Getting the flavor of...

Fishing Idaho’s Snake River

One day out on the Snake River, I found myself in “a spot so picture-postcard pretty it was almost silly,” said Jon Gluck in the San Francisco Chronicle. Above our boat loomed the Tetons, “perhaps the planet’s most picturesque mountain range.” On the river’s banks, the aspens and cottonwoods wore their fall regalia of red, orange, and yellow, and the sky above was “so vast and blue as to redefine one’s concept of the terms.” A person could forget about the fish that got away in a place like this, were not every angler constantly aware that the stretch of the Snake we sat in also offered some of the best fishing in the world. It took me four days to land the trophy I was seeking—a trout measuring 20 inches. But does this story really need such a tidy ending? Fishing the Snake, you are “smack in the middle of the mythic American West” and “you feel big and small at once.” This is truly God’s country.

Beyond baseball in Cooperstown, N.Y.

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See the Baseball Hall of Fame if you must, but “don’t be distracted from Cooperstown’s real charms,” said Noah Bierman in The Boston Globe. Otsego Lake, “the visual and spiritual center of the community,” is a good place to start any visit to this picturesque upstate New York village. Renting a kayak and getting out on the water is the best way to enjoy the lake and its surrounding green hills, and you’ll still have time before lunch to tour the Farmers’ Museum. The complex includes a farm that’s operated much as it was 200 years ago and a carousel that’s “a museum unto itself”—with murals on the walls and carved renderings of New York icons like Susan B. Anthony. After an afternoon perusing the American landscape painting at the gem-like Fenimore Art Museum, you’ve earned a rest on the veranda of the historic Otesaga Resort Hotel. Order yourself a local beer and grab a rocking chair.