Lost And Found

                          Lost And Found

Last summer I was given a waterproof sports video camera called a Hero GoPro by a friend of my wife’s, as a thank you for helping her move.  She worked for a retailer that sold them and got a good discount on it, but since I lacked any experience downloading digital video, the camera spent the rest of the summer safe in its box. 

  Then in the fall a local business that sends me lots of fishing business wanted to shoot some video to promote the fishing side of things.  We did a couple of trips but had only marginal weather, and I really hoped to get some sunnier shots of the colorful cliffs past which I float.  Then I remembered that I had the GoPro camera, and decided to learn how to use it so I could shoot video on some of the autumn trips I had scheduled. 

  The camera worked great and took excellent video, and soon my wife was using it as well to get footage of the dogs we board.  Soon ski season began and I started taking shots of some of the various tree and bump runs I love to ski all around Beaver Creek Resort. That year was one of the snowiest ever recorded in the area, and the skiing was terrific. One Friday I was doing my volunteer job at Beaver Creek, and during our free ski period in the middle of the day I hooked up with a neighbor couple who live just down the river from me. It was a perfect bluebird day, with a cloudless sky and six inches of powder snow that had fallen the night before.  I had already shot what I hoped would be good video of myself skiing down a bump run with the sun directly behind me, a perfect silhouette bouncing between the round soft mounds of fresh snow. When I met my friends, we spent the next hour filming our runs down Arrowheads perfect runs and aspen glades.

  Around 1:30 pm, it became time for me to get back to the main mountain so the three of us got back into the lift line.  Approaching the lift I reached up and took off the GoPro camera and stuck it in my jacket pocket, so as to not look like a total geek while I wasn’t using it.  Previous days on the hill I had been using the helmet mount, but it can be a little awkward to use when you can’t see the camera, so I had switched to using the head strap to keep it on my head which worked a lot better, as I could pull it off, switch it on, put it on again and ski.  As we were about to board the lift, a woman on foot came up and started asking the liftie how to get to the Arrowhead Club yurt on top, and since I was in my red volunteer coat I offered to show her.  My neighbors got on the lift and the woman and I got on the next, and she and I had a nice chat as the loft ascended. 

  When we got off on top, I bade my chairmate farewell and skied over to see my friends. As we were discussing which route we’d take back, a man skied over to us and said in a thick foreign accent that someone on my chairlift had dropped a pair of gloves. He said that he thought it was near lift tower twelve, but that he wasn’t completely sure.  I thanked him for telling me and as he skied away, I dug into my coat and found my main pair of gloves, and reaching deeper found my extra pair.  I assumed that it must have been the woman who dropped hers, but by now she had already walked further up and across the hill making her way to the yurt.  I quickly hurried away from my friends to let her know, and when I got within earshot shouted, “Excuse me ma’am!  I think you may have lost your gloves off the lift!” She heard me and turned around, shoved her hands into her pockets, and pulled them again producing a pair of black leather gloves.  “No, I’ve got my gloves, it must have been someone else!”, she hollered back.

  Puzzled, I skied back to where my friends were waiting and told them, and we discussed what I should do. My first instinct was to ski down to get them, but Ben said, “Well if they came off of a different chair, you should probably leave them where they are because someone is going to need them and will be looking for them”.  That made a lot of sense, plus if I didn’t get back to Beaver Creek I’d miss the 2:30 volunteer meeting,so we skied back to the Beav.

  When we were above Red Tail Camp, I told them that I’d like to ski ahead of them and film them coming down the hill.  When I got to the bottom, I stopped, turned, and stuck my hand into my right jacket pocket, expecting to feel the camera and its strap in there.  I had a small pang of recognition that my pocket was unzipped, but that thought reached my brain only an instant before the realization that the pocket was empty.  A big curly CFC-free lightbulb went off over my thick skull and I realized that it wasn’t a pair of gloves that had fallen off my chairlift, but my Hero GoPro waterproof digital HD camcorder!

  My friends were waiting for me to give them the signal to start skiing, so I waved them down and told them what happened.  We skied down to Red Tail Camp and they took the lift back to the main mountain and I took Larkspur up to get back to Arrowhead.  Once off the lift, I tucked the long catwalk back to Arrowhead almost the entire way.  Once there I skied underneath the lift looking in vain for my camera, feeling like the dumbest dumbass in the history of dumbasses. 

  Most of the lift had groomed runs beneath it, so by the time I came looking for the camera the odds were pretty good that someone would have found it by now.  But about halfway down the slope the groomed run turned right and the lift went through a section of dense woods, with just a narrow double black diamond trail winding through it.  I took the trail and tried to scan the brush off to my right to try and see the camera but saw nothing.  Once out of the thick growth it was back onto a groomer, and I followed that back to the lift. 

  I asked the lift attendant if anyone had returned a camera and he said no, so I took off my skis and walked over to the small rental shop to ask them and got the same response.  Then it was back onto the lift and as I rode up I kept my eyes glued to the ground below, feeling like a WWII bombardier flying over Germany looking for munitions factories.  I counted lift tower numbers and sure enough, lift tower twelve was in the thick woods. But below me I saw nothing, and from the top of the Arrowhead lift I made my way back to Beaver Creek Mountain, dope slapping myself the whole way.  Later that day I stopped by the Lost and Found office and reported what I lost, but no GoPro cameras had been found or turned in.   Over the next few weeks I stopped by several more times just in case, but the answer was the same.  One of the weird things was, about an hour before I lost the camera I had been holding it in my hands on the lift looking at it, thinking that when I got home I should write my name on it in case I should ever do something stupid like dropping it off a chairlift.  That turned out to be a great idea that but a little too late.

  When I got home that night I went online and put a “Lost” ad in the local paper, which ran for two weeks without any responses.  Then about three weeks later I was skiing near the Strawberry Park lift and saw a dark object in the snow, and when I stopped to pick it up I found that it was a wearable sports video camera, though not a GoPro.  My first instinct was to keep it, but knowing how much it would be missed by its rightful owner I made my way straight down to the Lost and Found office to turn it in.  Before I did, I stuck one of my business cards into the mount and asked the girl in the office if no one claimed it, could I have it?  I explained to her that I had lost mine a few weeks before, and that it seemed as though my getting to keep this one if unclaimed might restore some sort of karmic balance.  She said that I would have to talk to the head of the office about it. 

  The weeks passed with no word of my camera and I mentally wrote it off.  My wife and her friend who had given it to me gave me much grief about losing it, which didn’t make me feel any less stupid.  The ad ran out, and back at the Lost and Found office the manager said that even though I was the finder, I could not have that other camera.  She said that if were unclaimed by the end of ski season it would be donated to a charity. But in the back of my mind, I kept just a small glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, the camera was still up there in the snows of Arrowhead, and that once the snow melted I could go up there and find it in the woods.  That year proved to be a record one for snow however, and it kept falling well after the lifts had closed. I could see the stretch of woods from I-70, and all through March and into April I’d look at Arrowhead whenever I passed by on the interstate waiting for it to melt. 

