But then again, this is who I am.

David Ammons – author and avid fly-fisherman, adventurer and explorer from a young age. A husband and father of three, wedged between a desultory entanglement in the rat race and the ever-present tug of a desire to live in the remote mountains. A dedicated member of Trout Unlimited, a conservation organization focused on the preservation of cold-water fisheries. And a corporate warrior who juggles spending time between a desert home in suburban Arizona and a remote getaway in the Rocky Mountains, where I continue to write, chop wood, and fly fish in the river that raised me – the Cache la Poudre River.

The river that raised me runs through land my family has held since the early 1900s – a wide, wild stretch of canyon country in northern Colorado with a few cabins that have sheltered generations through summers and winters, storms and wildfires, and everything in between. I grew up spending my summers here, learning the Cache la Poudre the way you only can when a place belongs to your family and your family belongs to it. Now, it remains the place I write from – literally and otherwise.

Sermons in Stones was my first attempt to put that life into words – eighteen stories about family, friends, and fly fishing from a man who has spent most of his adult life trying to get back to the mountains. Tongues in Trees carries that thread deeper, into the timber and the memory and the complicated, beautiful inheritance of a place that keeps teaching you things whether you asked to learn them or not.