Tenkara Epiphanies

                                       

  Tenkara Epiphanies

  For the last few years, I’ve been using a “new” method of fishing called tenkara.  The reason for the quotation marks around the word new is that tenkara has been around for hundreds of years, but only recently has the idea been imported to the US.  Tenkara is basically what your parents or grandparents might have called cane pole fishing, in that it involves using a very long rod with no reel, with the line, leader and fly attached to the end of the rod. A tenkara rod uses the same basic idea but uses modern technology, making the rod telescopic for easy transport and light enough to use all day without developing shoulders like Serena Williams.

 I first heard of tenkara a few years ago during the Fly Fishing Show in Denver. The person who brought the idea to the United States, Daniel Gallardo, was demonstrating it in one of the casting pools, and then I went to see his presentation in one of the conference rooms afterwards.  It was an intriguing idea, but I wasn’t quite ready to buy in yet. 

  Then one my fishing customers did a float with me using one, but being on a big river we didn’t use it much.  The next day, we four-wheeled up to Derby Creek where he used his tenkara for most of the day, and let me try it a little.  Using it first hand finally got me off the fence to actually purchase one, but for the first year or so I owned it the tenkara rod it was more of a novelty than anything else.  I would bring it with me when I went fishing, but almost always used my conventional gear instead. 

  But then one day, I was using the tenkara up on Gore Pass while fishing Big Rock Creek, and had the first of what I now call my Tenkara Epiphanies.  These are moments where I’d suddenly realize that although the tenkara approach had limitations, it also gave me abilities that “normal” fly gear didn’t.  On that day on Big Rock Creek, I was on my hands and knees in some tall grass sneaking up to a pool and flicking a dry fly into a foamy seam trying to induce a some small brown trout to eat it.  Due to the fact that you are limited how far you can cast a fly with a tenkara, on some small streams you have to get closer to the water’s edge to get your fly in there without spooking the fish.  As I was making my short casts and mending my line, I looked up and realized that I had been casting left-handed without even realizing it!  I don’t do anything left-handed, so seeing that rod held high in my left hand came as something of a shock.  It occurred to me that using a tenkara is so easy and intuitive to do, whether casting or mending, that it might be a great way to turn my beginner clients onto fly fishing.  That was what I think of now as my First Tenkara Epiphany, that it was so easy to do that you could do it with either hand.  

  I began to use the tenkara a little more after that, especially on smaller waters.  When I’d fish small streams I’d take the seven foot long three weight my best friend made for me, and also the tenkara which I’d have closed up and attached to the underside of my fanny pack. On day up on Derby Creek, there were some cutbows sipping bugs out of a small foam eddy just beyond some fast current, and I just couldn’t keep my flies in the foam long enough before the moving water would pull them out, even using reach casts with lots of mending, So I put the three weight aside, and brought out the tenkara.  With the tenkara’s extra reach, I was able to drop my fly into the foam, and keep it spinning around in there until a trout was able to see it and eat it.  I caught and landed three fish out of that hole!  I realized then that the tenkara’s length made it much easier to mend than with a shorter rod. I’ve since switched to a ten foot three weight as my conventional rig for small water, and the seven footer now lives in my backyard to fish off my dock with in the evening.  The fact that longer rods equals better line mending was Epiphany Number Two.

  The second epiphany came the following winter.  My friend Ryan and I went to the Frying Pan River one cold February day, when the air temperature topped out at twelve degrees.  We were fishing the Toilet Bowl Hole, where the water comes out of the bottom of Ruedi Reservoir.  There are some huge fish cruising in this hole, and its justifiably famous, but for most of the year, there are plenty of other fishermen around to share it with who also want a get crack at catching a big fish.  But a twelve degree day has a wonderful way of thinning out the crowds.  It was one of those days that it’s actually warmer to stand in the forty degree water than to stand on the bank.

  Ryan and I were working it, and every five casts or so we’d have to stop and clear the ice out our rod guides.  I’d also stop frequently to rotate out the gloves I was wearing, to keep a warmish pair on my hands while sticking the cold, wet ones under my coat. At one point, I was poking the ice out my guides with my thumbnail when Bing!, I broke off the top guide to my rod.  This really pissed me off, since I hadn’t brought another rod with me.  I was just about to break my rod off just above the next guide down so I could keep fishing, but I really didn’t want to do that since there was still two good inches left, and I knew that I could simply glue on another top guide on when I got home.  As I gripped the rod tip, about to snap it off but hesitating, it suddenly occurred to me that I had my tenkara rod up in my Landcruiser, and my conventional rod was spared from further shortening.  I waded back to my truck and got the tenkara, and very quickly realized that this was a much better way to fish the Pan than my conventional rig was anyway!  It was long enough to cover the whole water, my hands weren’t getting wet and cold from running the icy line through them, I could mend the twirling micro-currents better, but best of all, there were no guides to ice up!  The light bulb over my head lit up brightly that morning, and this was Epiphany Number Three.

  The next spring, Ryan and I again found ourselves in a cold tailwater, the Yampa River below Stagecoach Reservoir.  It was April and they had just opened up the road to it, and not too many other anglers were there.  By now I was solidly into the tenkara camp, at least for my own personal fishing, though I wasn’t using it much on my commercial float trips.  I caught a couple of small fish on the tenkara, but as usual Ryan caught more, as he always does.  But then his line got tangled, and I asked him if he wanted to try the tenkara, while I re-rigged him.  He’d always been a tenkara skeptic, and still is to some degree, but he agreed to try it.  After just a couple of casts, he was soon into a fine fish, one bigger than I thought the tenkara might be able to handle.  But as I watch him play what turned out to be a twenty inch rainbow. I noticed how much that rod bent and flexed under the trout’s considerable pull.  I realized that once you’ve got a fish on, the line and leader don’t stretch very much, but the rod does.  Your rod in effect changes from being a fly delivery tool into a big shock absorber.  And a twelve foot rod is a much better shock absorber than a nine foot one! That was Epiphany Number Four. Ryan landed his fish, and though he’s not a complete tenkara convert yet he seemed to have gained a bit more respect for what they can do.

