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Authors: John Gierach
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miles of where I stood stretching my legs and studying a map before hurrying on my way.
This road isn’t a main route to anywhere in particular unless you’re a fisherman, but I am a fisherman, so I saw the stream other times over the next dozen years or so, always from a car window and always on my way elsewhere. It became part of my personal map of the region, which is simple-mindedly all about watercourses. It always looked interesting, but somehow never quite interesting enough to make me change my plans. I guess I’d hit one of those patches where my fishing had become purposeful and I’d temporarily lost the playful aimlessness of someone with all the time in the world.
I finally fished it higher up on the drainage with a friend. It just happened, in the way of things that are long overdue. We were in the neighborhood anyway and for once we were in no hurry. My friend knew a landowner, called in a favor and we ended up on a stretch of water above that first bridge that I’d never seen before but that I might have picked off the map as a likely sweet spot.
Upstream of where we fished, it was a mountain creek that tumbled down through twenty miles and several thousand feet of mixed spruce and pine woods on Forest Service land. There were a few places where you could four-wheel down to it, each with well-worn old campsites, but most of it was temptingly roadless: miles and miles of small, trouty-looking pocket water.
Downstream of that, it flowed out across fifteen miles of pastureland in a small, open valley. Here it slowed and stretched out into pools, riffles and wide meanders extensive enough to cover nearly twice the length of its own valley with the prettiest little western trout stream you’ll ever see. The mountain range upstream to the west loomed. Its signature 10,000-foot peak was ten miles away, but in the clear, thin air it looked close enough to hit it with a rock. The mountains downstream were higher and craggier, but even at a range ofthirty miles you could still pick out distinct snowfields. I moved to the Rocky Mountains forty-two years ago and have been here as a more or less successful transplant ever since. I suppose I now take it all for granted almost as much as those who were born here, but every once in a while I see something like this and remember why I don’t live in Cleveland.
This was a more or less intact working ranch that covered most of the small valley. It was exactly the kind of place you’d have settled yourself, but not for the beautiful trout stream as you now think. Back in the old days you’d have been a hard-bitten homesteader with an eye to cattle, so you’d have seen water for stock and to flood-irrigate hay, plus handy lumber that could be skidded off the hillsides and free food in the form of deer and elk. You’d have ended up with the entire valley not because you had delusions of grandeur—although that may also have been true—but because you’d need every last square foot of that poor pasturage to make a spread pay. The trout in the stream would have meant nothing more than the odd afternoon off and a break from a steady diet of red meat.
I’ll never get over the feeling of approaching a stream for the first time. I like it best when I can walk up on it from a distance, say five hundred yards through sage and prairie grass scattered with summer wildflowers. I can’t see or hear water yet, but up ahead the brush thickens into willows and a broken tree line of juniper, pine and cottonwood where the stream has to be. I’ll saunter along acting nonchalant, but the anticipation is palpable.
Maybe I’ll flush grasshoppers ahead of me and think hard about that, but I try never to tie on a fly before I have a close look at the water. Chances are I know what I’m doing and what will work, but tying on a fly too soon indicates the kind of false confidence that could cost me later. I remind myself that every day of fishing plays out like a movie. I may be
This road isn’t a main route to anywhere in particular unless you’re a fisherman, but I am a fisherman, so I saw the stream other times over the next dozen years or so, always from a car window and always on my way elsewhere. It became part of my personal map of the region, which is simple-mindedly all about watercourses. It always looked interesting, but somehow never quite interesting enough to make me change my plans. I guess I’d hit one of those patches where my fishing had become purposeful and I’d temporarily lost the playful aimlessness of someone with all the time in the world.
I finally fished it higher up on the drainage with a friend. It just happened, in the way of things that are long overdue. We were in the neighborhood anyway and for once we were in no hurry. My friend knew a landowner, called in a favor and we ended up on a stretch of water above that first bridge that I’d never seen before but that I might have picked off the map as a likely sweet spot.
Upstream of where we fished, it was a mountain creek that tumbled down through twenty miles and several thousand feet of mixed spruce and pine woods on Forest Service land. There were a few places where you could four-wheel down to it, each with well-worn old campsites, but most of it was temptingly roadless: miles and miles of small, trouty-looking pocket water.
Downstream of that, it flowed out across fifteen miles of pastureland in a small, open valley. Here it slowed and stretched out into pools, riffles and wide meanders extensive enough to cover nearly twice the length of its own valley with the prettiest little western trout stream you’ll ever see. The mountain range upstream to the west loomed. Its signature 10,000-foot peak was ten miles away, but in the clear, thin air it looked close enough to hit it with a rock. The mountains downstream were higher and craggier, but even at a range ofthirty miles you could still pick out distinct snowfields. I moved to the Rocky Mountains forty-two years ago and have been here as a more or less successful transplant ever since. I suppose I now take it all for granted almost as much as those who were born here, but every once in a while I see something like this and remember why I don’t live in Cleveland.
This was a more or less intact working ranch that covered most of the small valley. It was exactly the kind of place you’d have settled yourself, but not for the beautiful trout stream as you now think. Back in the old days you’d have been a hard-bitten homesteader with an eye to cattle, so you’d have seen water for stock and to flood-irrigate hay, plus handy lumber that could be skidded off the hillsides and free food in the form of deer and elk. You’d have ended up with the entire valley not because you had delusions of grandeur—although that may also have been true—but because you’d need every last square foot of that poor pasturage to make a spread pay. The trout in the stream would have meant nothing more than the odd afternoon off and a break from a steady diet of red meat.
I’ll never get over the feeling of approaching a stream for the first time. I like it best when I can walk up on it from a distance, say five hundred yards through sage and prairie grass scattered with summer wildflowers. I can’t see or hear water yet, but up ahead the brush thickens into willows and a broken tree line of juniper, pine and cottonwood where the stream has to be. I’ll saunter along acting nonchalant, but the anticipation is palpable.
Maybe I’ll flush grasshoppers ahead of me and think hard about that, but I try never to tie on a fly before I have a close look at the water. Chances are I know what I’m doing and what will work, but tying on a fly too soon indicates the kind of false confidence that could cost me later. I remind myself that every day of fishing plays out like a movie. I may be
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