Guide Profile: Autumn Harry

Autumn Harry Redefines the Art of Guiding

It’s rare to cross paths with the likes of Autumn Harry. For one—she’s busy. A casual check-in reveals a confounding scope of ambitious possibility: Perhaps she is organizing a river clean up, or hosting a Red Dress powwow with her mother, Beverly. Maybe she’s hovering in a forklift basket, applying final brush strokes to an agi mural from two stories high. But most likely–and to the delight of the California Fly Fisher reader—Autumn Harry is cradling a glittering Lahontan Cutthroat, its lateral streak of persimmon in perfect contrast to her periwinkle nails, Kooyooe Pa’a Panunadu just in the distance.

Autumn Harry isn’t your standard fly fishing guide. She is Numu (Northern Paiute) and Diné (Navajo), and a member of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe. She is an advocate, a public speaker, and a creative. She earned her Masters Degree in Geography. Her late father, Norman Harry, led Pyramid Lake water rights negotiations to Washington DC, her mother spearheaded water quality efforts at Pyramid Lake’s fisheries. 

Conversation with Autumn alchemizes the ecological, personal, and political mosaic of Pyramid Lake into a single masterclass, opening the aperture in every sense to the meaning of the word “guide.” 

(As a note, this piece will alternate the use of Indigenous and commercial language, just as Autumn does. Please find respective translations in the key below.)

Autumn’s face is relaxed and warm, with bright eyes framed by black bangs and high cheekbones. Two trout carved from abalone dangle and twist from her ears. Her presence is peaceful—a disposition well-suited to those who work on the water. Her voice carries a natural, gentle rhythm as her hands—with nails painted a turquoise seafoam today—swan lyrically in and out of view. She walks me through her story.

“Well, both my parents taught me how to fish.”

Stunned, I mirror her answer back to her. “Both?” (In latent processing I become painfully aware of the bias in my reaction to the surprising addition of a mother figure to a child’s introduction to the world of fishing, underpinning the necessity for this very article.)

“My dad would tell me about the history—the construction of the Derby Dam diversion project and how that impacted our fisheries. From my mom, I would hear about biology when it comes to water quality.” When topics are discussed at the family dinner table, on the shoreline, in the car—these are not educational presentations for the masses in a lecture hall, a YouTube channel of clinical how-to’s, an article in a fly fishing magazine—these are truths that become embedded in our beliefs and our way of being. “My parents continue to be the strongest example of what it means to care for community, land, water, and future generations,” she writes in a post, celebrating her parents’ wedding anniversary and grieving the loss of her father, who passed away four years ago. Autumn’s favorite memories are fishing with him during the quiet days of Covid; she and her mother still fish together today. Autumn echoes their imparted lessons in deep conversation with her clients. “I know that those folks have gained from the experience and go talk to their families, relatives, and friends, and continue to spread that education.” The trickle-down of teachings continues in its downstream flow. 

There’s no limit to sharing these messages when Autumn’s world of fly fishing includes everyone. “I want my guiding to be inclusive for Black, Indigenous, People of Color, LGBTQIA+, Disabled Folks, and all people who are open to learning.”  This openness matters; Autumn estimates as many as half of her clientele are brand new to fly fishing, along with her regulars. “I feel very supported within my [male] clientele. A lot of them have daughters, they want to support women, they want to see more women being welcomed into the fly fishing world.” (I echo her sentiments; this sport has done nothing but welcome me warmly.) For the new crowd, she lends the first hour of her trips to establishing foundational elements of roll casting with a switch rod—no walk in the park, as many of us know—but a necessity for distance shore casting (even from ladders). It was from this methodical diligence that Autumn first realized her natural ability to guide, watching a friend, brand-new to fly fishing, cast the day without a snag. The friend would later haul in a 19-lb cutthroat from the water. That’s when Autumn knew she was onto something. 

Her greatest strength? “Patience.”

Autumn muses on her perfect day at Kooyooe Pa’a Panunadu. In the early hours, the sun crests the skyline with powdered orange light to close out the casting lesson. Migrating the group down to the water’s edge, chilled air gathers in a steady breeze, lolling the foam Jaydacators steadily across the shoreline. A black midge with a copper bead and wire in size 8 leads the hunt. Autumn weaves in lessons in the moments of quiet—that the endemic Cui-ui can live beyond 60 years, and how to be a respectful visitor to Pyramid Lake. She collects discarded line and trash while she guides—but perhaps on a dream day, there is none to be found anywhere at all.

The bite is early and often. “What’s normal? Five a-piece by now . . . ?” Autumn avoids the half-joke gracefully, as any sensible guide on the record would. 

