With craggy mountains and windswept plains, southern New Mexico can be a lonely place. But if you know where to look—like fly-fishing guide Maddie Brenneman and her longtime boyfriend, professional photographer Nick Kelley, do—it’s the perfect spot to bask in early-season sun and hunt for rainbow and brown trout. This is exactly what Brenneman and Kelley did this past April. They loaded up a fishing-friendly RV in Santa Fe and headed south. “My favorite spots to fish are spots where nobody else is around,” Brenneman says. “And the best way to reach those places is by road-tripping to a lesser-known stretch of water.”
It is, quite literally, how Brenneman and Kelley roll. Over the past couple of years, Brenneman has taken the tight-knit fly-fishing community by social-media storm. Currently, she has more than 92,000 Instagram followers, or roughly the same number of people it takes to fill the Rose Bowl. Recent posts show her holding monster brown trout in New Zealand, riding horses in northern Patagonia, snorkeling in Belize, and wading across the flats of French Polynesia, fly rod in hand.
When she’s not guiding for C Lazy U Ranch, northwest of Denver near the town of Granby, she can be found in places like Australia’s North West Cape, where she and fellow influencer April Vokey recently spent a week fishing for queenfish and permit. Or on the road with Kelley, who takes most of the shots you see of…
