On Ethics, and the True Cost of Hot-Spotting

Why I walked away from a dream book deal to protect the hidden public waters of the Texas Hill Country

By Ben Christensen, Old Republic Journal

Five years ago, I landed a book deal—my first and only in a half-century of wanting to be a writer. I secured it through a friend, who had published an award-winning fly-fishing guide to the Austin area. Now we were going to do a series! A few other guys and myself were going to write up various areas, and I was assigned the beautiful Texas Hill Country.

Inauspiciously, the first summer of the project, I got a dream job managing the outdoor recreation program of an old dude ranch near Pinedale, Wyoming, which took me away from Texas from May of 2021 through the end of August, guiding private fly fishing and teaching people how to shoot. That started me on the project on my back foot, but I was soon hard at work.

The author, teaching rifle safety and marksmanship at the Box R Ranch, Cora, Wyoming, summer 2021.

I had fished the Hill Country pretty thoroughly before the book project, but nothing like the full-time job I worked in doing so for the next two-and-a-half years. I fished an area the size of Maryland, pushing out nearly every morning from Johnson City to fish everything from the little creek under the Espada aqueduct in south San Antonio to Pecan Bayou south of Brownwood, and out to beautiful Haby’s Crossing on the Nueces a little way north of Uvalde.

I pored over my big and much beloved DeLorme Atlas & Gazetteer Texas road atlas and Google Earth. Sometime during the project I went all in with OnX’s Elite tier, wrestling with issues like legal access. I fished every accessible reach and stem and tributary of public water on the San Antonio River through San Antonio proper, the Medina, Nueces, Frio, Sabinal, upper Guadalupe, Pedernales, Llano, Colorado, and San Saba I could legally access. I fished a lot of spots a lot more than once.

But as I worked on it, I began to have misgivings. This was a hot-spotting project at its core. It was a guidebook—with coordinates—to the entire treasure chest of public Hill Country water. The idea of giving out literal, precise coordinates to every low-water crossing and public access to the entire Texas Hill Country did not immediately strike me as bad, or even unethical when I started the project.

Somewhere in the Texas Hill Country. Photo by Ben.

Talking to fly fishing friends of mine, a few were blunt about the ethical difficulties hot spotting the entire Hill Country presented. At the time I had some of these conversations, however, I was so fired up about legal access and wealthy land-owners blocking a lot of it that I thought I’d be contributing to the opening up of some of our statutorily protected waterways, so I shrugged it off at first.

Then, the project got really difficult. I missed a lot of deadlines. The project was ENORMOUS). I kept having to push submission deadlines back, delaying the book a full year. A lot of the local color I had written in was edited out, leaving a really boring fly-fishing road atlas that I just couldn’t be proud of bearing my name. My book was nothing at all like the book my buddy had published and won awards with. I wasn’t looking for awards, but I couldn’t be happy with the edits that had sucked all the flavors out of the book.

By the time the economic considerations caught up with me and I needed to go back to work teaching school (I got a job at Llano High School teaching history), I had pulled out of the project.

I was devastated. I had a lot riding on that book. I felt diminished in front of everyone who had cheered me on, not least my children and my wife. But I felt, in the end, it had been a principled stand against pouring years of my life researching, exploring, and having the time of my life out for an anonymous public, counting on everyone to do the right thing by these rivers and streams.

As one friend framed it, how could I be sure bow-fishing enthusiasts wouldn’t use my book to find more access to carp? The idea makes me queasy!

So I want to reassure readers: Old Republic Journal will not be intentionally hot spotting any of the waters we fish. More often than not, I’ll let you know what river, and maybe even what part of a river I am fishing, and how things are going. But I will not be giving out coordinates, secret honey holes, etc. You’ll have to earn those yourself.

I put in hours and bloody hours of really tough research, got into conflicts with landowners, spent a small fortune on fuel and local restaurant fare, and so should y’all. While I trust readers to do the right thing, the internet is an open page lying out on the table for everyone to see.

Like the land rushes of old, where everyone pored over a map to find the best places to live their lives or dig their gold, AI programs scrape the digital landscape, leaving precious little that is special and exclusive anymore.

I’ll do my best to keep every bit of water I report on somewhat of a mystery, so other folks can choose their own explorations and exploits with a fly rod.

We’ll see ya out there!

-Ben