  Finally in late April, it did.  One day I got off of work early, and instead of going home I drove up to Edwards, parked in the now empty Arrowhead parking lot, and began walking.  Up the hill I went past brownish patches of melting snow, and through wet rivulets caused by the same, until I finally reached the edge of the woods. Trying to stay as close to the underside of the lift chairs as possible, I made my way uphill with difficulty through the thick brush.  Then the hill flattened a bit right near lift tower twelve, and I was disappointed to see that some kind of crew had been through there already and had cut down all of the saplings which had impeded my progress.  It was now much easier to make my way, but if I had dropped my camera there then surely one of the trail crew would have found it.  Along the way I did find a ski pole, which helped as a hiking aid, and then a nice leather glove, and then fifty-five cents in a neat little pile.  But by the time I made it all the way through and back onto the grassy slope which a month before had been a groomed ski run, I had not seen my camera.  With that, the small flame of hope that had led me up this hillside just about flickered out. 

  I started to walk downhill the easy way along the run instead of the woods, but I stopped once more to look at the scrub brush below the lifts and noticed that the hill between the uphill and downhill chairs did have a noticeable slope between them, and I thought that maybe the camera could have hit the ground, and slid on the snow which would mean that it wasn’t right under the chairs.  It was a long shot, but I was already up here and wet and tired and dirty, so what the hell, I went back into the woods, this time hewing more closely to the downhill chairs. 

  After clawing may way through more wet and pokey brush, I stopped not far from lift tower twelve to catch my breath, looked to my left, and saw my camera about ten feet away resting beside a two-foot tall pine tree!  I did an over the top neck-snapping double-take, and closed my eyes and reopened them to make sure I hadn’t imagined it, and yet there it was, a Hero GoPro weatherproof wearable sports HD-ready digital video camera.  I picked it up in disbelief, holding it in my hands for the first time in four months.  I tried to turn it on, but of course the battery was dead, and at that point I didn’t really care if it worked or not.  Even if it were broken then at least I had some closure, and knew where it had been all this time.  Apparently, once it had fallen from my pocket it had hit the snow and slid, until it reached the little pine tree, which may have had a small well around it which gobbled it up.  I raised my hands up to the sky and yelled “Thank you!” to whatever cosmic entity is in charge of such things. 

  Now I made my way back down the hill with a bounce in my step, but I was so excited that I had to tell someone, so I called my neighbors and told them of what I was holding in my hands.  I related to story of its discovery and we had a good laugh, and after we said goodbye up I stood up, and saw the biggest black bear I’ve seen  about fifty yards away, ambling down the slope.  I tried again to get the camera to turn on but of course it wouldn’t, so I contented myself with walking down the hill following the bear, who was unaware of me at first.  Then near the bottom of the run we were sharing he abruptly stopped, looked over his shoulder, and saw me.  I stopped as well and trying to to look afraid, began talking to him.  “Hey bear!”, I called, “Nice day for a walk! Look what I found today!” I yelled, holding up my camera for him to see.  The bear wasn’t impressed. 

We stood there looking at each other for awhile, and when he sat down I began walking again.  He quickly got up, made as if to charge, and suddenly the camera didn’t seem so important anymore.  But he stopped when I did, and after another tense moment or two he got bored and slowly disappeared into the woods. 

  When I got home I had to find all of the accessories to the camera so that I could try to charge it back up, and that took some doing since I had put them all out of sight..  Seeing Hero GoPro this and Hero GoPro that had only served to piss me off in the intervening months, and on a couple of occasions I had been tempted to toss that stuff out.  When I first plugged it in nothing came on, and I thought that maybe after all that, the camera was dead. It was in a clear waterproof housing, but the housing had slightly popped open when it hit the ground, and perhaps moisture had gotten inside.  But I left it plugged in overnight, and the next day when I tried to turn it on I was delighted to see it come back to life.  The next step was to try to download the video on it, and my wife who is a wiz with iMovie plugged it in to her Mac, and it spent the next night being downloaded onto that. 

  The next day the neighbors happened to be over, and all of that video now resided on her hard drive.  At the bottom of the screen was a series on little thumbnails showing what video there was, and you could see that the first several of these thumbnails were of ski footage but eventually all the thumbnails turned black.  We started watch the videos on her computer screen and there was indeed some good footage of all of us.  But then the image turned very strange, it looked like a colonoscopy.  The image was mostly dark, but with a red flower-looking center that opened and closed like a video voyage of someone’s small intestine.  I turned up the audio to see if that would lend any clues and what we heard was my deep, rhythmic breathing.  We quickly realized that it was probably the sound of me poling my way into the lift line, and the reason the image kept going from dark to deep red was that my arms were moving forward and back.  It seemed that when I stuck the camera in my pocket, I had forgotten to shut it off!

  Now we all hunched around the computer screen, watching as the image brightness stabilized.  That would have been me riding the lift!  And as we watched, the image went from almost dark to slightly brighter, then a little brighter, then brighter still, until suddenly it went to bright white.  That was the camera coming out of my pocket, and the auto exposure trying to catch up!  Then as we all watched, we saw a nice digital HD image of the snowy ground below the Arrowhead chair lift rushing at the camera, like smart bomb footage from the first Gulf War.  Finally the image went black, and a second or two later the autoexposure caught up again and after the image brightened, we were treated to a nice image of snow, of which there was an hour and a half more of filling my 8gb SD card.  We hooted and hollered and laughed watched the footage again and again.  The camera’s head strap had apparently acted like a parachute to keep the GoPro’s lens pointing down as it plunged to earth. 

  The camera is still working fine, and its cinematic career has come full circle.  All of that massive snowpack led to an epic river running season, and I got terrific footage of some massive waves with it.  I wish I could say that I’ve gotten smarter about zipping pockets and the like, but my absentmindedness only seems to get worse the older I get.  However I did do one thing since I got it back – I etched my name and phone number onto the camera in case I lose it again.  Perhaps someday I’ll have a couple hours of footage of the Colorado River, from a trout’s perspective!

  Epilogue

 Not long after I wrote the above, my wife and I did what was supposed to be a quick float down the river in a two-person inflatable kayak.  The river had receded from its record levels, but was still very high for August.  There was a wave train that had been particularly fun that summer not far from our put-in, but what were fun waves in a full-sized raft looked enormous from the ducky.  A big refractor swept over the left side of the little boat, and flipped us into the river.  The Go Pro was on my head, but not for very long. My wife and I had a very long and scary swim, and it wasn’t until we dragged ourselves out of the river that we realized that I had lost the Go Pro again.  I had lost it for four months, had it back for four months, and then managed to lose it again, this time in a place where the name I etched onto it wouldn’t do me any good.   

  Every time I’ve told this story to someone, (usually to strangers on the
Arrowhead chair lift), they tell me that I should let the Hero GoPro folks this story,

and maybe I could get a free camera out of it.  I don’t really expect that to happen, but since I’ve had many people tell me that and I’ve been too broke to buy another yet, I decided to actually write about it and send the tale to you.  I really loved that camera and would love to get another one some day!  Feel free to use this story for whatever marketing purposes you wish!

The Switch Flips

                                              The Switch Flips

Winter has finally begun, and this year it came in like a lion (or perhaps a yeti). It had been a fairly mild November, and by the time Thanksgiving rolled around the river was still ice-free and fishable.  We were beginning to wonder if winter would ever arrive, since by then we would usually get one or two precursors of the new season in the form of early snowfalls that quickly melt.   But this year there was none of that, except in the higher terrain where it was greatly appreciated by the ski areas.  But then on the Tuesday night after Thanksgiving the weather grew cold and dark, and we woke up on Wednesday morning to a foot of fresh powder. Winter had arrived literally overnight. 