  Starting last year, I began to carry a tenkara rod of two in the hatch of my boat, in case my guests might wanted to try it.  Some days we’d be into rising trout in one of the Colorado River’s many back eddies, and for those up close fish the tenkara can be deadly.  Most of these back eddies have many spinning foam lines that the trout follow around sipping bugs out of.  Long casts are not only unnecessary here, but they can be detrimental.  People will see a splashy rise twenty feet away and cast towards it, putting down the fish five from the boat with their line.  Also, having that much line on the water can be impossible to mend, whereas keeping your casts shorter with a tenkara not only forces you to focus on your short game, but gives you much better control over your fly once its in the water.  This was more of a gradual appreciation, than an epiphany.  The other thing about tenkara rods that I only realized over time was what a direct connection you feel to the fish, versus a conventional rig.  With a normal rod, the fish is connected to the tippet, leader and line, which is then connected to the rod via the reel.  But with a tenkara, your hand is on the rod, and the rod is one with the line and leader and therefore the fish.  When a fish moves or shakes or begins to weaken, that life force of the fish is transmitted to you in a far more direct and personal way than it is with conventional equipment. 

  This summer, due to the high prolonged runoff we spent more time in those back eddies, since the fish were stacked up in them for most of the summer before the water finally came down.  I also seemed to have more beginners this year than in the past.  As a result, I’ve been using the tenkara rods more and putting minimally-skilled people onto fish more often.  One day in what I call Echo Hole, I had a nine year old girl hook a fish with the nymph on a hopper/dropper rig, which she lost when she dropped the rod tip and let the line go slack.  Her ten year old brother caught and landed one out of the same hole and she began pouting, but on her next cast she had a nice rainbow destroy her hopper and we landed that one.  Her demeanor changed radically after that, and I hope that she is as hooked on fishing as surely as that rainbow was on her hopper. The next day in the same hole, an eighty-five year old woman who had only done spin fishing caught a nice fish, using what she called her “cane pole”.  Another day, I two brothers from Chicago who had never fished before do well catching trout on dry flies, ten minutes after they got onto my boat in squirrelly water that that even experts have difficulty mending flies in.  Two weeks ago, I had three raw beginners learning how to cast in a stocked pond.  After exposing them all to conventional fly rods, I took the tenkara out of my rucksack and rigged a hopper/dropper on it.  On her second cast, one woman hooked a fly on the hopper, and before she could land the fish a second small bass took the hopper, and she landed both! 

The latest (but hopefully not final) epiphany I’ve had with tenkara came a week ago.  I had a very experienced fisherman was coming up to fish with me for the third time, but the day before our trip he had a bad fall and hurt his right arm.  He called the night before to tell me about it, and said that they were still coming but that he was going to just fish left-handed all day using his own tenkara rod.  I got thinking about that, and was glad that he was open to trying to compensate for his bad wing. But I doubted whether you could be successful fishing the long straight sections of the river given the distance limitations that a tenkara setup imposes.  But then another light bulb went on over my head.  The length of a total line and leader that rig with a tenkara is typically set by not making it any longer than you can land a fish yourself by.  So, if you’ve got a twelve foot rod, than you don’t want to make the total length of your line and leader more than fourteen or fifteen feet, otherwise you can’t hold your arm up high enough to net your fish.  However, if someone else is landing your fish, as we do from a boat when that person with the net is me, then suddenly that line and leader can be much longer.  And so the night before my client came, I rigged up a new tenkara rig that had about eighteen feet of line and leader.  The next day, he was willing try to new long-line rig, and he ended up using it all day long, left-handed, with his right arm almost literally tied behind his back. The results?  He caught and landed as many fish as his able-bodied partner did, who used conventional equipment (though his friend caught a twenty inch brown just above our take out, that might have tipped the balance a bit!).  A few days later, I floated with a couple consisting of a very experienced man and his less-experienced girlfriend, and she caught more and bigger fish that he did using the long-lined tenkara setup, while he used conventional gear. 

  The final thing that happened this summer which firmly placed the tenkara rod among my fishing tools to use first, and not just as an amusement, was an hour spent on the Bear River above Yampa.  The Colorado had blown out due to a thunderstorm, and so I cancelled a scheduled float trip and went fishing myself instead.  In an hour and a half, I caught my first Colorado Grand Slam, landing a brown, a brookie, a cutthroat, and a rainbow, all on the tenkara while my ten footer lay on the riverbank, unused and unneeded. 

  I haven’t even mentioned some of the other advantages to using tenkara rods that are already more widely acknowledged.  Among which are how light they are to pack if you are hiking or horse-packing into the high country.  Or how much easier they are to use if you’ve come back from Iraq with just one arm, or lost the use of one to a stroke.  Or, how quickly you can replace their delicate tip section with a new one if it does break off. 

  The bottom line is, tenkara is not a fad, and its not going away, and if you’re not using one now you probably will be someday.  Tenkara will never replace conventional gear, but it’s a really nice compliment to it.  I’m still more likely to use my old Fenwick or Loomis in most fishing situations, but the more I use the tenkara the more I enjoy doing so.  Try using one once, and you may never go back to the same old way of doing things!

                                                       Jack Bombardier

www.confluencasting.com

14503 Colorado River Road

Eagle County, CO 81637

The Eagle Feather

                                        The Eagle Feather

Spending most of my days on or along the Upper Colorado River, I get to see lots of wildlife. Deer and rabbits are too many to be counted, and in the winter elk are not only near the road, but sometimes bedded down in the middle of it.  On my river floats, we often see otters, bighorn sheep, ospreys, many types of waterfowl, bears, moose, beavers, and of course, brown and rainbow trout.  But of all the creatures who live on the river, none are quite as majestic as the bald eagle. They are more numerous during the winter, when the dark contrasting colors of their feathers blend in perfectly with the snow-covered hills above.  But there also are several mating pairs that live year-round on the river as well, and they’ve become a frequent and welcome sight on my river trips. 

  One bald eagle in particular has been around a lot this summer, and I’ve begun calling him Burt, mostly because “Burt the Bald Eagle” has good alliteration (I used to call the osprey that hung out here last year Oscar for the same reason). Burt was seen by us on the river pretty much every day in June and July, and for most of August.  He was usually in the canyon section that I run, below the Pinball boat ramp but above Jack Flats.  Sometimes we’d even see him twice – once in his favorite tree on the shuttle ride up, and again on the way down from the boat. 

  I’d never expected to have any other contact with Burt other than visual, and that’s always been enough for me.  Even though you can practically see a bald every day if you are on the river, and several if you drive the length of the Colorado River Road in the winter and have sharp eyes, I never get tired of seeing them.  Maybe because when I was growing up in western Massachusetts, they were still quite rare.  DDT use was finally outlawed in the Sixties in the wake of Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring”, and their comeback was steady but slow.  I can still vividly remember the first bald eagle I saw, it was from a high viewpoint overlooking the Quabbin Reservoir. My girlfriend at the time and I had road-tripped there for the weekend, and while looking down at the huge body of water below we suddenly saw a bald eagle float by, hundreds of feet in the air but hardly moving a muscle. Years of hearing about bald eagles and seeing them on TV had not adequately prepared me for the sight of an actual living one, and I can remember it as if it were yesterday and not almost thirty years ago. 

