There are fishing guides who take you fishing, and then there are guides who leave you with a complete learning experience and mold you into a better angler. Matt Heron is the latter. Matt is a lifelong angler, guide, and certified casting instructor. He also runs the Truckee, CA Fly Fishing School & Outfitter, all while managing Cast Hope, a non-profit dedicated to introducing underprivileged individuals to fly fishing. In our latest Behind the Guides, Presented by Costa Sunglasses, we learn how Matt Heron turned his passion for fishing into a lifelong pursuit of educating others.
Flylords: How long have you been a guide, and how did you first get into it? What was your intro to guiding?
Matt Heron: I’ve been guiding for 20 years now. This is kind of the 20-year anniversary for Matt Heron Fly Fishing on the Truckee in North Lake Tahoe. How I got into it—I’m not going to lie—it was a little by accident. I was working full-time in Livingston, Montana, and through a buddy, got an opportunity to move out here and partner with one of the resorts, which is now Everline Resort and Spa in Olympic Valley. My buddy pitched them this napkin plan we came up with for a fly fishing school at the resort. They loved it, and before I knew it, I moved out of Livingston and started the business.
When I first moved out, I had this passion for teaching, even more so than guiding. I had never guided to that point, and was focused on my clinics at the resort. Back then, I was pretty broke, and I’m like, man, I’m really giving away a lot of money referring out guide trips, only wanting to teach. The Truckee and Little Truckee are notoriously tough rivers, so I wanted to be confident I knew these systems well before I started guiding. Once I started to figure it out, I took a guided trip here and there, and the next thing I knew, within a few years, I was full-time guiding and teaching.
Flylords: What was your childhood like? Where’d you grow up?
Matt Heron: I grew up in Rexford, right near Schenectady, Saratoga, in New York’s upstate region. But the best part about where I lived was that the Mohawk River flowed through my backyard. It had amazing smallmouth fishing and was close enough to ride my bike to.
When I was really young, I started with gear and bait. We were throwing all kinds of Gitzits, which is like a jig kind of plastic bait, Mister Twisters, and we used a lot of crayfish. We’d go catch crayfish the day before, keep them in a bucket, and then go fish with them, which absolutely crushed them. Then, when I was about 10, I got into the fly thing. My new go-to, in the backyard anyway, was throwing a popper with a muddler minnow dropper. We’d run into pods of smallmouth that would attack that rig.
My second home was the Adirondacks. My dad was the angler of the family, so I fished with him more than I could even tell you. We would pick a blue line on a map every once in a while and go get lost in the Adirondacks and catch tons of little brookies, and sometimes bigger browns and rainbows. We constantly rented small cabins up on a bunch of lakes up there as a kid. And so that was something I’d look forward to every summer. We’d do that for maybe a couple of weeks every summer, a week here, week there. And then growing up, high school, college, for me, it was all about the Great Lake tributaries and Lake Ontario, and chasing those browns and “steelhead” every year.
Flylords: Fly fishing and fishing clearly had a huge foundational base for you. When did you decide to take that and get into educating?
Matt Heron: Growing up, through college, I was always the fishy kid in our friend group. My friends and family would always say, “Hey Matt, you fly fish all the time. You have to teach me how to do it.” So early on, I developed a passion for helping others and for watching them catch their first fish. That said, when I was younger, I had no clue what I was doing from a teaching standpoint.
Where I really solidified my kind of educational skills and my passion for teaching was when I interned in Montana with the Federation of Fly Fishers (FFF). At the time, my boss and one of his good friends, Matt Wilhelm and Molly Semenik, took me under their wing. Back then, they were Montana’s only two master-certified casting instructors and, on top of their FFF careers, ran the Yellowstone School of Fly Fishing.
So I went down this teaching rabbit hole as an intern with them, and I was like a sponge. These were two of the most well-spoken instructors I had ever been around, I had ever seen. Of course, I basically unofficially lived with them. I saw them all the time. Those two really took me under their wing, and by the end of summer, September of ’06, I passed my certified casting instructor test. To this day, 20 years later, it is still a passion of mine. I definitely consider myself a casting nerd, understanding the physics of it and trying to keep it as simple as possible.
Flylords: Your early career is really blossoming. When did you make your way to California, and why was that?
Matt Heron: When my internship finished with the Federation of Fly Fishers, I was supposed to go back home and do my master’s at Syracuse. They have a school called ESF, the Environmental School of Science and Forestry. I was supposed to go there, do my master’s in fisheries biology, and that was the plan. Well, that plan never happened. I got hired full-time by the FFF, and about a year in, the grant that was funding my position, because they were a nonprofit, we found out, ended up only getting a year of funding instead of three.
My bosses contacted me about this issue that they saw coming a mile away. And they’re like, “Hey Matt, we feel terrible. We don’t know if it was us or the grant writers, but this is the position we’re in. We feel terrible, but we basically have an internship for you financially from a salary standpoint.” So it wasn’t much.