  I used to think that if there was any month that it wasn’t great to live in Colorado, November was it. After all, most of the ski areas weren’t open yet, the fishing isn’t as good as it is earlier in the fall, and the weather can be a little less sunny than the rest of the year.  But I’ve begun to have more of an appreciation of November, since it’s a month that I tend to drive around with both my skis and my fishing gear in the back of my truck. May is the only other time of year that I do that. From June until Thanksgiving, I usually have a bag of fishing gear with me in my truck or car wherever I go, just in case I find myself driving along the Eagle or Colorado Rivers (or just about anywhere in the state) with a little extra time and some open fishy water beckoning me.  From November until June, that fishing bag is replaced by my ski gear.  That way if I find my work day ending early, I can drive up to Arrowhead to get in a few runs on the mountain.  Or, if I’m going to the Front Range, I might either have the time to do some turns at A-Basin if its open, or off the top of Loveland Pass if its not. In May and November the back of my car or truck can be a little crowded with gear, but it’s a good kind of inconvenience to have to deal with.

  Over the past few years, the early season skiing at A-Basin has gotten better, partly due to the fact that there is more snowmaking there than there used to be.  For many years they wanted to increase their snowmaking, but we being sued by Trout Unlimited for trying. Once A-Basin won the right to make snow, they were able to get their rocky terrain covered in the white stuff earlier than would have been able to in the past.  Suddenly the November skiing could actually be pretty good. 

  Anyway most autumns I have fishing on the brain, partly because after watching other people fish all year I suddenly have time to do some myself.  Then the ski areas begin to open, but fishing remains in the forefront of my consciousness.  But at some point there’s a switch that flips in my brain, sometimes with an almost audible click, and at that point I can get as obsessive about getting on the hill as I was about being thigh-deep in some river only a short time before.  The way winter came in overnight this year resulted in one of those short transitions. Beaver Creek has been open almost a month now, and the conditions have been very good already.  My favorite type of skiing is to be found in the trees, but some years it’s not safe to hit those until January, since they’re not maintained and it takes a certain amount of snowfall to cover all of the felled trunks and downed limbs. But I’ve already done a bunch of tree skiing already this year, and it not even Christmas yet.

   So fishing has taken the back seat, and will remain there even as my fishing magazines begin piling up unread.  Usually I forget about fishing until January, when the Fly Fishing Show in Denver rekindles my interest.  Once I come home from that, it’ll usually motivate me to go hit a tailwater like the Frying Pan, the Blue, or the Yampa.  But an afternoon of freezing my ass off doing that is usually all it takes to get me looking up again, at the snow-covered hills all around. 

  I did have an epiphany last February fishing the Pan with my friend Ryan that might lead to more winters forays however.  We were out there one day with the air temperatures about twelve degrees.  It was one of those days where its actually warmer standing in the river instead of our of it, since the water temperature was a balmy forty degrees. We had the Toilet Bowl almost to ourselves, which is pretty unusual on the Frying Pan.  The Bowl is right near the outlet of the dam, and where all of the real leviathans live.  About every three or four casts I would have to stop to clear the ice off my rod guides, and doing that for the umpteenth time I broke tip of my rod.  This pissed me off, but then I remembered that I had my tenkara rod in my truck.  I put my conventional rod away and switched to the tenkara, and found it to be the perfect tool to fish in sub-zero temperatures.  Its thirteen feet long and has no reel, only about fifteen feet of line and leader with which to toss a fly.  Not only were there no guides to freeze, but there is very little handling of the line necessary, which leaves your hands much dryer and warmer.  I expect to be doing much more of that this winter. 

  But until then, the switch in my brain is still firmly flipped to the “Ski” setting, and as long as fresh powder keeps falling from the sky that’s where it will stay. Although, I did just finish clearing off a 300’ x 30’ space on the river ice in my backyard on the Colorado River, and so I’ll have to figure out where ice skating and hockey is going to fit into my limited recreational time!

Shooting The Goddamn Pigeons

 

                                  Shooting The Goddamn Pigeons

  In honor of the on-going Great Backyard Bird Count, sponsored by the Audubon society, I’m pleased to announce that there are three less goddamn pigeons in my great backyard than there were yesterday. 

  Shooting the goddamn pigeons in my yard has been something I’ve been doing for the last year or so, ever since their population began to get way out of hand.  My wife and I live on the Colorado River, which is sort of an interstate highway for birds of all types. We regularly see hummingbirds, eagles, ospreys, orioles, finches, tanagers, redwing blackbirds, and many, many others, including the goddamned pigeons.  Hanging around our house are six normal bird feeders, as well as five hummingbird feeders that we hang in the springtime when the hummers begin to show up.  We love birds, and used to enjoy waking up to their happy songs every morning. That is we did, until the goddamned pigeons began to show up. 

  Why goddamned pigeons began to appear here and where they came from is still a bit of a mystery.  We didn’t used to have any, but one day we had one or two and soon after it became a dozen and not long after that it became two dozen and now there is even more than that, to many to count. The two main pastimes of the goddamned pigeons seem to be cleaning out our bird feeders, and engaging in pigeon coitus to produce even more goddamned pigeons.  It may be that they first started coming around because of our horses across the street, for when they aren’t vacuuming up the millet in our feeders they’re over by the horses picking through their waste looking for an afternoon snack.  If you are an aficionado of flies and goddamned pigeons, I suggest that you buy a horse or three, you’re guaranteed to have plenty of both.  In response to the first group of pests, my wife undertook the world’s most comprehensive study of fly traps, to determine which is the best to way to eliminate flies.  Since she wanted to have a big enough sample to make her study stand up to peer review, we now have approximately 11,321 different fly traps which stick, electrocute, maim, entrap, cook and poison the little germ vectors. 

  The goddamn pigeons have been another matter.  For a long time I tried to ignore their increasing numbers, but they simply became to numerous to ignore.  Not only to they quickly hoover up every scrap of food that would otherwise end up in the belly of some more deserving bird, but the riotous ruckus they make in the process of doing so wakes me up most mornings.  The two things that I most like to hear first thing in the morning is the happy song of some little bird greeting the day over his breakfast, or the low murmurs of my wife wanting some lovin’.  My least favorite sound to wake up to is the noise produced by some fat unruly goddamned pigeon flapping and cooing and banging into my bedroom window fighting one of its cousins over who gets to inhale the food in the bird feeder first.  In addition to the cacophony the goddamn pigeons make, their battles often get our cats going slightly bonkers as well, and that tends to get the dogs up, which in turn means that in very short order, the whole house is awake. 

  Now, instead of filling the bird feeders before I go to bed at night so as to ensure some lovely songbird symphony, I leave them empty to I can get some sleep in the morning.  This means that a lot of our nice birds have left, preferring to live their lives somewhere away from the goddamned marauding pigeons, and I can’t say that I blame them.  So I’ve over the past year or so, I’ve begun doing some pest control, and have been shooting the goddamn pigeons with my twenty gauge shotgun.  It’s very satisfying to watch them plummet to the earth and hit the ground with a thud. Its even more fun to let my yellow lab out into the backyard to retrieve the goddamn pigeon, for nothing please my dog more than to have a warm bird in his mouth, its like lifting a foamy glass of Guinness to mine.

