GETTING READY FOR THE SUMMER TIME AND FALL SEASONS

One Wild Summer From the first of June to the end of August, you have 92 days to fish, hunt, camp, and have the time of your life. Let’s do this The river ran 15 feet from the camp stove, and I shuttled back and forth from the water to the frying pan, swapping out a spatula for a fly rod. I could make a solid half-dozen casts before I had to run back and flip the smallmouth bass fillets sputtering in hot peanut oil. I didn’t want to miss a minute—not a single ­second—of one of the best days of my outdoor life. Before lunch, we’d landed bruiser smallies up to 4 pounds, wading waist-deep in a back slough of the river. We ran whitewater at midday and wound up on this gravel bar, casting to rainbow trout within sight of our tent, with just an hour of daylight remaining. So, I sprinted from fish in the river to fish in the pan, gnawing every little piece of summer fun from what remained of the day like working a chicken bone on the Fourth of July. Get all the good stuff—don’t leave a morsel of awesome behind. That’s your mantra now that summer is on your doorstep. Don’t waste a single second of the awesome. Maybe that means running from river to frying pan. Or maybe it means kicking back in an inner tube and letting the river do all the work. Whatever it is, the good news is that you’ve got two things going for you. First, you have plenty of time to hit the lake hard, hone a new skill, or chill under the stars. Summer brings its gifts of long hours of daylight. This year in Wichita, Kansas—about the bull’s-eye center of the nation—the longest day of the summer clocks in at 14 hours, 14 minutes, and 22 seconds. Add in dawn and twilight, and that’s a good 15 hours when you’ll be able to see a spinnerbait churn through the lily pads or nurse a nightcrawler. Heck, it’s light till 10 o’clock in many places during summer. Even if you have three kids in travel baseball, you can still make time for an after-work farm-pond slam. Second, we’ve got your summer planner ready to go with many many tips, trips, and adventures—an awesome idea for every day, from June 1 to August 31. Jonesing for a weekend catfish noodling festival? A groundhog hunt? Want to put a black bear—or ­snakehead—​on the wall? Stay tuned. Your best summer ever begins now. —T. Edward Nickens