 Early this July, I took a family of four on a fishing trip, and we saw Burt on his regular perch on the way up the road to our put in.  We paused for a moment on the road just opposite to look at him, Burt bright and backlit by the morning sun. Then we moved on, got the boat in the water, and began our trip.

  Later on, we were in the canyon section, and the dad hooked a nice brown trout.  I moved the raft over to the left bank, and as I did someone noticed a big bald eagle up in a tree watching us intently. As I netted and released the fish, Burt was looking down at us with an expression that seemed to say, “You guys going to eat that?”. Then, with a couple of swipes with his huge wings, he flew out of the tree and headed downstream. We all looked around at each other with big smiles, both for the close encounter with the eagle and the even closer one with a wild brown trout. 

  Soon thereafter we were out of the canyon, and began floating down the straight section of river above Jack Flats.  As we rounded the corner, one of my passengers noticed an eagle in a tree that leans out over the Colorado River.  I suggested that we keep our rods down, and try to stay as quiet as possible, and see how close we could come to Burt this time.  As it turned out, it was very close. My big raft hugged the left bank, and due to the high water we were able to float directly underneath Burt.  He looked down on us unperturbed, slowly rotating his head around as we passed.  Luckily he wasn’t due for a bowel movement, for if he had he would have pooped on our heads.  Once we were below him, I gently rotated the boat around so that we could look back up at him, with the bright red backdrop of Derby Mesa behind him. 

  Then something unusual happened.  The wind, which had been intermittently gusting all morning, suddenly kicked up a little extra, and we saw a white tail feather blow off of Burt’s bottom, and begin to swirl around in the air high above the river. Then, even more oddly, a swallow swooped in from nowhere, and began chasing the tail feather around as it made huge loops in mid-air high above the river.  It was quite a sight, bird and feather having what looked liked a dogfight, but then the wind blew the feather across to the other side of the river, and we thought the aerial display was over.  But then the wind shifted again, and then the feather was doing big circles over the water again, and when it momentarily stopped blowing, the feather dropped straight down into the river.  \

  The first thought that popped into my head was, “There’s an eagle feather in the river!”, and I immediately rowed hard for the left bank to see if perhaps we might see the feather floating downstream.  By now we were two hundred yards downstream from the tree in which Burt still sat, and the feather was out of sight.  I wasn’t sure whether the feather would float or for how long, but in short order there it was, coming down the middle of the river like a little white sailboat.  We were excited to see it, and when it was about fifty yards above us I began rowing out to the middle to intercept it.  When we got close, I handed my landing net to the mother of the group in front, and she deftly used the net to pluck the errant feather out of the water.  She took it out of the net and held it up for all to see.  We had an eagle feather on the boat! 

 She tried to give it to me, but I insisted that she keep it.  After all, this was their trip, not mine, I was just the operator of the boat getting them down the river.  I told her that she should keep it forever, and that it would bring her good luck.  Secretly, I really wanted that eagle for myself, but it seemed like they were the ones that should keep it.  Later, when they were getting ready to go home she offered it to me again, and again I reluctantly told her to keep it. 

  Once they were gone, I got on my bicycle to begin riding up to the put in to get my truck and trailer.  On the way, I saw a couple of my neighbors, and stopped to tell them about the eagle feather.  “Hey! You’ll never guess what happened today!  We were on the river, and saw this eagle, and its tail feather blew off, and we were able to pluck it out of the river!”  Before I could get much further, they said, “That’s really illegal! You better not tell anyone about that!”  That sounded crazy to me, but they didn’t know too much more about it, other than that Native Americans were the only people allowed to keep any eagle feathers.  I didn’t really believe them, for I didn’t see how there could be anything wrong with keeping an eagle feather, especially the way that we came about getting it, but figured I could just look into it later. 

  As I made my way up the road on my bike, I saw another neighbor, and stopped to relate the story of the feather to him.  Once I got to the park of snagging the feather out of the river, he said, “You better get rid of it!  Its illegal to have that!”.  Once more I was dumbfounded.  How could have an eagle feather be illegal, and why did everyone but me seemed to know about it?  Later that night, I went on-line and did a little research, and soon learned about the Bald Eagle Protection Act of 1940.  It turns that when eagle numbers were in serious decline, Congress passed the Act to help protect them. Perhaps they didn’t know that their dropping numbers were due in large part to DDT use, but in any case the law was still on the books and in 1962 the Act was expanded to included golden eagles as well. 

  I tried to get a hold of my customers to let them know about this, but was unable to reach them.  I wanted to let them know about it before they told the wrong person about it and ended up in some kind of trouble. The next day I finally did, and when I told them it also seemed like a crazy law to them as well, and that they would have to consider their options. Of course, the easy thing to do would be to simply go to the nearest trash receptacle, toss it in, and be done with it.  But somehow, that just didn’t seem right to them or me.  They were on their way out of town, and said that they would have to think about the best thing to do with it. 

  We kept in periodic email contact over the next month, and during that time I came up with the best idea I could about how to deal with our Feather Problem.  If she could get the feather to me, I could simply take it out on the river on my next float, and place it back into the water in the same spot we plucked it out.  She seemed to like that suggestion, and a few weeks later when they were back in Vail, I swung by their hotel and picked up a sealed envelope from the front desk clerk, feeling like I was consummating some kind of illicit drug or arms deal. 

  So now Burt’s discarded tail feather was back in my possession, and I had to get it back into the river where it belonged. The next day I had float with some folks that I hadn’t met before, and I wanted to wait to do it with someone I knew could appreciate the moment.  The following week I was going to take a regular client of mine out on the river with his brother, and was going to wait until that trip, but when that day came I forgot the feather in my shop, and so I had to be a felon a little bit longer. 

  Then coming up soon on my schedule was a trip taking out some filmmakers from CNN who were filming a feature about the Colorado River and its water issues.  That seemed like it would be a perfect moment, to make myself right with the law once more in front of plenty of witnesses.  That way, in case I ever found myself before the Supreme High Court Of Animal Parts, I could call them in as witnesses, or at least get their depositions.

  They came on a perfect day, and we had an almost perfect day on the river.  About the only thing that didn’t fall into place was that we didn’t get to see Burt while we were out that day, but the guys in the other boat did.  He was in one of his usual fishing holes (i.e., in a branch looking down on one) and he flew off, we were in the Whirlpool Canyon looking upstream at a bubble line while trying to put the show’s host onto a fish.  He did hook a nice trout on a hopper moments later, but by then Burt had flown away downstream to one of his other spots. 

