On behalf of the Ambleve Bedrock Foundation, welcome to our site and to our community. I am super excited to be embarking on this important path. Having spent the better part of my professional career helping businesses to be more successful, I am thrilled to be able to expend some of that same energy and enthusiasm to support something that I have been doing, and daydreaming about, since I was 8 years old.
Fishing for trout became an obsession for me as a small boy plying freestone streams in the Sierra Nevada. I still have a photograph of myself, taken in the late 70s, sitting on a streamside log, fishing pole across my lap. It is right there above these lines! I often find myself drawn to that picture, which I am looking at right now, and am reminded of the hope, excitement and wonder that little boy felt on a long ago late July afternoon. As I got older, my passion for fishing grew, as did my ability to pursue the greatest of all pastimes in ever more exciting locales. But no matter how far my travels have taken me, I can still return to that log on that warm summer day, and recall the moments where a small boy began a lifetime forever changed. Like many anglers, I can vividly replay the moments surrounding many of my catches as if I was rewinding video in my mind. The casts, the mends, the instant a fish swallowed my worm, pulled down my nymph or that time a large Yellowstone River brown literally jumped out of the water and landed on top of a rock to eat my streamer.
I am fortunate that I can still go back to many of these same places and fish them again and again. That is in large part due to the efforts of countless anglers and conservation organizations who have acted to protect and enhance these wild spaces where clean, cold water reigns.
The Ambleve Bedrock Foundation recognizes that there are many unique fisheries the world over which have similarly captivated the imaginations of countless people. On behalf of the Foundation, I want to do everything that I can to ensure that those places are preserved so that others can go back to the places of their imagination year after year. However, COVID-19 and the necessary travel bans, quarantines and restrictions that come along for the ride, have debilitated many communities and fisheries. Entire years of revenue from guiding, fees and associated tourism/travel spending have been lost. And equally important, the people entrusted with being custodians for amazing fishing destinations are instead struggling to feed their families.
We hope that our grants can help to ease that strain for a subset of communities. In that light, we welcome funding inquiries, and look forward to working with the fly fishing community to secure a future that is more than a daydream.
James Frazier, Co-Chair and the boy on a log