But during this time, one of my best friends finished his internship in Charleston, and he moved out to Truckee, Olympic Valley. And he was the assistant rec manager at Everline Resort. And I was like, “Hey man, come through Montana, let’s fish, let’s party. Hadn’t seen you since school.” After fishing, we were at the Murray Bar in Livingston, the famous fishing bar, and we came up with the napkin idea of starting a fly fishing school at that resort, which he was moving to. Well, he pitched the idea, and they loved it. Two weeks after I moved out, I never looked back.
Flylords: You’re out in Truckee, you’re doing this fly fishing school, and then we kind of touched on it in the very beginning, but can you tell me about your early career and the steps that it took to transition into guiding as well as teaching?
Matt Heron: My plan, when I first moved out, was to teach, and I really didn’t want to guide. I had a bunch of buddies who got burnt out doing it. They turned their passion into a job. So, initially, it really wasn’t at the top of my list, and I just taught. We did tons of classes—whether it was casting or fishing on our private ponds, teaching fly tying courses, and doing all the normal intro stuff at the time.
We initially partnered, from a guide-permit standpoint, with the original Reno Fly Shop, led by Dave Stanley, which, to this day, has been one of the best partnerships to help propel my career. I always give Dave credit, and even though he closed the shop a long time ago, he’s still around town. But after maybe a year or two, I kind of realized, man, I’m giving away all this money, giving all these trips away.
Once I learned the Truckee and Little Truckee rivers and felt comfortable putting people on to fish, I began guiding. I started with a guided trip here and there, a couple of days a week. Before I knew it, I was full-time guiding and teaching, and I have been super blessed to watch the business take off like it has.
Flylords: Shifting gears a little bit, can you tell me about Cast Hope? Can you tell me what it’s all about and how it started?
Matt Heron: Cast Hope was started in 2011 in Chico, California, by our founder and current director, Ryan Johnson, who many people know in fly-fishing circles. The focus of Cast Hope has always been to get underserved and at-risk youth on the water through fly fishing. In many communities around the country, as we all know, some kids would never have the opportunity to experience the outdoors, like I did as a kid, and then to go a step further and experience it with a fly rod in their hand.
Our focus really is to expose youth to an outdoor sport that hopefully changes their outlook on what you can do in Mother Nature and on the environment. Of course, catching fish is always a bonus, but the big picture is more than that. After a couple of years of helping with Cast Hope, Ryan said, “Hey man, I want to have a chat with you. We’re thinking about expanding Cast Hope for the first time, and are curious if you’re interested in becoming a regional director.” And before he even went through two minutes of this meeting that we had planned, I was like, “I’m in. Where do I sign?”
It’s been a really special process and project. We’re about 10 years in now for the Reno Tahoe region. We’re fortunate to have so much support locally with grants and fundraising on the West Coast, with all of my clients, even some national stuff. The support for the organization has been terrific, and we’re lucky to have Reno Tahoe as our largest region among all of them.
Flylords: How have you seen opportunities like Cast Hope affect kids?
Matt Heron: Absolutely. As you can imagine, as someone who’s making a living off fundraising for it, having those stories of impact throughout our local youth community is huge. One of them that comes to mind is a young man by the name of Ryan.
So Ryan and his dad, we first met at a fishing movie premiere here in Truckee. He came up to me after as this little spin fisher kid and knew nothing about fly fishing, but was like, “Holy crap, that was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. Tell me more about it.” And as someone who was hosting that event, I just talked to him and his dad all night. I told them, “Hey, we’re starting this new thing called Cast Hope, I think it might be right up your alley, and I’d love for you to apply.”
As it turns out, once I got to know him and his family a little bit, it turned out he had a really negative past with bullying in his life, to the point where he had to change schools. Which meeting this kid, you think, how in the world could you ever bully this kid? He’s polite, kind, and he’s just a really humble person.
But to fast forward, Ryan quickly went down the fly-fishing rabbit hole. It was cool to kind of see him come out of his shell after some of these negative experiences he had had in the past. Fast forward another year or two, and before we know it, Ryan has grown up a bit. He’s now in high school, and he is all of a sudden one of our interns for my business, Matt Heron Fly Fishing, and he’s helping with classes and the occasional guide trip. Fast forward a few more years, and before we know it, Ryan is teaching classes on his own and getting paid. Now Ryan is graduating from the University of Montana, and is currently tracking lake trout populations and basically how to get rid of them in Yellowstone Lake.
Flylords: How have partners like Costa supported you and Cast Hope in this initiative?
Matt Heron: I have been working with Costa, without knowing the exact number, probably for about a decade, 10 years or something like that. Costa, technology aside, is a brand that is kind of more my speed and my style. One of the guys at Costa, Peter Vandergrift, who I will always give credit to all these years later, said, “Hey, Matt, just go look at some social media stuff, and look at the competitive brands and look at Costa, and which one is you? Maybe we’re not, maybe we are.”