  Later we were a mile further downstream, and about a half mile from Jack Flats. It was time to put that eagle feather back into the river.  As we approached the leaning tree, I pointed it out to those on my boat, and as we passed the tree, leaned over to place it gently back.  My boat kept wanting to float right along with the feather, for since there was no wind we were all floating along at the same speed.  I had to back row my boat to keep it away from the feather, and finally some distance began to grow.  The crew shot some video of this, and possibly a still image, but there were so many different cameras on both boats that day that I rarely used my own. But it occurred to me almost too late that I should get one of my own, and blindly shooting pictures downriver at the shrinking feather I managed to take one. 

 We did get to see Burt that day, but not from the river. Before we began our float, I took the crew up to the top of Derby Mesa, to see what I consider to be one of the best views in Colorado (and that’s a long, lengthy list). It’s only about a mile from the River Road, but about 900 feet higher after winding past some tight switchbacks.( I take most of my river clients to this overlook, and not just the national media). Sometimes I get pretty funny looks from people who see me taking my big green river raft up there, into country more suited for 4 X 4s.

   The crew was awed by the view, as am I even after having seen it a few hundred times.  While taking in the view, which included looking down at the first five miles of Colorado River we’d be floating, a big Golden Eagle drifted past, heading down valley, and we got to see it from just above, and not from below like you usually see them.  Then a couple minutes later, riding along the same thermal, came Burt.  I had been pretty sure that he lived in the canyon three miles above, in a nest the size of an upended Volkswagen Beetle.  We got to look down on Burt from above, and I was instantly transported back in time almost forty years, to being high on a hill in Massachusetts seeing my first bald. 

 Over the past month since then, I’ve continued to see Burt and always wave hello to him.  I’ve wondered if he recognizes me or my boat, and something happened last week that maybe he does.  There were two guys on my boat fishing, and as we approached Jack Flats I told them about the eagle feather. As I finished, I rotated the boat around and there was Burt, over in a dead tree river left.  He was watching us float by with his usual nonchalance.  We got below him and temporarily forgot him as we fished the big eddy next to the campsite, but one of them got a tangle and the current slowly brought us back up to Burt.  It was raining a little, and Burt held up his wings and began preening himself.  As he pecked and poked his chest, a small white breast feather came slowly drifting down, which we could all clearly see against the deep red backdrop of Derby Mesa.  Its seemed to take forever to fall, and it landed directly below him in a small willow.  I looked at my companions, and said, “Maybe we’ll just leave that feather alone this time!”

                                       Jack Bombardier

 

Scott Willoughby's Final Post Column

To Colorado Outdoor-Loving Types,

  If you were one of those people who only bought the Denver Post on Wednesdays or Sundays, primarily to read Scott Willoughby's Outdoor columns, you might have wondered where his column was yesterday. That column wasn't printed, nor will any future columns be, because the Post has decided in its infinite wisdom that things happening in the "outdoors" are no longer of interest to its dwindling readership. 

  If you've read any of Scott's stuff, you know he was a worthy successor to the proud tradition the Post had with its outdoor coverage.  In Bob Saile, Charlie Meyers, and Scott, the Denver Post had three of the best writers on subjects outdoors and otherwise that could be found in any American newspaper.  But in a changing media landscape, why waste such valuable newsprint real estate on something as pointless as the "out of doors", when it could be used for something more important like Kardashian family updates, or an American Chinese Furniture Warehouse ad?

  I've always admired that way Scott and Charlie could take a complex subject, and winnow it down to the small amount of word room they had to work with, and make it informative, funny, and to the point.  Both men also had the ability to turn a phrase or two in their stories that made whatever subject they were writing about linger in your mind. We no longer get to be enlightened by Charlie's words, but I'm sure we'll be hearing from Scott again very soon in some new outlet (or at least I hope so!)

  Below is the column you would have read on Wednesday, if the Post had enough class, taste and wisdom to print it.  Of course if they had, they wouldn't have been consigning the Colorado outdoors to the dustbin to begin with, and Scott would not have had to write it in the first place. 

                                                                 Jack Bombardier

****************************************************************************************************

  Scott Willoughby's Last Denver Post Column (unpublished)

The best stories have always originated in the outdoors.

Be it the fireside tale that never grows old no matter how many times it’s told, or a modern classic born of the latest adventure, the wild outside has always offered the ideal backdrop for compelling drama.

Like the rest of the world, the genre has evolved over time, taking us beyond the campfire to the Ted Trueblood era of Field & Stream, establishing local newspaper legends like Charlie Meyers, Bob Saile and Ed Dentry before making its way to the cutting edge of social media and contemporary brands like Yeti Coolers that urge through advertising: Be the guy with the story about the bear.

Along the way, it found folks like you and me: Drawn in by nature’s allure, hooked by the sensations of adventure, dedicated to enriching and sharing the experience so that others might come to understand our collective passion for the outdoors and embrace it as their own. The stories are the things that connect us best to the land, the water, the wildlife and one another.

There will always be a place for compelling outdoor stories and storytelling in Colorado, just no longer here on these pages. Or perhaps just no longer here by me.

As of this week, The Denver Post has decided to do away with its traditional Outdoors pages, and by extension, my position as Outdoors writer, photographer and columnist. I’ve been invited to continue writing stories about Rams, Buffaloes and Falcons, but like those college sports mascots, the gesture feels symbolic at best. In all likelihood, this is the final column, outdoors or otherwise, I’ll be asked to write for The Denver Post.

Among those outside the paper already aware of this decision, the disappointment has been universal. The pervading sense of loss has less to do with me personally than to Colorado’s collective outdoors community as an entity. In the absence of an uprising — and likely even in its presence — the voice of that community expressed for so long on these pages will soon fade to black. So many stories are left untold.

It can be easily argued that these stories of wild places and the people drawn to them are more important now than ever. As our sprawling world grows ever more crowded, battle lines drawn over resources in greater demand, such places offer respite and reward that can’t be found or recreated anywhere else. And they require the voices of those who know and love them best to keep the fire lit.

My ambition is to continue down this path, although where it leads is anyone’s guess right now (and yes, I am open to offers). After more than a decade dedicated to the cause of Colorado outdoors, the mission and message remain as compelling as ever. It’s the job I was born to do.

First though, my heartfelt thanks are due for the opportunity I’ve had to do the job I’ve most aspired toward. While there is much more to achieve, for a time, at least, I could lay claim to the best job in Colorado.

But like the campfire that gave birth to so many stories and outdoor traditions, this chapter is about to go up in smoke. I have no doubt the fire has not gone out, however. The flame will reignite and grow. The stories — maybe even some told by me — will linger. And new ones will emerge.

The void is great. But the tale is never-ending.