  Unfortunately shooting them is not as easy as it sounds, for they are very clever bastards.  It used to be that after they woke me up, I’d just grab the twenty gauge, open a window, and blast one out of the tree or in mid-air as it lumbered away with its breakfast.  They’re as fat as geese and not very fast.  But now they’ve taken to stationing a lookout, and when I get out of bed they warn the ones who are feeding, and will fly off around the corner.  There they wait until I go back to bed, and am almost asleep, before returning to resume their feeding frenzy. 

  This morning was a perfect example of that.  I was woken from a sound sleep by what sounded like someone banging on the bedroom window wanting to get in. (Since our bedroom is on the second floor, that would have been no mean feat).  I got out of bed, but the goddamned pigeons saw me, and scurried off.  It’s hard to say for sure, but from the noise they were making I’m pretty sure that they were laughing.  I went back to bed, and pulled a pillow over my head, but they were soon back, flapping and cooing and making the feeding squeak with the way they were making it swing around.  That’s how the clever bastards get the remaining millet out – by knocking the crap out of the feeder to rain breakfast down upon their accomplices below. I got out of bed again, filled the feeder, and went back to bed, this time keeping one eye open for them. Soon they were back, and this time I let them eat their fill, so they might become even fatter and more complacent.  As I watched them, I was amazed to see the clear vertical tube of feed visibly drop as two of the goddamned pigeons went to work. In response, they seemed to almost inflate like a pair of small balloons.  Slowly, I rolled out of bed and crawled on all fours like a cat, over to the bureau where my twenty gauge was leaning. I carefully peered over the bed in front of the window, but when I tried to open the window to give them the Lee Harvey Oswald treatment they flew away, giggling wildly.  I went back to bed and repeated this twice more, but each time they flew off just in time. 

  A change of tactics was called for, and the next time the goddamn pigeons came back I was waiting for them downstairs, just inside our sliding glass door. The problem with shooting them from downstairs is that this is where the labs sleep, and as soon as they see me with the shotgun in my hand they begin to lose it, for they know that very soon, they might have a warm goddamn pigeon in their wide, soft mouths. So the hardest part of assuming the downstairs sniper position is keeping them calm for long enough for me to open the door and blast one out of the sky.  This I managed to do, and I slowly slid the door open just enough to stick my nose out to look up at the bird feeder hanging outside our bedroom window. Sure enough, two of the goddamn pigeons were up there snorkeling up what remained of the food.  Our two Labradors were doing there best at shutting the hell up, and the effort was making them quake in anticipation.  I slooowly opened the door wide enough to get my head, shoulders and shotgun out, and took aim at the fat goddamn pigeon who was furthest from my house. I had to wait until he took wing, so the bird feeder and the corner of my house wouldn’t be annihilated in the process. 

 Daisy our black lab couldn’t take it any longer, and barked.  The goddamn pigeons took flight, and I squeezed the trigger on the one who had laughed the loudest, had him dead to rights.  CLICK!, went the shotgun, since I had neglected to put in a live shell before beginning my morning’s efforts.  Both goddamn pigeons flew off laughing harder than ever, and my dogs looked at me as if I was the biggest idiot they’d ever seen. They were used to me walking out the door and returning with birds or fish.  To see me fail so utterly, standing there on the cold deck wearing nothing but a pair of Crocs, confused and disappointed them.  I let them out to potty, and made busy in the kitchen until the goddamn pigeons returned.  The dogs came in, the pigeons came back, but as soon as I opened the door a crack they flew off. 

It was time to adjust strategy again.  My wife’s assistant was due in soon, so I went upstairs, put on some pants, and put on a big green Eddie Bauer parka I bought years ago in case I ever go to the North Pole.  I stood outside the sliding door and held very still, shotgun close to my chest.  Soon the goddamn pigeons were back, but I held very, very still.  The labs were back to full attention inside, but as long as the door stayed closed the goddamn pigeons weren’t bothered. 

  I quickly raised the shotgun and the fat bastards threw up their wings in surprise.  The first one away from the house flew right into a dense pattern of birdshot and fell like a heavy stone.  The dogs went ballistic inside, and I let my yellow lab Yuker burst outside to claim his prize.  He was on it in no time, and began doing his prideful little walk, ears flattened forward and front shoulders doing a bulldog-like rocking gait. Later that morning I was able to shoot one more that was too fat to fly from the bedroom window.  In the afternoon, most of the mob was on the cliffs above the horses, and I got a final one with my pump action in mid-air as he lumbered away.

  The problem with shooting the goddamn pigeons is that every time you do, two more seem to appear.  There seems to be an infinite supply of them, coming from god knows where. I’ve been turning my bedroom window into the Colorado River Book Depository now and then for the last year, but there are twice as many goddamn pigeons than there were when I started. So when the futility of the exercise begins to wear on me, I turn a blind eye to them, and just resign myself to filling the bird feeders as often as possible (all the while watching the goddamn pigeons get as big as turkeys).

   But then some morning soon, there’ll be ten of them outside trying to break in again, and out will come the shotgun for some goddamn pigeon genocide!

My First Colorado Weekend

                                                    My First Colorado Weekend

In April of 1986 I officially moved from Boston to Denver, but work duties kept me traveling most of the time, usually back on the East Coast.  Every thing I owned was in boxes in my Denver apartment, and would stay that way for months.  But finally one weekend in late April I was able to stay in Colorado for the weekend, and had to choose between unboxing stuff or heading out into the hills. The call of the mountains was strong, and everything stayed in boxes for another week.

  On Friday afternoon I left Denver in a rainstorm, and by the time I got to Georgetown it had turned to snow.  This concept was still entirely new to me, that one could drive west from Denver and then be in an entirely different climate in a half-hour’s drive (of course that’s a two-hour drive most Friday nights now).  The previous night I had watched the TV weather forecast, and it indicated that it would be raining in Denver but nice in the mountains, west of something called “The Continental Divide”.  It seemed improbable, but  I stuffed camping gear, fishing tackle, and skis into the back of my Saab 99 and pointed it west.  As the road rose and the weather grew wetter, I kept thinking that this was a really stupid thing to do.  The driving just got worse as the road climbed, and camping didn’t seem to be too likely.  By the time I got to the Eisenhower Tunnel, there was a half foot of snow on the ground and I was glad to be driving something as good in the snow as a Saab.

  But then I emerged from the tunnel’s west portal and could see the sky for the first time since I left Denver, and there were the makings of a gorgeous sunset!  Scattered clouds, the sun looming high above Buffalo Mountain, and suddenly this had the potential to be a great weekend after all.  When I came down the hill into Summit County, I decided to try and find a vantage point to shoot some photos of the beautiful western sky, but I  the sun was going to set prematurely behind the big wall of mountains in front of me. I needed to decide whether to keep going west straight into the sunset, or try to go around the mountains.  In my haste to leave Denver, I had forgotten my map on the kitchen table.  Not knowing any better, I headed north on Highway 9 to try and get around what I would learn later was called the Gore Range. 

  This was not a smart choice, and the further north I got I began to realize that maybe I should have kept going west on the interstate.  But now I was committed, and  I kept driving north hoping to see some road that might take me west and over the mountains. Finally after about twenty miles, I saw a dirt road that ran downhill to some river I didn’t know the name of, with some small signage on it that indicated it might go somewhere. It was getting late, so I made the turn to see where this road might lead.  It crossed a river, which I learned later was the Blue, and then began to climb up a long, winding grade.  I passed a ranch with some sheep, then rounding a corner almost ran into a large herd of cows leisurely walking across the road, in no mood to be rushed by my little car.  I thought, “I’m not in Boston anymore!, and waited for them to give me room to go by.

