Eagle Claw "Packit" Spin/Fly Combination Pack Rod, Wright & McGill Co. Denver, Honey Fiberglass, c. 1975

The Piece

A four-piece travel rod in honey-gold fiberglass, built by Wright & McGill in Denver and marked on the blank the way rods were marked when the marking was done by hand: Eagle Claw "Packit" — No. PKRR149 — 7½ FT. (229cm) — Spin/Fly Combination — Line Size 7, with the company's eagle-and-claw device struck just ahead of the grip.

It's a convertible. Break it down and rebuild it one way and you have a 7½-foot fly rod rated for a 7-weight line; rebuild it the other and you have a light spinning rod. That was the whole idea — one rod that came apart short enough to ride in a pack or a trunk and covered whatever water you found at the end of the drive.

The details are the reason to look twice. Chestnut thread wraps at every ferrule and guide foot, still tight. A knurled brass reel seat with the warm, unpolished bloom that brass only gets from being handled. And a long cork foregrip that has darkened unevenly across decades of grip and river water — the pits and the shading are the record of it. The spinning reel it's paired with came to us on the rod and stays with it.

History & Provenance

Wright & McGill was founded in Denver in the late 1920s by Stan Wright and Drew McGill, first as a fly-tying house. The company's fortune turned on a single idea: McGill, fishing the Upper Colorado, reshaped a hook point into an inward curve modeled on an eagle's talon — the first meaningful improvement to the fish hook in centuries, and the origin of the Eagle Claw name that's still on the blank.

By the postwar years the company was building rods as well as hooks, and the pack rod became a Denver specialty. Wright & McGill's Trailmaster series had made the multi-piece spin/fly convertible famous with backcountry anglers through the 1950s and '60s; the "Packit" carried that idea forward into the fiberglass era for the generation that fished out of a station wagon. This one is stamped Denver, Colorado, U.S.A. — from the years when it was still made there.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Honey-gold glass against a dark wall is one of the quietest good decisions you can make. Stood in the corner of a study, laid across a pair of iron brackets above a doorway, or leaned beside a stone fireplace, this rod reads as line and warmth — a long amber stroke that softens a room full of hard edges.

It works because it isn't decorative. Someone chose this rod for the specific reason that it would fit in a pack, and then used it enough to wear the cork down unevenly. That's the kind of object that anchors a room: not staged, just kept. It belongs in a cabin, a lake house, a wood-paneled office, or anywhere you want a little Colorado on the wall.