When I was 18, my cousin and I put together a string of days on several southeast Missouri bass rivers that simply could not be beat.  We each caught multiple two-pound bass (largemouth, smallmouth, and Kentuckies) in low-productivity water where a twelve-incher is average, and on the last day of the streak, in late May, I caught more fifteen-inch bass than I have in any complete season since, and probably two-thirds of the fifteen-inch smallmouth I've caught in my entire life.  We had the pattern dialed, but we also benefited from several years of great water conditions that had produced a bumper crop of large fish that season, and from the fact that we had ferreted out access points on second- or third-tier rivers, access points leading to stretches of canyon water that were faster and steeper than any other stretches of the rivers, miles of water with lower fish densities than elsewhere but which were almost never fished, though they ran only an hour and a half from St. Louis.

        Then I wrote a magazine article about it, as a break from the "serious" literary writing I was doing as a college freshman.  As a how-to where-to story, it was great.  Only the fact that I lost the four-pounder I hooked on one of the rivers kept me from getting a cover shot for the magazine I wound up selling the story to, Missouri Game & Fish . The picture of a fish my cousin got and the two-page spread one of my slides merited showed what the 2500-word article did not. I got $250 for the story, sold a half-dozen other pieces to the magazine, had a regional fly-fishing article published simultaneously in several other Game & Fish publications, and eventually landed a scholarship based on these stories. In most senses, my article was quite a success.

       But I also got crowded rivers where before I'd never seen anybody, since the rivers are close to St. Louis and aren't hard to navigate with felt-soled wading boots.  The fish populations collapsed as a result of this increased pressure, the return (briefly) of normal water conditions, and recently an unfortunate drought that persists to this day in the area. What fish remain are now hard to catch and small. I haven't fished any of the rivers I covered in the article since 2004, when I fished one of them for gar, with the bass fishing now all-but worthless.

        I never wrote another kiss and tell article.  I wrote about specific destinations, of course, but only about how to optimize one's experiences on waters that were already well-known and well-fished.  Another story on the Yellowstone or Slough Creek's great terrestrial fishing isn't going to hurt these streams any.  Neither is mentioning in vague terms how to fish Yellowstone 's pocket water creeks. Same with the South Platte , Blue, and South Fork of the Snake articles that have appeared in Rocky Mountain Fly under my editorship.  The South Fork of the Flathead is unfished water, but it's so remote that writing about isn't going to bring down hordes of tourists. Northern Canada, Mongolia, and so on are also relatively undiscovered areas that are likely to stay that way, no matter how many "GO HERE!" fishing stories are written about them.  Thus, writing about waters that are already well-known, or that are so far away or so hard to get to that even if every reader wanted to fish them only a few could actually do it, are not problems.  I do it, and will continue to do it. Most magazine articles follow this pattern. How many articles have there been on fishing the Bighorn in the last five years, again?

        The problem I see is that many writers, even those who should know better, keep writing articles about rivers and creeks that should be -- at best -- ferreted-out by hard work and determination.  If these writers wrote exclusively about their home water, like I did in my shortsighted first article, all would be well.  They'd realize quickly that writing about River X when they had River X to themselves, or when River X was fragile, was probably a bad idea, and would switch to writing Fly of the Week columns, casting advice pieces, and nostalgia essays, all more interesting and/or more applicable to most readers than yet another expose.  Most of these writers make their livings by writing about waters far away from home, however, places where they seldom fish, or might never fish again, waters whose decline and subsequent crowding they may never see.  Some rivers hotspotted this way may deserve to be discovered, the Elk in British Columbia being a prime example -- it's a big river in a fairly well-protected watershed and can handle the pressure it gets.  Others are fragile, small, short, or otherwise streams nobody should write about.

       One of my favorite creeks was recently highlighted this way by a well-known hotspotter who writes regularly for Fly Fisherman and who has written several wildly inaccurate guidebooks about the rivers of the Rockies and Pacific Northwest.  Most readers can probably figure out who I'm talking about.  There are a lot of creeks in Yellowstone that might deserve a line or two in a magazine, which is what this one got, but most of the creeks in the area are also far less fragile and far less crucial than this one.  The stretch of the creek the author in question highlighted does have some nice fish in it, but it is primarily spawning water: the nice fish the author advocated targeting are all in the creek making the next generation of fish for the much larger and more famous river just downstream.  Moreover, there simply isn't much spawning habitat in the stream, meaning no more than perhaps 200 spawning trout might be in the creek at any given time.  All of these fish are hungry from their efforts in climbing the steep little creek as far as they can (less than 150 yards, all told) and ravenous in defending their eggs, meaning an angler of average skill would stand a fair chance of catching virtually every fish in the creek if he kept at it all day.

        I used to fish this creek a fair bit. During my first season of guiding, I fished it once a week, hard, and probably caught about every fish in it.  I landed one large male cutt eight times.  This was before I really learned the creek, learned how crucial it was to the river.  Last season I fished it only once, limiting myself to steelhead dry flies to reduce my catch.  I landed ten fish in twenty minutes, and felt guilty about it.  I will probably never fish this creek again, because it is so important and so fragile.  I have never so much as thought about guiding on it, even on days when a quick stop might save my tip.  I never tell visitors to the shop about it, and when someone asks about it, I explain as best I can the creek's importance and all the various reasons not to fish it.  Most people are amazed at my understanding of the stream, and take my advice to fish elsewhere.

        Readers of hotspot stories do not have an area expert to add caveats and footnotes to their understanding of a given "undiscovered" water.  Perhaps even the authors of hotspot stories could not add these caveats and footnotes if they were asked to, since most of them do not have the years of local experience necessary to truly learn the nuances of the waters they write about --most hotspotters learn that writing about their home water is a really bad idea, as I did, even if some continue to write about the home waters of others.  Because of this, readers of hotspot articles descend in droves to the rivers, creeks, or lakes mentioned, and can abuse the water even if they mean well.  How could a visitor to the creek I mention above know the fish are spawners when the article does not make this clear, for example?  The readers who heed glowing reports in a magazine are not at fault for following the advice they're given, they are only responding to the incomplete picture presented in the magazines.  Like the authors of said pieces, tourist anglers are unlikely to see the devastation wrought by improper destination articles, since most will never return.

        I do see it, in the rivers I wrote about in 1998, and expect to see it again in the creek the author I've mentioned wrote about. None of these streams should have been hotspotted, not because of the crowds the stories brought, but because of what these crowds did or will do: hurt fish populations and habitat.  Most undiscovered waters are undiscovered not because they are guarded by tight-lipped locals, but because they have some flaw or some weakness that makes them unsuited to large crowds, or because they are so good only because of a small set of odd circumstances, such as that the large fish in them are making the next generation of fish for waters downstream.  When unknowing or uncaring writers spotlight these waters anyway, they set in motion a process whereby this flaw or flaws (poor spawning habitat, low productivity, etc. all of which are present in the stream I've discussed and the rivers I wrote about) are exacerbated.

        Increased crowds are not the main problem with kiss and tell articles.  Neither is the increasing air of commercialism these articles create and the lack of curiosity to discover new water for oneself that results from relying on these articles, though these things are unfortunate.   The reason kiss and tell articles destroy fly fishing is that they destroy the most important of the sport's ingredients: the fish and their habitat.