Adventurer · Journalist · Environmental Filmmaker · Author
Patagonia Fly Fishing Ambassador. Author of Water Lines. A Texan who keeps leaving for the edge of the map and coming home with stories.
Riverhorse Nakadate is a Patagonia Fly-Fishing Ambassador, adventurer, environmentalist, and musician whose writing can be found in numerous surfing, guitar, and fly-fishing magazines.
He has starred in three films, Love & Water, A Northern Light, and The Reindeer Journals, and received the first-ever Texas Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Leadership in Public Land and Water Conservation Award.
He is known for traveling alone to the farthest outer fringes of nature and the earth to immerse himself in terrain, explore solitude, pen stories of the beauty of the path, and the amusing characters along the way.
The author of Water Lines: A Life on Marshes, Rivers, Seas, and in the Rain, published by Patagonia Books in June 2026, he resides in the Lone Star State, in a bungalow from 1910 in a historic district of Houston.
A staff assignment writer for The Flyfish Journal and Surfing, crafting narratives that capture the spirit of wild places and the people who defend them, with bylines across fly fishing, surfing, and guitar culture.
Stories from the water →It's All Home Water: A Northern Light contributed to securing a 20-year mining ban protecting the Boundary Waters, proof that stories can move policy.
Watch the films →First recipient of the Texas BHA Leadership in Public Land and Water Conservation Award, with ongoing work supporting the Gulf Coast and the Boundary Waters.
Save the Boundary Waters →32 essays from Patagonia Books, Kirkus Reviews calls them "bite-sized essays celebrating life, love, and water."
About the book →A Patagonia Fly Fishing Ambassador, adventurer, environmentalist, journalist, and musician based in Houston, Texas, and the author of Water Lines: A Life on Marshes, Rivers, Seas, and in the Rain from Patagonia Books.
Three films: Love & Water, A Northern Light, and The Reindeer Journals. A Northern Light helped secure a 20-year mining ban protecting the Boundary Waters.
A memoir in 32 essays moving through Texas salt marshes, Colorado alpine lakes, the Boundary Waters, the Yucatán mangroves, the Arctic Circle, Africa, and Montana spring creeks, humor, solitude, conservation, and a life lived close to water.
In a 1910 bungalow in a historic district of Houston, Texas.