Costa is all like-minded anglers who have a passion for being around the water. That has been my MO since I could walk, since my dad had me fishing at three, four, five years old. So it’s great to see brands that really push a lifestyle we’re all so passionate about. They have endlessly helped who knows how many nonprofits over the years with donations, social media support, and newsletter support. From a fundraising standpoint alone for Cast Hope, it’s hard for me to comprehend how many dollars we have raised from just sunglasses.
Everyone wants to wear Costas. People see them in a raffle, and those donations, of course, fund gear for kids, trips, and classes. There is no question that they have had only positive impacts on the youth of Cast Hope and all of us within the organization.
Flylords: How has Costa personally helped you in your guiding career?
Matt Heron: I’ve always joked with clients, friends, and guide associates that I feel like I owe Costa a check because I have made so much money off being able to see fish with their lenses. I wear the Sunrise Silver lens, which is supposed to be a low-light lens all day: mornings, evenings, cloudy days, rainy days, whatever. Personally, I wear it all the time now. It has been an absolute game-changer since that technology came out. And for me, that’s my go-to. I still wear other lenses here and there, but there’s no question my number one choice is the Sunrise Silver lens.
Flylords: What is it like to be a guide on the Truckee River? What’s so special about the area that surrounds it and the river itself?
Matt Heron: I would say the first thing that makes the Truckee so special is the opportunity to run into the wild trout of a lifetime. The Truckee is known as one of the toughest rivers in the country. It’s a freestone, though it is somewhat dam influenced, and the nickname is the Tricky or the Toughie. Our fish don’t come easily, but we do have 99% wild fish in the river. It is known as the place on the West Coast for somebody who wants to run into a big brown; this is one of the best places to make that happen. It doesn’t mean it’s going to happen, but they are there. Every once in a while, they slip up, and we run into some really quality adult fish.
There’s the Truckee Canyon, where we did a lot of fishing for this project, and some people have coined it the Grand Canyon of the Truckee. Absolutely gorgeous. It’s kind of your classic Western free stone with canyon walls, high alpine, bouldery, fast pocket water, and long runs. From a technique standpoint, I would say what I love the most about the Truckee is that, however you want to fish, you can do it here. It’s known as a nymphing river, so we do tons of bobber fishing, tons of Euro nymphing, and a lot of hopper dropper in the summer. Usually, they’re eating the dropper more so than the hopper.
But to go even further, you can drive fly fish if you want to. You can streamer fish if you want to. You can trout spey. You literally can do it all. There are certain times of year when specific techniques will outperform others, but whatever you want to do, however you like to fish, we can do that any day of the year.
Flylords: Are there any specific fond memories from your guiding career that you’d like to share? Any fun stories?
Matt Heron: I would say one that kind of hits home the most, and is one that I’ll absolutely never forget, is actually relatively recent. In 20 years of guiding, it happened this spring. A gentleman by the name of Gray Watkins gave me my first-ever fly fishing lesson in 1991. For years—well, for 20 years—he’s been talking about coming out to fish with me. He’s a longtime family friend, and his son and I grew up together.
This past spring, he said, “Matt, I’m coming out for five days and bringing one of my best friends. We’re finally going to get to fish again after all these years.” So he booked five days. We did two days on the Truckee, a day on the Little Truckee. We floated him down the Nevada side, and he did a Pyramid Lake. So we booked the whole thing for him. I was fortunate to do four of the five days with him, even with our guide to Pyramid Lake.
On the last cast of five days, he ran into my biggest client fish in 20 years down in the canyon on the Truckee. It was a full circle moment that, after 20 years of doing this, he caught his lifetime brown trout—a 26-inch wild fish. I caught my lifetime client fish, and it’s with the guy who helped jump-start my fly-fishing career.
Flylords: What advice would you give to a younger guide or someone who wants to get into guiding as a profession?
Matt Heron: I would say if you’re looking to get into guiding, catching fish and as many fish as possible cannot be the top priority. The order of importance for me is that you have to have fun first. I may not be the best guide on the river, but I know my clients and I are having as much fun as anybody.
The second thing would be that you have to be able to teach and have a passion for teaching, even when you’re not catching. That could be on a slow day, you’re going to find bugs, you’re doing the sample, and seeing what the fish are feeding on. Get really good at casting instruction, that kind of stuff. But number one, have fun. Number two, learn something.
Number three is definitely catching fish is a massive part of it, of course. But if one and two come pretty naturally, it’s pretty safe to say number three is going to hop in line right where it should. So go out there, have fun with your clients, and be personable and respectful. For some people, this is their one chance to spend a bunch of money on a guided trip. You need to show them a good time, even when fishing’s tough, which we can’t control.
Thank you to Matt Heron for his time and for getting out on the water with us! To learn more about Matt’s classes and ‘Cast Hope’, you can find him on Instagram, HERE. Also, thank you to Costa sunglasses for making this series possible, and for giving us the opportunity to share stories like Matt’s. To check out their wide variety of performance frames and lenses, click HERE.