  After passing some pretty meadows lined with aspen groves, the road starting going steeply downhill and the canyon walls closed in.  I was beginning to wonder just how big of a mistake I had made by taking this road, when I found myself coming around a bend to see one of the most expansive valley views I’d ever seen.  To my right was the mouth of an enormous, deep canyon, and to my left a wide green river valley far below.  I pulled over to get a better look, and climbed over the guardrail to get out onto some rocks for a better perspective.  The sun was already down below the western ridge, and the colors underwhelming, but the sight I gazed upon below for the first time made an indelible image onto the filmstock of my brain. Then I heard a low sound like steady distant thunder, and looking down into the deep dark canyon saw what looked like a toy train a thousand feet below.  I watched as the train went down the valley and could see the entire thing from the engines up front to the last rattling cars in the rear. The perspective from so far above was almost god-like. 

  I decided to sleep in that spot then and there, and unloaded my sleeping bag and cooler.  There was on flattish spot on the side of the hill that was level enough to sleep on, and that’s where I planned to spend the night.  But looking west, I noticed that the gathering clouds were looking more and more malevolent, and felt the first few splats of rain strike the ground and rocks around me.  Since it wasn’t completely dark yet, my curiosity finally got the better of me and I wanted to see where that dirt road I was on ended up. I got back in the 99 and drove the hill and into the valley below.  The road curved and dipped for over ten miles, crossing the river once.  Finally I came down a steep hill and towards some ramshackle log buildings, and then to a larger building with lights on inside.  I was happy to find a watering hole this far out in the sticks. Having gotten to where I was without a map and in unfamiliar territory, I had no idea where I was.  So parked my car and checked out the old wooden structure I was approaching.  It looked to be at least turn of the century vintage, and maybe older. There was a big deck one had to cross to get in, from which there was a good view of the river below.  I went into the old saloon expecting to see a roomful of people, for judging by the number of cars outside the place was going to be packed. 

  But when I opened the door, there was…no one.  I bellied up to the bar and stood and waited, and waited, but still the bar appeared empty.  I peered over the behind the bar and saw how easy it would be to pour myself one.  Let’s see, the mugs are over there, the tap is there, hmmm I could just…

  Just then I heard the murmur of people upstairs, and noticed that there was a staircase leading up to what looked like a darkened room above.  I creaked my way up the stairs on the ancient planks and when my head got above the floor level I was greeted by the sight of a roomful of people sitting in folding metal chairs, looking towards a small brightly-lit stage and smiling.  On the stage was a cowboy, (I could tell that because he had the hat, and neckerchief, and a perfectly coiled rope).  He was in the middle of reciting a poem about working hard on a cattle ranch, through all kinds of bad weather, in the company of trusty fellow-ranchhands, a good dog, a sturdy smart horse.  Long nights spent around campfires being serenaded by coyotes, (or the way cowboys say it, kye-yotes).   It was kind of cliché but it was way cool, too.  I had stumbled onto a Cowboy Poetry gathering, something I had heard of but had never been to.  Cowboy Poetry readings don’t exactly dominate the Massachusetts cultural landscape. 

  A waitressy-looking woman went downstairs and I followed, finally able to get a large mug of draft beer.  Back upstairs I found a metal folding chair of my own and stayed for the rest of the show. There were more Real Cowboys like the first, and some also had instruments and sang their poems.  One of the singers had a little cattle dog (also in a neckerchief) who would let out mournful, “Oooh! Ooooh! Ah-Oooohh!!s” at critical moments in the song.  (I think that he trying to sing like a kye-yote).  The highlight for me was the cowboy who recited the entire poem “The Man From Snowy River” verbatim, gesturing dramatically with his arms and making grand flourishes at exciting moments in the narrative.  I was thinking, Boy, you definitely ain’t in Boston no more. 

  That night I drove back up the dirt river road to my spot near the mouth of what I had learned was called Gore Canyon.  The river nearby was none other than the mighty Colorado, and, as I was told by the bartender,  this saloon had been here for over a hundred years.  It was called the State Bridge Lodge and Teddy Roosevelt had stayed here once on the way to slaying large numbers of Colorado fauna.  

  Finally back at my spot I unrolled the sleeping bag and laid it out under the night sky.  Directly above me the stars were blazing, but as I looked west I couldn’t see any stars at all.  There were dark clouds everywhere, it was like being in a black hole, or just outside of one.  But right overhead the sky was clear, so I decided to stay there until it rained, and if the bivy bag couldn’t keep the rain out then I could always retreat to the Saab.  But the sky stayed clear, and I noticed that there was a persistent breeze coming out of Gore Canyon, which seemed to be blowing the clouds away. Before I fell asleep I got to see my first Colorado shooting star, the first of many more to follow in the next two dozen years.

  The next day I drove back to the bar to get a better look at where I was and had been.  The river canyon was beautiful, and once I had a better look around I was ready to see more.  The previous night someone had told me about a long way round back to I-70, and had drawn up a map to it on a bar napkin.  At some point while bundled up in my sleeping bag later I must have had runny nose, for I had used the napkin for an alternative purpose.  It was still readable though, just a bit gross.  I headed west on the first paved road I’d seen in some time to where I was told to turn, and once again was back on a dirt road.  This one went down a hill and met up with the river, which it then followed west.  It was a scenic river valley, with the railroad tracks running between the river and the dirt road I was on.  After a few miles the road crossed the river on a one-lane bridge and climbed up a hill away from it, and up on top I got my first look at some snow-drenched mountains I later learned to be the Flat Tops.  It was beautiful open country, with only an occasional ranch to be seen.  The road dipped again and went down a steep hill where it crossed the river over another small bridge, and for the next few miles I followed it along the prettiest section of the canyon I’d been on yet. The canyon walls on the right were shades of pink and yellow, and on the left they were bright red.  I began thinking of looking for a spot to camp and wet a line, and when I saw some orange, yellow and red rock hoodoos on the opposite hillside and thought that it looked to be a good spot to stay. 

  There was a little dirt trail that went down towards the river which I thought the Saab could handle, so I followed that down.  Unfortunately the railroad tracks were there as well, and they prevented me from getting too close to the water’s edge.  I got out and walked around a bit, astounded by how dramatic the cliffs looked.  In subsequent years I would spend a lot of time in southern Utah and got to see lots of country like this, but to eyes raised on softer eastern mountain ranges, this all looked like the surface of Mars by comparison. I took some photos of the area and scrambled down to the river, but decided to look for a spot to camp elsewhere since only (but ideal) spot that I could see was across the river. 

  I got back in the Saab and kept driving, stopping a lot to take more photos along the way.  Along the way I saw a couple of dirt roads that went off into the hills, but they all lead away from the river and I wanted to stay near that.  A few miles from the area with the colorful cliffs I saw the first few houses I’d seen in awhile, and thought, What a great place to live.  Eventually I got back to I-70, and camped out that night near Tennessee Pass on my way back to Denver.  But I never forgot the Colorado River Road, and over the next 17 years went back often to camp and fish.   For the first fifteen years that I lived in Denver I spent many weekends loaded up with skis and fishing rods and camping gear, and then later mountain bikes and an inflatable kayak, exploring the mountains of Colorado and deserts and canyons of Utah.  But over the latter years more and more often I found myself spending the weekends in the area above and below the State Bridge Lodge.  There’s lots of public land with free camping all around, some of which is walking distance to the bar. 