                                                          By Scott Willoughby

Headwaters Matter

          What Happened To the Animas, or Why Headwaters Matter

    A few days ago, after a perfect day on a perfect river (the Colorado) I got home to watch a sickening series of images shown on the nine o’clock news. They were aerial images of the Animas River, looking like a bright orange ribbon of toxicity winding through pastures and past golf courses. The Animas is a river I would have considered just as perfect as my own not long ago. It will be beautiful again one day, but it’ll probably remain tainted for the rest of my lifetime. The Animas begins in the highest of Colorado’s high country, the San Juans, birthplace of five of Colorado’s greatest rivers. The Rio Grande, the Dolores, the Uncompadre, the San Miguel, and the Animas all begin here.  There are very few places on earth that are the natal source of so much life, spreading out like spokes in a wheel. The Dolores feeds the Colorado, just before turning its crimson flows towards Moab.  The Rio Grande helps water the lower San Luis Valley and is the lifeline of Taos and much of northern New Mexico all the way to Texas and the Gulf Coast.  The Uncompadre nurtures one of Colorado’s true breadbaskets, bolstered by an amazing irrigation project built a hundred years ago underneath a mountain using waters from the Gunnison.

  And then there’s the Animas.  If you grew up back east the way I did, you probably hadn’t heard of the Animas.   The Animas has a pretty colorful history, in all meanings of the word.  There are plenty of mines above it, and despite the history of men and women doing amazing things at high altitudes in tough conditions, the main legacy of the mining era is its toxic waste.  But the Animas feeds into the San Juan, and the San Juan merges into the Colorado at Lake Powell, and the Colorado below that is the lifeline of Phoenix and Las Vegas and the Imperial Valley. The Animas is fed by a little creek called Cement, probably not so named due its bucolic properties.  Abandoned mines leach into Cement Creek, which has been fishless for as long as miners have been extracting wealth from these hills.  One of these is called Gold King, and it was walked away from by the last men to work it in 1923.  Gold King was one of the many holes in the ground trickling nasty stuff into Cement Creek, which in turn flows the Animas.  EPA crews were poking around that hornet’s nest of toxicity when something breached and the small trickle turned into a small flood. 

  The problem with Cement Creek is that it’s a really stupid creek. The water in it wasn’t content enough to just stay where it was, and enjoy the wonderful views it had of the surrounding countryside.  No, that deranged Cement Creek water wants to run downhill towards Silverton due that pesky unseen force known as “gravity”.  Gravity is something that scientists can explain the effects of and manipulate, but don’t really understand the true cause of.  All we really know is, unless external pressure is exerted upon it water runs downhill, and on the western slope of North America, that means that the true connected end point of Cement Creek is the Pacific Ocean, via the Animas, the San Juan, and the Colorado rivers.

 The EPA was attempting to mitigate what they knew was an impending problem, and in the process triggered the exact outcome they were hoping to avoid.  Whomever was operating that track hoe or bulldozer probably feels badly right now, or if they don’t they should.  But the EPA at least had good intentions, and was trying to do the right thing, but we all know what the road to hell is paved with. 

  The thing that really all brought this to forefront to me was something I heard from a neighbor the day after the news broke.  We were having a nice conversation, and admiring how perfect the Colorado River was looking. Knowing that he is also a lover of rivers, I asked him if he’d seen what had happened on the Animas. Since our properties are more than fourteen miles from a cell phone signal, sometimes it’s easy to get a little behind on world events. Turns out, he had. We exchanged a few comments about it, and then he looked at me with a pointing gesture and said, “Do you know that the EPA did it?”

  Now my neighbor is a wonderful person, and one of the nicest people I know.  But he’s made his career in the uranium mining industry, and I’ve made my livelihood dependent on having a clean river to run.  This is one of those things that happen which some people are just going to look at from different perspectives. In strictly technical terms, he was right.  The EPA “did” it. If they had just left it alone, and just gone and done something else with its increasingly limited resources, then maybe the Animas River would have kept being one of the most beautiful rivers in America for another year or two, or for the rest of my life, or maybe even longer. But maybe not.  The point is, the EPA didn’t create the problem, they were trying to fix someone else’s mess, and that’s not the same thing. 

 Then my neighbor said, “Well they didn’t break any laws, there were no rules back then”, as if to say, “if it wasn’t illegal then they did nothing wrong”.  He was referring to the miners who a hundred years ago had dug the mine, extracted whatever wealth there was to be had from it, and then walked away.  That’s a scenario which was repeated  thousands of times in the west. There are an estimated 18,000 abandoned mines in Colorado, and 250 of them are leaching toxins into our watersheds.  Once again, he was a hundred percent correct.  Back then, doing that broke no laws, or least no meaningful ones.  But bad behavior back then is why we have laws to try and regulate that kind of behavior now. If the unfettered free market could be allowed to do whatever it wanted and not just walk away from the mess it had created, then we wouldn’t need an EPA in the first place.

  The EPA was created in the early seventies, and signed into existence by a radical environmentalist called Richard Nixon. What’s happened on the Animas should be a wake-up call for everyone that protecting watersheds is important, for they make life as we know it possible.  I’ve heard one suggestion that this might be a “Cuyahoga River Moment” for watershed awareness, referring to the Ohio River which caught fire in 1969 and was one impetus for passing the Clean Water Act in 1972.  I hope something good like that can come from the poisoning of a beautiful river like the Animas.  There are those who would defang the EPA in any way possible, up to and including getting rid of it altogether.  They might use this horrible but inevitable accident as a rationale to blame or tear down the EPA, which after all exists to help mitigate problems like these and not manufacture them. 

  Recently, the EPA and the Army Corp of Engineers have moved to restore the protections given to headwaters under the Clean Water Act, (also passed by that Edward Abbey doppelganger Nixon).  These logical rules, which understood that little creeks like Cement Creek are connected to rivers below, and not somehow distinct from them, were relaxed under the Bush administration.  Trout Unlimited has been calling attention to this issue, and urging its members to contact their congressperson and ask them to not stand in the way of restoring the original language and intent of the Clean Water Act.

  The Yakima River TU chapter in Washington State recently printed up a large number of “Headwaters Matter” bumper stickers.  They were created in response to some of the issues faced by the Yakima River, including placer mines.  But though the issues in Colorado or anywhere else might not be the same, the message is.  Headwaters matter. We all live downriver, and downwind, from someone else.  What others do above, has an impact on those below. The higher up a watershed you go, the more lives and ecosystems below are affected by your choices.

