A fish can be memorable for many different reasons; size, species, location, the people you were with, the amount of effort it took to catch, it’s personal.
After fifteen minutes, three fly changes and a complete rotation of casters the plan was looking dubious.
I grinned, expecting a punchline, but he’d said all he had to say. The sound of outbound flyline singing through the guides was his only response.
My mind is still anchored in summer. The eighth inch of ice on the windshield should have tipped me off that the seasons have changed. I scrape ice and cradle a mug of coffee as I wait for the truck to warm up. Toes tingle from the cold as I step into waders. Carefully, Read More
It’s a ghost town; a scene from the twilight zone. The riffles babble and splash, pools flood the bends, soft water lurks behind rocks and foam spins in the eddies, but the river is abandoned. No signs of life. Nobody home. It must be an illusion, maybe a misunderstanding. Has to be. The water, Read More
They are the gullible rubes of the trout family; the hayseeds, hicks, hillbillies, yokels, rustics, provincials, buffoons, bumpkins, country cousins and clodhoppers. Mountain cutthroat, convention holds, are so unsophisticated that even novice anglers had better brace for action. Why then were they giving four capable fishermen fits? “Riser. Four o’clock. About 10 feet further,”, Read More
An 800 foot descent, that is more like a free fall, leads to a stream narrower than my desk. It might get fished a handful of times per year. Nearby the Green sees more traffic in a day than this creek might see in a decade. But it’s position is what makes it special. In, Read More
The brookies come first. Proud, native and prized east of the Mississippi, brook trout teem in many Rocky Mountain watersheds to the point of infestation. What they lack in status, stature or exclusivity though, they make up for in volume and accessibility. You don’t have to blister your feet or wrack your brain to, Read More