  Ten years ago my wife and I moved to a spot two miles downriver from the heart of that red rock canyon.  I run fishing trips right through the most beautiful section, and my shop and takeout is right in my backyard.  I've been up and down that road thousands of times now, but it still sometimes knocks my socks off just soaking it all in.  Even after several hundred river trips, its still a magical place that I never get tired of experiencing.  What's even better is taking others on it for their first time, and reliving my first exposure to it in the process.  It’s a place that I was somehow just drawn to, as if by some larger unseen force.  I knew it was meant to be not long after we bought our place here, poring over the USGS maps left behind by the previous owner.  The name of that spot in the middle of the canyon was "Jack Flats", and I thought, I guess I was meant to be here. 



 

 
 

   Finding Home                       
  I live beside the Colorado River, on a thirty-four mile stretch of road appropriately called the Colorado River Road. At the downstream end, the road meets Interstate 70, and the river its confluence with the Eagle.  At this confluence, the river turns west and flows into Glenwood Canyon and to points further southwest, including Moab, Powell Reservoir, and the Grand Canyon.

  But upstream of the interstate, the river is still small enough to wade across in early winter, and it remains a mostly wild and untrammeled place.  The lower half of the river is flanked by a handful of large ranches, and the upper half by BLM land, neither of which seem to be in any imminent danger of development. Our place is roughly in the middle of the two.  We only own six acres, but they’re pretty diverse, with two along the river, and four across the River Road.  Of the remaining four acres, two are flat enough for my wife to run her horses and cows, and the other two are up on hills which afford the livestock a place to explore and to have some nice views of the Flat Top Mountains and the river below. 

 I love living here next to the river, for in so many ways being here is really a dream come true.  I’ve always loved oceans and brooks and rivers, for water that is dynamic and moving and alive just stirs something in my soul that a mere lake, no matter how large, cannot. Beside a river, I feel a connectedness to everything that the moving water touches from the snowcapped peaks above the valley to the desert canyons that the river eventually carves.  With an ocean, I feel connected to the entire rest of the world.  When my wife and I were finally ready to get ourselves away from the noise and bad air and traffic of Denver, we looked through many river valleys before settling on this one, but we made a very good choice.  My only stipulation at the start was that we had to live near a creek at a minimum, one large enough to sustain a year-round population of trout.  It didn’t have to be big enough to float a watercraft through, although that would obviously be a major plus. 

  At first we looked along the Colorado River valley west of Glenwood Springs, which is near where my wife Terena is from.  But in recent years, the ramped-up amount of gas drilling in that area has really spoiled what having an interstate highway through the middle of it already didn't.  Almost anywhere you stand between Silt and Parachute, multiple numbers of drill rigs can be seen, especially at night.  If you buy land there there’s no guarantee that some day Encana or Halliburton trucks won’t be driving across your property to access a drill pad in the middle of it. Then since most of Terena’s clients come from the Roaring Fork valley we looked up there, but anything near moving water, let alone the Roaring Fork River itself, was prohibitively expensive.  Finally we turned towards the Eagle River valley, which is growing rapidly and would have numerous job opportunities for me, and a lot of potential dog clients for Terena.  But as with the Roaring Fork Valley, anything near the Eagle River is very expensive, and there’s the perpetual distant hum of I-70 to listen to.

  And so we ended up finding a place along the Colorado River, in the place I was hoping to be in all along.  It was a stretch of river and road that I had first stumbled upon in the first weekend road trip I had made when I first moved to Colorado many years earlier. In the years since, I had made many more forays here to camp and fish and float the whitewater sections further upstream in the area around State Bridge.  Before it burned down, the State Bridge Lodge had been a favorite spot for my wife and I to reconnoiter for weekend getaways. 

  When people see our place for the first time, they usually marvel at how beautiful the surrounding area is, and how lucky we are to have found such a great spot.  They'll often ask how in the world we were able to find a place to live in such as this one.  Not only are we right on the river, but we have no immediate neighbors, there is county open space across the river that can't be developed, and our backyard view is dominated by a colorful rock formation five hundred feet high called Sleeping Indian Mesa.  Terena is able to run her business from the house without ever going to town, and it serves as a great place to run a float fishing business out of for me. 

  The wheels started turning for all of this back in 2002, when Terena began taking classes to learn how to write a business plan.  She had the idea of starting a school for dog trainers, but knew that she would need to know more about running a business at that level than she knew at the time.  The business plan she wrote was so well done that would eventually win an award for it from the Small Business Administration.

  Then in mid-year, I got laid off from the high-tech job I had, right on the heels or returning home from what was probably the most successful business trip I'd ever had.  Two large projects that had been on going in California were finally signed off on by the customers, which would allow the company I was working for to finally bill them for it.  Terena and I decided that this was the time to get out of Denver and to relocate our lives in the mountains, which is where we had both wanted to be all along. 

  Our trips to the mountains that summer took on a new rationale.  It was no longer just about camping and floating rivers and four-wheeling, but also about finding a new place we could call home.  Since Terena had roots in Garfield County having grown up in New Castle, we started there.  But the Roaring Fork valley was very expensive, especially along its waterways.  Eagle County along the I-70 corridor was also pricey, plus neither one of us was crazy about being close to the highway.  We looked west of Glenwood Canyon, but the river there was often off-color and the fracking boom was already taking hold there.  Horror stories were already beginning to emerge about people getting their drinking water ruined by drill rigs, and of rigs being put up on people's land without their having any say in it due to not owning the mineral rights. 

  So that left the lower Upper Colorado River, and area that I had known and loved for sixteen years. One weekend I got up into the mountains a day before Terena, and had spent it really checking out the valley with a more critical eye than I ever had before.  There were only a handful of properties for sale, but all had issues.  They would either be on the wrong side of the road or railroad from the river, or wouldn't have the room for horses that she would want to have, or would be more or bigger than we could afford.
  But then rounding the corner, I spied a perfect little ranch on a bend in the river with a huge stripey rock formation behind it.  I thought, "Too bad that's not for sale, that one would be perfect!".  Only when I got to the bottom of the hill and saw the driveway to it did I see the "For Sale" sign.  I added that phone number to my notebook and took some pictures of it.  It had several outbuildings and what looked like living units, an arena, fencing for horses, and irrigation.  And of course, it was right on the Colorado River.
  I showed it to Terena the next day, and she agreed that it looked pretty good, but her first priority at the time was getting involved with the potential purchase of the private land surrounding Sweetwater Lake, not far away. Someone she knew was trying to purchase it, and would slice us off a parcel if they did, but that negotiation was stalling.  The property that I found was more expensive than were hoping to pay, but once we locked in on it, Terena was able to redo her business plan and make all of the numbers work, primarily by increasing the amount of dog boarding we would do.  By raising some money from some investors, and by dipping into my still-good credit resources, we were able to pull it off, and in January of that year we began moving our stuff from the Front Range up to our new place in the hills.

  In October of 2002 Terena and I had gotten married, but instead of a honeymoon we put all of our time and financial resources into trying to pull off this whole change of life move we were contemplating.  Negotiations with the owner of the property we wanted to move into were tricky, but it got done. Our initial payments to the owner were stiff, but it was a lease-to-own arrangement and whatever we paid in rent would be applied to the eventual purchase of it, which we were hoping to do once our businesses got off and running.  In addition, we spent a lot of the money she had raised getting the place ready for the dogs we would have boarded there, and for the apprentices who would be living there.  This involved putting up a lot of fences, and cleaning up the three-unit apartment building and wiring it up for the internet.  By April we had moved out of our house in Denver, and were up at our new place full time.  My old place had been rented to a lesbian couple who would eventually wreck it, which would lead to a bad time for me the following year cleaning up their mess. But up in the mountains life looked promising, and we spent all our waking hours getting everything ready for students and dogs. 