  The bottom line is, one of the most verdant and beautiful spots on the planet has been irrevocably harmed, not by someone living and breathing today, but by someone who has long since passed.  (Unless you believe in reincarnation, in which smashing the next mosquito you see might help balance the karmic scales).The point is, how do we try to make some good out of something that has virtually no upside to it?  Supporting the restoration of headwaters protection by the Clean Water Act is an obvious first step.  Another positive thing that might come from this is for people to acknowledge that all of the waters that flow from the highest peak to the widest ocean estuary are all one thing, not separate and distinct.  Like an aspen glade consisting of what seems to be individual trees that are actually just one big plant, so too is water from mountain streams all the way down to the sea.  Just one thing, and all the same thing. Trying to make one set of rules for the water on your right hand, and another for the water on your left, makes no sense.  It is all one water, indivisible by God or whatever deity you are accountable to.

  As science explores the universe, and searches deep into the cosmos for worlds suitable for human habitation, one thing becomes abundantly clear.  The best possible habitat we’ll ever find in our lifetime or in our grandchildren’s is the humble old rock we’re currently stuck on. Headwaters matter, and so do everything those headwaters are connected to, which is to say, everything else. Headwatters are especially important, because they are upstream of everything we hold dear. If the source becomes fouled, then everything downstream of the source becomes impure, as well.  Its our duty as citizens and temporary guardians of this planet to keep the waters we depend on as clean as we can from as high up as we can all the way down to the ocean’s edge.

  Watching the toxic orange progression make its way from the highest peaks through Durango, and then on to the southwest desert should really make obvious the connectedness of it all to everyone.

                                 Jack Bombardier

 

Guides Need To Fish Sometimes, Too

                              Guides Need To Fish Sometimes, Too

I just got home from a day and a half of fishing, but it felt like a week.  That’s because although I’m a fishing guide, I don’t get to actually fish myself very often, at least not during the summer. What I do quite often is watch other people fish. Oh, I  spent five or ten minutes most evenings just before dark standing out on the end of my dock trying to catch the same small brown trout.  I’ll usually toss flies to them until I fool one, or can’t see the river anymore.  But that’s not really fishing, there’s no skill involved in the doing of it. Its just a bit of methadone, and not a real heroin fix.

  Summers have gotten busier in each of the eleven years I’ve done this. There are a lot of outdoor-minded people coming to Colorado in the summer, partly due to the fact that the Centennial State is a pretty darn great place to be.  Dry weather, full reservoirs, and not many bugs. More people seem to figure out every year that Colorado is where its at in the summertime. (The cliché is that people come to Colorado for the skiing, but stay for the summers).  Most of my July and August days are spent rowing, then recovering from that day’s float trip, and then getting ready for the next. 

  But this weekend, two things happened simultaneously.  First, we had a torrential rainstorm on Thursday night that turned the river bright red on Friday.  Also on Friday, my wife left town to go visit her sister in Arizona for the weekend.  Suddenly I found myself looking at a couple of off-color days in which I couldn’t extract any filthy lucre from the Colorado River.  Just as important, there was no one around to tell me how I should be filling that gap instead.  And so on Saturday morning, I mowed the lawn to fulfill my legal minimum spousal requirements, and then went fishing. 

   Not only did I get to go fishing, but I got to try a couple of new spots I’ve been wanting to try,  plus I can write the whole thing off to research. Another guide I work with has been trying to turn me onto a couple of high-mountain lakes I’d somehow missed, so this would be a chance to check them out first-hand before bringing any clients up there. 

  Since the Colorado River was off-color, and probably would be for another couple of days, going up above the red sediment sounded good.  So I to  an area that shall remain nameless, one I had spent some time in before.  Even though I’d fished it many times for fun, this time I would look it at with the cool eye of a trained professional, tasked with getting someone who had never held a fly rod into fish.  I started at a lake large enough to paddle around in, but not big enough for a motor.  To do the paddling part, I brought a water vessel I’d never used before, a small one man raft called a Tote-N-Float.  Its fits into its own bag with carry straps, and is fairly sturdy.  It’s designed to use oars, but the oarlocks it has are a hard to find design, and so lacking those I brought a kayak paddle. 

  Things with the Tote-N-Float started poorly and didn’t improve much.  I had a difficult time getting the pump hose to seal, and it took about five times more pumping than it should have needed to fill it up.  Once I got it filled, I paddled out in to the lake into a slight headwind, but couldn’t really take efficient strokes with the paddle due to the protruding obsolete oar locks.  The boat was very wide, and had a blunt bow that gave the wind plenty of rubber to push against.  With my paddle blades having to be held way out away from the boat, the little craft had a pronounced yaw first right then left as I made my way across the lake.  I looked over my shoulder and saw that I was leaving a zigzaw pattern of bubbles behind me.  And then there was my cold, wet ass, and other body parts that are neighbors of the same physiological region.  The Tote-N-Float had a rigid seat made of plywood with an attached stadium seat, but it was only about a half-inch out of the water with me sitting on it.  If I could have just sat still there without either me or the water moving, my crotch might have stayed dry.  I realized too late that I should have worn waders, and not simply quick-dry pants.  For those pants to stay dry, certain moisture-free time intervals need to be observed between wettings, and I didn’t get any of those on the Tote-N-Float.

  I got out into the middle of the lake, and sat there resting all of the new muscles in my arms, shoulders, and back that I never knew I had.  The motion I had adopted to propel the boat was one akin to crawling out of quicksand or a grave.  I leaned back to rest a moment, and heard a slight hissing sound.  I’ve had a lot of inflatable devices in my life, and in that rich experience one thing I’ve learned is that hissing sounds are not good to hear around inflatables.  Over my left shoulder I could see a steady stream of bubbles coming from the boat in a spot that I had gotten patched.  The Tote-N-Float only cost me fifty bucks a couple of years ago because it had a small tear.  I spent more than twice that getting a patch put on in Denver, but the boat had sat in its carry bag for two years before I finally got around to trying it.

  Now I was in the middle of the lake with a difficult to row leaking boat, and a cold, wet ass.   I wasn’t worried about running out of air, for I did bring the pump with me along in the Tote-N-Float’s ample storage area behind the stadium seat.   But I questioned whether I could be doing something more fun and productive instead, and which didn’t feel so much like being in a wet diaper.  I crab-rowed my way back to shore, the steady breeze at my back.  When I got back I stuffed the Tote-N-Float back into its handy carry sack, and it may be there for another two years. 

  Now I had to decide how to try and salvage the afternoon.  There was a sweet small river that meanders through a big meadow nearby, one I’ve fished before, so I headed for that.  It’s a short, steep walk down to the river, but worth the hike.  I had fished this river several times before, but usually during the morning or early afternoon when the fish are kind of spooky.  Now it was late afternoon, and I could see small bugs about and some rise forms.

