside the highway. He made the move south, started Jackalope Anglers, and has not looked back. When Jack is not on the oars he is still thinking about the river. What is hatching. Where the big fish are holding. What conditions are doing to the bite and how to adjust. That level of obsessive attention to the water is exactly what you want in a guide and it is what makes a day on the Rio Grande with Jackalope Anglers something worth planning a trip around.