  In June of that first year, Terena had an unusual experience.  She was driving down to Glenwood Springs on a hot, sunny day, and as she was getting on the on-ramp to I-70 she noticed an upraised hand in the tall grass.  Curious, she pulled over and got out.  She found an older man in the grass barely conscious, bile coming out of the corners of his mouth, weakly saying, "Water….water…".  Her first thought was that he was some homeless crackhead on a bender, but having a big heart she wasn't going to just leave him there, or call 911 to let the cops deal with it. So she got some water from her van, gave it to the old man, and revived him.  Once he was able to sit up and speak, she found out that he was hitchhiking to Glenwood, and gave him a ride. 

  Along the way, she learned that he was not a substance abuse, but a once-independent business owner who had Parkinson's Disease.  He lived up the river from us, but his disease had progressed to the point that he could longer drive.  Now to get to town, he used his thumb instead of his truck.  He also mentioned that later in the fall, he would be moving to an assisted-living facility because he was getting to the point where he could no longer take care of himself, and that he would be selling his house. 

  When I got home that evening, Terena told me about what had happened with the old man whose name was John. It was an interesting story, and we didn't think too much about it at the time.  When we would ride our bikes that summer, we would usually go past his place on our way up to the canyon and would hope to see him around to say hello.  But he never seemed to be there, and his place was a bit of a mess.  The house he was living in was one that he had built himself, racing against his terrible disease to get it finished while he could still work on it.  But in the end the Parkinson's won, with the place about 90 percent finished. 

  By September, Terena and were starting realize that we were losing our own race, that of getting paying students into our new dog training school by the time our startup money and my credit ran out.  We had potential students interested, but since we weren't accredited by the state they could not get student loans.  Getting accredited by the state was also an expensive and involved process that we hadn't adequately factored in.  I bought a boat to start building a float fishing business, but there were lots of permits that I needed before I could start making any money at that, as well as lots of gear to buy.  The good news was that there was more boarding business to be had than we realized, and so our dreams were still alive, but where we trying to make them happen was just too expensive. 

  So we began to think about Plan B.  My house in Denver was rented out so that wasn't an option, but considered trying to rent some where cheaper or even moving in with her parents in New Castle.  Neither option was that appealing, and in the few months we had been there we had really grown to love the valley we were in and the river we were living beside.  At some point, we thought, what about John's house?  We rode our bikes over there one day and looked at his place with a far more critical eye than we had before.  For the first time, we walked around the back yard and tried to visualize it with dog fencing and a boat ramp.  It wasn't that hard to do.  There wasn't any room for Terena's horses, but the property across the street seemed to be John's as well, judging by all of the piles of out-of-code electrical components that were over there.  John had been an electrical contractor back in the day, and had several rusting trucks and trailers over there with his business name on them.
  Finally it came down to trying to buy his place or moving in with Terena's parents until I could get back into my house in the big city we had been so glad to put in our rearview mirror.  We tracked down John, and then his realtor.  The real estate economy in Colorado was very strong back then, and particularly in the mountains, and this was waterfront property so it wouldn't be on the market for long. 
  John had just moved into his new digs at a nursing home in Rifle when we were finally able to get ahold of him, but he remembered Terena and the kindness she had showed him on that day in June.  Being a bachelor, he wasn't in need to squeeze every penny possible he could out of the place.  In the end, we were not only able to buy the house from him, but he sold it to us for less than the appraised value, and he carried the financing! It shows how karma can work its way around, sometimes in unexpected ways.  Terena did a good turn for someone,  and ten years later its still paying dividends off for us.
  We felt very grateful to John, and tried to show it in the time he had left.  My father passed away that year, and in some small way I transferred the attention that I might have shown my father onto John instead.  The job I had took me into Garfield County occasionally, and I would stop by to say hi to John and see how he was doing.  Not so long before, he had been a strong and proud and independent man, and being trapped in a nursing home was miserable experience for him.  Cleaning up his home and property proved to be a formidable task that took the better part of a year, but every now and then we would come across something interesting.  Once we were going through some VHS tapes and found one labled, "Alaska Trip".  Curious, I put it in the machine to watch it and found that it was of John and some friends fishing in Alaska not too many years earlier, back when his disease was in its infancy. Just before Christmas, I took the tapes and an extra VCR over to the nursing home and hooked it all up for him.  Then we spent the next couple of hours or so watching the tapes together.  In the darkened room, I could see the glow in his face as he looked twenty years younger, seeing images of himself as the strong healthy man he once was.  For a short time, he was no longer the helpless old man that I knew, but the man who had hiked into the Grand Canyon, and who had bicycled through Europe, and had fished for salmon in Alaska.  In one sequence, he hooked a nice big Chinook and as he brought it to net, his old friends congratulating him. I looked over at him in the warm light of the TV and saw tears streaming down his face, and knew that in that moment he wasn't sick anymore. He was back in that Alaskan river once more, wet and cold and happy. 

  When people see the life that we've managed to carve out for ourselves here, and wonder if its possible to do something similar for themselves, the answer is yes.  But it takes a lot of luck, and for lots of things to fall into place that you may or may not have any control over.  Three years after we bought John's house, Terena's parent's bought the original ranch that we had leased, and having her family a mile away has added yet another dimension to our life here. Her ninety-year-old grandmother also moved up to live in one of the ranch units we fixed up, so Terena got to be a part of her grandmother's life for her last seven years. 

  Our life here is not perfect by any means, for we are not perfect people and our relationship even less so.  But the place we live in is as perfect as one could ever hope to find, and knowing that makes dealing with the day to day grind of scratching out a living much easier to deal with. I owned two homes before we bought this place, and each one was just somewhere to be until the next stage in life came along.  Living here, there is no "next place" to come, this is it, we are in the place we were meant to be.  I hope to be here forever, but if for some reason that doesn't come to pass I'll always be grateful for the opportunity to have spent the time I have here, and to have been able to share it with others. It’s a special place that works itself deep into your marrow and into your soul, and I feel very lucky to have been able to call it home.
 

   Fishing Without Fish                                                                                                      

  Last night I got home a little early, with enough time left to do some chores and still have a little bit of light left in the sky afterwards.  It was a very mild and still evening for November, and almost warm considering that the previous week, the first few snows of the year had dusted our yard.  The river out back looked pink and flat enough that I thought there might be a trout or two sipping midges out there.  So I took my little seven foot three weight rod out of my shed, and walked to the end of my dock to see if there would be any tell-tale rings out there betraying the presence of brown trout.

  I stood there on the edge of my dock for awhile looking for risers, and saw none.  But I was so taken by the scene I forgot that I was supposed to be fishing.  The sky was lit by some very high clouds catching the last rays of the setting sun, and were very pink.  The river before me had long been cast into the shadow of the large rock formation across the way, a five hundred foot high fin called Sleeping Indian Mesa.  In the summer, as soon as the edge of that shadow makes its way from the far bank over to mine, rising fish can be seen just into the edge of the shadow, following it across the river. 