  I cracked open a beer and put it in the river to keep it cold (my favorite temperature for beer is whatever temperature the river is). Then I had to decide which rod to use.  I had with me a ten foot three weight, and a twelve foot Tenkara.  I was going to start with the conventional rig, but then I noticed a hole that presents just the kind of situation that the Tenkara really excels at.  The small river went around a bend, and just beyond the bend there was a small reverse eddy like a bursitis bump in an old man’s elbow. The Tenkara rod was pulled from my bag and extended, and soon I was dropping my two-fly cocktail into the spinning foam.  After several spins around in the foam without interest, I decided to switch back to my conventional rig.  Looking up the river, I knew I’d have to make longer casts and so the Tenkara got closed back up. 

  There were little pale mayflies hatching, and I thought that my standard rig should work.  That consists of a ten foot 5X leader attached to a hi-vis Elk Hair Caddis, trailed by a little mayfly.  There were occasional caddis flies flitting by, so I figured I was covered either way.  But neither fly elicited much interest, but when I noticed that they were rising for something I knew I had to make an adjustment. Then I came to hole that just said Tenkara. The river split into three channels, and there were three little back eddies to fish, all around the outside of a small gooseneck.  One could stand at the center of the gooseneck, and fish all three uisng the Tenkara’s reach without hardly moving one’s feet. Before I cast into the first pool, I replaced the mayfly with another elk hair caddis, this one without the hi-vis orange tuft on top. There had been a couple of hits on my top fly with the ten footer that I’d missed, but none on the mayfly.  I flicked the flies into the first swirly spot, and after a couple attempts at divining the complicated little hydraulic, got a rise to the second caddis fly.  Steering the fish away from the other holes, I tipped the Tenkara rod way back over my head and landed a nice little six inch brookie.  I kept fishing the Tenkara, and in the third hole I caught a small brown, this one about nine inches, (or what known in the Colorado River as preyfish).  Neither fish was big, but they were beautiful and feisty. I worked my way up the little stream, getting more hits but missing them. Then near the top of the meadow I pulled out a really nice cutththroat, fourteen inches of bronze color with black Sharpied spots and a slash so red I thought he was bleeding.   It was the nicest cut I’d caught in some time. 

  After working my way up the river I got to then end of the bigger pools, and in the waning light decided to explore what lay downstream.  I was able in spots to just walk along the river with my arm extended and the fly just floating alongside me like a dog at heel. The fly came to a small riffle, and as I took my eye off it to look at what was below I felt a tug in my hand and realized that I had a trout on. It wasn’t a big trout, and as I gently brought it to the bank, before I could see what kind of trout it was, I had the thought, if it’s a rainbow then you’ve gotten a Grand Slam.

  Now I am not normally the kind of person who cares much about How Many or How Big a day we have trout-wise.  Fly fishing for trout is mostly just an excuse to be in the beautiful places they tend to live in.  But I had never caught all four main species of trout in one day, let alone out of one river. And at this point, I was only lacking a rainbow, and I knew that the state fisheries people loaded the lake below with them.  It was like being a baseball player who had already hit a home run, triple and double, and only needed a single to hit for the cycle.  So as I drew the trout closer with my arm held as high to land the fish, I was disappointed to see that it was another brookie.  Immediately I chastised myself for feeling that way, for brook trout are my favorite trout.  They are the fish I grew up chasing in New England.  To my eyes they are also the prettiest, (though I’ve seen a tiger trout in person), and photography just doesn’t do trout justice.  I released the brookie, fished my way down to the end of meadow ‘til it was almost dark, and gave up on the Grand Slam idea.  I would have just enough time to get back to my truck before dark, and put away the Tenkara so that I could photograph the sunset over the mountains.

   Reaching for my camera, I noticed that I was missing something, mainly my camera.  It was a new waterproof camera I had just gotten less than two weeks earlier, after losing my last one overboard off my boat. Trying to remember where I had used it last, I realized that it been when I took the picture of that gorgeous cutthroat.  Walking briskly upriver, I tried to remember which hole I caught it in, but the little goosenecks looked a lot alike and it was almost dark.  But then I saw it, on the bank right below where I had steered the cut towards to photograph it. 

  I secured the camera in a zippered pocket, and looked up the steep hill towards the 4Runner on the shoulder above.  Starting to head that way, I remembered that I was still one rainbow trout short of a Grand Slam.  Since it wasn’t completely dark yet, there was still time for a couple more casts, so I pulled the Tenkara back out.  I cast towards the spinning foam pockets, and missed one hit on a tiny foam line.  The flies were barely visible in the dark purple light that was left.  I moved down the river a bit to the next hole, tried a couple of casts, and then moved down one more.  I was fishing more by feel than by sight. I put the fly in a likely-looking spot, or at least I think I did, when I felt a little pull on the rod.  Raising it slightly resulted in a splash on the water, and the fight was on.  I decided that no matter what was on the end of the line, and that it was going to be my last cast of the day.  Of course, that promise was made easier to keep when I got the fish in my net and saw that it was a seven inch long rainbow trout.  I had gotten my first Grand Slam of trout in less than two hours, in a very small river using a Tenkara rod! 

  Fishing for trout has never been much of a results-oriented pastime for me, but still it was hard not to feel good about it. It made the steep hike back up to my truck go much easier!

  That night I resupplied in town, and then drove back up to start doing the “research” part of the trip. There were three small lakes that my buddy and partner took paying clients to, and if I got familiar with them then it might give me an alternative way to earn money guiding when the Colorado River was off-color. The first lake was really a small impoundment, located in national forest so I could park the 4Runner for the night wherever I wanted.  I followed my friend’s directions up an increasingly smaller and steeper road to a dead end, where I saw signage for the lake.  It had begun to rain as I went up into the mountains, and it was impossible to see the lake in the dark.  Every now and then a flash of distant lightning would allow me to get a sense of it, but really scoping it out would have to wait until morning.  I got a great night’s sleep that night in the back of the 4Runner, listening to the tap tap tap of the rain on the soft top that I had just reinstalled for summer. An ’88 4Runner might just be one of the best small SUVs ever made.  It the only year they put a V-6 into the first generation body style, which is also the only 4Runner made that allowed for the removal of the fiberglass top an the addition of a soft jeep-style top. It’s a great truck in the winter, and even better in the summer.  With the left rear seat bottom taken out, a six-footer can easily sleep in the back.  I love dirt-bagging it in the 4Runner, and gladly did so that night. 