At midday, Beverly delivers a hot shore lunch for the group—golden fry bread and slow-cooked tri-tip with green chile. She shares her knowledge from a mother’s perspective as the group warms over the home-cooked meal. Autumn makes clear, “You are not going to be able to have that type of experience or gain that type of knowledge if the people are not from the lands. Whether it’s fishing, or rafting, or hiking, backpacking—there is so much learning to gain from Native people.” Autumn rallies support of Indigenous guides like Marvin Racine, another local authority on shore fishing at Pyramid Lake. “Supporting Indigenous Peoples as guides on their homelands should be the standard,”
Autumn declares.  

When Autumn speaks of the “standing water” we know as Pyramid Lake, I picture its otherworldly, high-desert landscape: a surrounding mountain range marking an ancient water level, sand stretches of exposed shoreline meeting a plane of teal-green water. Under the surface, Lahontan Cutthroat trout—once extinct from the lake’s environment entirely—patrol for midges and leeches while the Cui-ui suckerfish lingers below. Tufa rocks march towards the lake’s center from the Stone Mother’s strong silhouette to the geometric monolith we call “The Pyramid,” but to the Paiute, will always be Wono.  “These are the lands my ancestors lived on, and thrived on, and protected—so my generation and future generations can have a connection to the waters like they did. It’s a very powerful place.”

The Lahontan Cutthroat trout thrives in Pyramid Lake today because of the Northern Paiute. With the settlers’ 1906 construction of the Derby Dam, the single alpine water source from Truckee River was diverted, desiccating Pyramid Lake of over 80 feet of its water level. The theft of Pyramid Lake’s water led to a local extinction of the Lahontan Cutthroat.

Advocating for its return by leveraging the species’ genetic match found alive, somehow, in Pilot Peak, located on the Nevada/Utah border, the Pyramid Lake Paiute organized efforts to support its sustained proliferation. “I want people to be so appreciative of this place, the people who care for it.”  It is why Autumn started guiding: to share the land’s history, to champion those who catalyzed change, to throughline our understanding of where we have come to fish. People like her mother through water quality, her father via national policy, her ancestors, through caretaking the land, Indigenous guides like Autumn and Marvin advocating through their guiding practice, and Autumn herself, carving a path between worlds through speaking engagements, fundraisers, river clean-ups, and her own continued education.

While discussing Autumn’s Masters program, I learn that her thesis was inspired by her 200-mile journey on the Nüümü Poyo with Indigenous Women Hike, founded by Jolie Varela. She recounts a story of the sun setting on a day of hiking and her and Jolie coming upon a resting point, at “a beautiful lake with granite cliffs.” But with a silent glance down at the map, they are reminded of the domination of settler place names. (The omission of this name is intentional. The term is so offensive to Indigenous culture—Autumn bristles when referring to it as “the sq*** word”—and has no place in this article, our ski resorts, our vernacular.)

They symbolically renamed it Nüümü Hu Hupi Lake (“Paiute Women Lake”) to free it from its derogatory applied name and strengthened their relationship to the lake that evening. Four years later, the name would reach official recognition by the United States Board of Geographic Names, and nearly two years after that, Autumn would graduate with her Masters Thesis titled, “Numu Place Names: Retention and Reclamation of Place Name Knowledge in Kooyooe Pa’a Panunadu.”

I see Autumn’s pattern, letting the current of life sweep her to where she’s needed, and her beliefs and teachings guiding her way. It is from these obstacles that her purpose blooms.

To know Autumn is to experience the infinite multitudes within her—the cross-pollination of mediums and missions that have become her life’s work of guiding, teaching, advocating, learning, speaking, doing. She is a student of life as well as a guide of it. 

As she steps into her 4th season, there is the looming threat of jadedness she observes in other long-time guides. Will she always feel drawn to fishing? To guiding? She postulates “yes”, yet finds herself fishing her tribal-access lands less and less these days, opting to fish the public side where she runs her business instead. Is this how it starts? These are the questions, if we are lucky enough, we grapple with in our lifetimes—how much of ourselves do we give to our work, our passion, our purpose? What if, in Autumn’s case, it’s all three? 

The thrill of guiding is in the vicarious contact highs, tapping into a beginner’s mindset to experience the rush of newness all over again. Autumn knows her clients’ breakthrough moments in fishing, paired with her breakthrough moments in teaching, is what will keep her driven for the long haul. 

In a photo from last month, Autumn stands in front of a mural by Pyramid Lake Paiute artist Gregg Deal. Behind her right shoulder, her late father, Norman Harry, gazes skyward in a three quarter profile. His words will remain on display for years to come: “What is good for the fish, is good for the people.”  

How proud he must be to see his daughter today.