Inspired by the Lower Deschutes: Gorge Fly Shop
Travis and Lyndsey Duddles own and operate Gorge Fly Shop in Hood River, Oregon. Photos courtesty of
New Blog Feature
Today’s entry marks the beginning of what will become a regular feature on the DRA’s blog. We’ll be highlighting businesses throughout the region that not only depend on the lower Deschutes River, but have owners and employees with a personal connection, love or loyalty to it. The inspiration is to cultivate readers, opinion shapers, and policy-makers who might see a clear connection between a healthy economy and the goal of the river’s healthiest possible ecology.
Clear water, clear vision
Travis Duddles’s radical shortcut to a successful career was aided in part by the lower Deschutes River. At the tender age of ten, he was already tying flies for shops around the Pacific Northwest. By age 12, he had cultivated a decent-sized client base, and was running a fly-tying business out of his parents house. Interest in his creations of feathers and hooks grew. His enthusiasm for angling also grew exponentially the first time he laid eyes on the Deschutes. “I didn’t start fishing there until I had a driver’s license,” he recalls. His first trip to Maupin was a May afternoon in 1986, where he stumbled onto the salmonfly hatch. “I spent 90 minutes there at the boat ramp at Wapinitia,” he recalls. “And I was absolutely blown away by how strong those trout were.”
He started spending as much time as he could, learning to fish for Deschutes redsides in the winter, at the expense of his interest and performance in his high school classes. “Fall of my senior year, I had a business class,” said Duddles, “and I was already doing the stuff [for his own business] we were being taught. I had a hard time seeing why I was there.” He had already told his parents on a camping trip to fish at Crane Prairie what his sole professional ambition was going to be. He wanted to start a fly shop. He just didn’t want to wait any longer to do it.
He paid a visit to his guidance counselor and cut a deal to be graduated from high school by January. In February that year, at age 17, Duddles opened Gorge Fly Shop.
Trout Power
More than 30 years later, the uncanny vision that teenage Travis had for his future has clearly paid off. The shop does a brisk business both in person and online, out of a storefront and warehouse in Odell, just south of Hood River. The personal checking account, spiral-bound ledger, and few thousand dollars of seed money that started the business proved to be sound investments. But Duddles is just as much interested in at least one long-term investment in the future of a river central to his success.
Travis, along with his wife Lyndsey, are long-standing supporters of the Deschutes River Alliance. “It’s [the Deschutes] been an important part of our business,” says Duddles. “I would say 75 percent of our walk-in customers are heading to the Deschutes.” He recognizes that the outstanding quality of the trout and steelhead fishery in lower Deschutes river has not only contributed to the positive cash flow of his business, but is a unique resource worth protecting and restoring.
Duddles has fished in famous trout streams all over the place, but always comes back to the power of trout in the lower Deschutes. “The first few times I got to fish for trout in Idaho or Montana, I’d anticipate hooking an 18 or 20 inch fish, thinking it would absolutely destroy me. But it didn’t. The fight with a 14 to 16 inch Deschutes trout is as good or better.”
The memorably good fight in a wiley trout can be an inspiration in the equally good fight to put colder, cleaner water back into the lower Deschutes River. The Duddles recently took part in the DRA’s Troutfest, and took the time there to pen letters to Oregon’s Governor Kotek.
A 14 inch fish that helped to inspire a durable, prosperous business, it seems, might also have the power to launch a successful campaign to bring back the best possible lower Deschutes River.
Write your own letter to Oregon’s Governor Kotek: The DRA is pulling out all the stops to get the state of Oregon to enforce its own water quality laws on the lower Deschutes River. We need your help. Please take the time to write a letter to Governor Kotek. Her address, along with some suggested talking points, can be found on the DRA’s resources page on our website.
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