  In the morning I walked over to the lake to check it out.  The first thing that I had noticed on the Forest Service sign was that the lake had grayling in it, or at least it did when the sign was erected.  That sounded interesting – maybe I could follow up my grand slam with my first grayling?  I made some hot coffee, and went down to the water’s edge where I had yogurt, orange juice, a banana, and apiece of apple pie for breakfast.  Across the lake (which was maybe thirty acres in size) was a bald eagle,. On the surface of the water there was a disturbance, and in the shallows I could see a trout-sized fish finning along.  I wasn’t sure if it was a grayling, and the tail seemed to be breaking the water more than the famous dorsal fin, but I’d never seen a trout so stupid as to be that obvious and exposed to predators.

  The only two other people out there were a pair in a small johnboat tooling around the lake with an electric trolling motor.  They were fishing, but I never did see them hook up. There were some intermittent rise forms, but they tended to be out towards the middle. To get to them I’d have blow up the Tote-N-Float again, and wear waders, and I wasn’t inclined to do either.  After breakfast, I got my nine foot Fenwick five-weight and lofted a pair of dry flies out as far as I could into the lake, but that got boring pretty quickly, and the lake itself wasn’t pretty enough to distract me.  One hillside was blanketed by aspens though, and I bet in another month when the leaves were changing it might be a different story.  I was more interested in the other two lakes, and so catching my first grayling would have to wait. 

  The next lake was bigger, but required either a twenty dollar fee to access by boat or by a hike in from the national forest. Since I don’t mind burning a little shoe leather to get to good fishing, and I’m cheap, it was the low-cost option I took. From the trailhead it was about a mile long walk, and the reservoir once I got down to it was once again uninspiring.  There were many more rise forms though, as well as substantial amounts of algae floating about.  When I got to the lake, I saw a rocky promontory with a heron sitting on the point of it, and that seemed to be as good a spot as any to start fishing.  One of the three small tributaries that filled the lake also ran past that area.

  Walking closer to that point, I realized that it was a small island, not a peninsula.  The water across didn’t look far or deep, but by the time I got halfway to it my arms were upraised and the water halfway up my chest.  Where the line is between “wading” and “swimming” can be blurry.  If I had been wearing waders, it would have overtopped them, so technically this might have qualified as “swimming”.  Once onto the heron’s perch, I could see why it liked this spot so much.  Trout could be seen cruising through the pods of floating green gunk, occasionally popping their noses into the surface to slurp some yet-unidentified bug.  After watching them for awhile, I began casting about ten feet in front of the trout I could see hoping that one would check out my offering.  Two did, but both turned abruptly away as soon as they got a closer look at my flies.  At the far end of the lake it looked as though there might be another inlet, so I walked down there to see.  There was a very small and very cold creek of about five cfs that ran in, so I  walked up that to see if there were any small pools.  The water made my sandal-clad feet numb, and I did find one babbling brook dropoff that was worth photographing but not fishing.  I was OK with that though – once more the fishing rod in my hand was merely the ticket to a secluded, beautiful spot that I would never have found if not for the pursuit of trout.  Fishing might have been the reason I was here, but it wasn’t really the reason. On the way back, I watched an osprey making silent circles above the water, playing avian god.  Which of you fish will soon die in my talons? As I watched the osprey, a sudden shadow passed over me like that of a passing plane, and I looked up to see an immature bald eagle fly twenty feet over my head. I was tempted to fish some more, but not really that much.  I had verified that there were fish in the lake, maybe even a good number, but figuring out what they wouldn’t turn their noses up to wouldn’t be that hard to determine. I had noticed huge tricos the size of damselflies hatching, and am pretty sure that I could have imitated one of those pretty well and tempted a fish with that, or a grasshopper. 

  I hiked out from there and went to lake number three, possibly the most promising of all.  It was also in a national forest area, and the road access pretty good. Though it was well off the beaten path, when the lake came into view I saw that there were some people scattered on the bank either spin or bait fishing.  There were two dories out on the lake, both operated by friends of mine.  It was just past noon, and I was preparing to make a long hike to the lake’s inlet, when I saw both boats heading to the small boat ramp.  Instead of hiking, I drove there instead and got to the ramp just as their clients were climbing out of the boats.  I asked my friend if he wanted to give me tour of the lake, but he’d been guiding for several days in a row and was ready for some home time.  But he offered me his boat, and after the previous days experience in the Tote-N-Float I was more than ready to take him up on that.  After attaching his trailer to my truck, I rowed out into the middle to take it all in.  This was a much prettier lake than the last two, though there were more people here as well.  To the northwest was a bold escarpment that was the edge of the Flat Top Mountains, and on the southern edge a dark forest of big trees were guarded over by a big bald eagle.  To the south and north were dark black clouds, and I could tell that I wouldn’t be able to hang here forever before the weather moved in.  I rowed from one end of the lake to the other to get an idea of its size, and the whole time I did so was surrounded by rising fish, some not merely rising but jumping clear of the water in pursuit of their quarry.  My friend had left me a rigged rod, and said to just use that, they had hooked forty fish in under four hours using it.  It was six weight Orvis, rigged with a large foam hopper and a neon green egg pattern suspended beneath.  Out in the middle of the lake I chucked that thing out there, watched in land with a Plop!, and waited.  I made a few more casts towards the heavier concentrations of rings, but no one was interested.  It was everything I hate about still fishing, and why I do so little of it. Fishing moving water has a pull on me that all but the most beautiful of lakes lack.  There is really very little skill involved in still water, just cast it out there, watch closely, and when a hungry fish happens to cruise by be ready to set the hook.  Whoop de doo.  

  The weather seemed to be getting closer, and so was the lightning, and I began to wonder how safe a large aluminum dory would be in the middle of the lake.  I rowed back to what I thought would be striking distance to the ramp, and took out the Fenwick still loaded with a couple of dry flies.  Since fish were still rising aggressively in the face of the oncoming storm, why fish something below the surface? I wanted to see the fish before he hit my fly, and not watch some chunk of foam disappear in the water.  In short order, I caught several fish, mostly small stocker rainbows and one nice brown.  Then the wind kicked up, and the   I knew it was time to make my break for the ramp, and was just finishing strapping the boat down when the hail began to fall.  By the time I got halfway to town, the roads were covered in a layer of white ice that looked like snowfall.

sky was not only black but had turned tornadic green, with the clouds hanging low like the Hulk’s testicles.

  After dropping the boat off with my friend, I made a leisurely drive home.  When I got back home to the Colorado River I was glad to see that it was clear enough to fish.  Visibility was a foot and a half looking down off the Catamount bridge, and presumably clearing. A fishable river meant that it was time to go back to work, and my mid-summer two day holiday was over.  It was time to watch other people fish again, and help them catch some.  

                                          Jack Bombardier