Review of The Next Valley Over: An Angler’s Progress by Charles Gaines

A good friend of mine, Roger Avery, recommended The Next Valley Over: An Angler’s Progress to me, and I’m grateful he did. As a longtime connoisseur of fishing literature—having spent countless hours absorbed in the works of Zane Grey, Thomas McGuane, Monte Burke, F.A. Mitchell-Hedges, Ernest Hemingway, and others—I can confidently say that Charles Gaines’s book earns a secure place in that canon.

Gaines is an accomplished and obsessive outdoorsman, especially in the realms of fly fishing and wingshooting. His credentials span more than twenty countries and five continents, and his writing reflects the depth of a life spent chasing both fish and meaning. In The Next Valley Over, he takes readers on a journey that begins on his childhood home waters—fishing for late tadpoles with his father—and winds across the globe before returning, full circle, to that same starting point.

The narrative is more than a travelogue; it’s a meditation on experience, obsession, and the way time reshapes our relationship with wild places. Gaines fills his pages with rich anecdotes and vivid portraits of the people who inhabit the world of destination fishing—from bohemian guides who live by the rhythms of the river to high-energy business titans who bring the same ferocity to their casts as they do to their careers.

What makes the book exceptional is how Gaines weaves these stories together with an intellectual and philosophical thread. It’s not simply about chasing fish, but about chasing the essence of why we fish—the search for solitude, beauty, and a deeper sense of self. By the final chapter, the reader realizes that the journey through “the next valley over” is both literal and internal: a journey of self-discovery disguised as a fishing trip.

For anyone who finds peace in moving water, or who believes that the tug of a fish can tug at the soul, The Next Valley Over is a book worth treasuring.