  But tonight there were no riseforms, just mellow water with only the faintest amount of ripples and little spinning eddies to it.  Usually I don’t bother to cast dry flies without there being fish obviously feeding on top, but it’s not a firm rule.  I’ve caught many a small brown trout in my backyard just after sundown, and even when I don’t it gives me a good excuse to just stand by the river for ten minutes. 

  We’ve lived here for ten years, and in that time I’ve spent a lot of time in the backyard along the water.  But it wasn’t until I built my dock two years ago that I really had a good central place to admire the river from.  Its not much of a dock, its only ten feet long and six wide, but it cantilevers out over the water by a couple of feet.  Sitting in an Adirondack chair watching the river flow by, it feels like sitting in a raft, only higher.  The dock was made out of used, repurposed wood, and I don’t expect it to last forever, so the only cost I incurred in its construction was for the hardware bolting it all together.  The year before I built it, the river rose to height two feet above where the dock is now, and when that happens again the dock will become a raft.  But in that year, the water had been the highest it had been in twenty years, and it had been twenty more before that since the last big water.  So I figured twenty years would be about what both the dock and I have left, and I’ll take twenty of both if I can get them. 

 I remembered the rod in my hand, held the tip out over the water, and began stripping out line.  It was a rod expertly crafted by my best friend, and rigged with a long leader and two flies.  The point fly was a size 16 Adams with a little orange parachute, and the second dropper fly two feet away a size 18 elk hair caddis.  The Adams was probably a little too big to duplicate a midge, and there hadn’t been reliable caddis hatches on the river in the past three summers, ever since the big water.  But both flies float very well, and I didn’t particularly care whether I caught anything or not, so I started making short casts upstream.  The water flow was so flat that I could easily follow the progress of the flies as they floated downstream, and would mend out line after they passed me to float them a good ways down. 

  The sky grew deeper and deeper pink, with the chin of the sleeping indian creating a solid dividing line of black in the water.  I’d cast upcurrent into the black, note the location of the flies landing on the water, and keep a close eye on them.  When they’d land into the dark water, they would appear as little pinpricks of light, like two new stars in the watery firmament.  When the flies passed  the dividing line from dark to light, they would now look like two black specks in a undulating sheet of glowing pink bed covers. Then as they continued their voyage downstream, the flies would hopefully drift over the nose of an unwitting little brown, and get taken. 

  I kept my eyes and ears tuned to the periphery of the scene hoping to hear some other fish that I might cast towards, but there were no fish rising this night.  But it was fun drifting the flies further out each cast, and getting a longer drift each time.  The water was so flat that getting those flies to drift a long way didn’t require much on my part, just an occasional flip of the line.  Suddenly I heard a small splash downstream to my left, but instead of a riseform I saw our local muskrat swimming upstream towards me.  I held very still, and he got closer and closer until he was only twenty feet away, at which point he rolled forward and dove into the water with great flourish, his upstretched tail disappearing last like a submarine periscope.  The muskrat swam around for a minute or two in the very water I was trying to drift my dry flies in, and then swam off to go ruin someone else’s fishing. 

  Now that the muskrat was no longer making waves in it, the water’s surface grew smooth again.  I resumed my casting knowing without doubt that I absolutely no chance of catching anything in the few remaining minutes of light I had left.  And it didn’t matter.  The mere doing of the thing was enough, and no small terrified trout had to be dragged out of its aquatic paradise by a sharp hook in it’s mouth for my moment to be complete. Trout tend to live in beautiful places, and give the rest of us reason to share those places with them. Of all the joys and benefits of fishing for trout, perhaps that’s the best one.  They need clean, clear, cold water to thrive, and to find that you generally have to be higher up in watersheds.  The higher up you go, the less developed it tends to be.  Of course, the tailwaters found below dams and the fisheries they create are the exception to that rule. But even those can be unexpected and special, like finding trout in the Grand Canyon or the on San Juan River, in the middle of deserts where no trout would otherwise be. 

  If a person were to simply walk up to a pretty stream and stand there beside it for an hour or three, or stand in it, doing nothing, you might think that person a little daft.  But to do the same thing only with a fly rod in hand, makes you crazy, but a sportsman. Warm water fishes don’t always live in ugly places, but they often do.  Trout rarely do, and that’s a major reason to pursue them.  By seeking them out, we go to where they live and just being in their verdant neighborhoods is good for the soul. 

  When my wife and I moved up to the mountains from Denver ten years ago, I had only one non-negotiable stipulation as to where our future property would be.  It had to be adjacent to a moving body of water that held a year-round population of trout. River, brook, or stream, it didn’t matter, if it were good enough for trout, it would be good enough for me. That it ended up being along the Upper Colorado River was only a bonus, but I could have been just as happy on the Crystal or Brush Creek or the Eagle.  

  I kept making longer and longer casts further out into the river, but it was almost dark and those two little flies got harder to see.  Thirty feet of line is about all I can manage with that seven footer, but its all that's needed to reach the main current.  The flies remained unmolested, but staring at them in the now-purple twilight was mesmerizing.  I began to wonder if mind-altering chemicals ingested in college might still be clinging to dim corners of my brain.  There were no trout to be had on this fine evening, but it couldn’t matter less.  Right in my own backyard I have a portal into a very different place than the one constructed and inhabited by man.  It is the natural world, the real world, a reality that preceded our “taming” of it and one that would long outlast us.  Standing out there on the edge of my dock is to be able to feel and touch that reality, and know that it exists.  The magic is there all the time to see, all we have to do is to open up our eyes and minds and hearts to it. 

The River Is Perfect!

To All My Fishing Friends,

   Its been an up and down couple of months, but I'm happy to report that the Upper Colorado River  is finally in great shape! The level has dropped and the clarity is really good, and watching the trout eagerly chasing streamers is great fun, even when they don't quite catch them.  (Sometimes I'd almost rather just miss a fish on a streamer than catch one on a nymph).

  So anyway, it looks like its going to be a condensed fishing season here on the Upper C.  Since August, it seems as though we never got more than a couple of days in a row without rain.  The river would just start to clear, and it would rain a little and turn it red again.  Since the ground got so saturated it wouldn't take much to do the trick.  Late in the year, I even lost my ability to check out the river clarity in the backyard, since the irrigation headgate on Red Dirt Creek blew out for the second time, and now it's crimson waters run directly into the river about mile above my house. So to check on what the river is looking like through the canyon, I have to go a mile upstream (above Red Dirt) to look. Right now, both above and below Red Dirt it looks great.

  Due to all the off-color water we've had, the trout have had trouble getting good meals and look a  little skinny.  They don't seem too interested in nymphs, and there haven't been many mayflies or caddis rising, but they sure seem to want a nice big meal in the form of a small baitfish.  Autumn Splendors, Zonkers, and Woolly Buggers (purple or white) do well.  Since the trout are both horny and hungry, I like to toss a two streamer with one brown and yellow rig for the hormonal fish and a smaller, unweighted white fly trailing that for the hungry ones.  Either way you're covered!

  Last night we got our first little bit of the white stuff on the ground, and before you know it the lifts at A-Basin will be running again.  But things are supposed to warm up this week again, and here at the relatively low elevation of 6,200' we should have another month or so of great fishing before its time to break out the old Volants and head for the slopes. If any of you reading this want to get in some good fishing before than happens let me know.  The leaves have just started to change this week and so there should be two more weeks of that to help dress up an already colorful float.