2024

One woman, one river, one journey around the sun

The benefit of living near trout water is that for the first time in my life I get to
fish the same river all year, over the course of the seasons and through all of its
cycles. In my previous role as weekend warrior I traveled to my favorite trout
streams every few months, and while over the years I gained a sense of their
rhythms, the day-in-day-out river knowledge always eluded me. You come to
know a river as you come to know a person — spend enough time together and
you start to understand their topography, their twists and turns, how they
respond in different situations. Rivers, like people, change constantly. One year
the spring comes earlier or the summer is hotter. And one year the snow pack is
higher and runoff lasts longer, but a river’s rough outline is the contours of a
“self” that feels familiar despite its fluctuations.

Runoff
I landed on the Eagle River during perhaps the most difficult fishing season of all
— spring runoff, when the mountains empty themselves of snow, engorging the
whole watershed down to even the smallest creeks. Never does the river feel
more adversarial. The violent, roaring water frightens me. I watch people
descend the rapids in all number of inflatable and float-able objects, and I
question their sanity. Pressing myself tight to the banks, the willows poking my
neck and sides, I have all but forgotten the art of casting. All I know now is dap
and lob and keep the rod tip out of the bushes. But there are still fish to be had.
They live on the inside, bunched together in pockets and small indentations in
the bank, sheltering from the inundation. It almost seems unfair to fish for them
at this time of year, displaced as they are by the sheer quantity of water. And god
help you if you hook into one and it darts out into the fast current. Even a small
fish seems to fight like a tuna beneath a mountain of white water.

Caddis
After braving the torrent of spring, the fish are hungry, and they’re hungry for
caddis. Wave after wave of these insects bring fish shooting to the surface in
missile-like fashion. Sometimes they want their snack skittered, sometimes
sunken and swung, other times they want that spray of elk hair bobbing on the
surface like a toy boat. There are many shades of caddis, and an angler could
spend a lifetime learning to fish this hatch alone. As the sun sets into evening
and the light fades to darkness, the fish become indiscriminate, launching
themselves after anything that even remotely resembles a tented wing, desperate
to take their fill. I fish until the twilight obscures the river bottom, until I can no
longer see to tie on a fly, until I can only hear the fish slurping and cast in their
general direction. Finally the night has won, and my better judgement sends me
wading blind, back to the riverside. Scrambling up the dusty bank in the weak
beam of my headlamp, grabbing to the roots of sweet sagebrush, clutching my
net in one hand, rod in the other, I pray that a cougar hasn’t caught on to my
nighttime bush-whacking. In the water, I am a stealthy, shrewd, persistent
predator, and on good fishing days I am my superhero self. Out of the water, I
am clumsy and bumbling, and not at all keen on becoming prey.

Hopper-Dropper
Ah, the hopper-dropper rig — a fat, foam-bodied terrestrial with a weighted
nymph suspended under it — admittedly not my favorite to fish, yet annoyingly
effective in the late summer and early fall. The hopper-dropper rig is a means to
an end. Yes, I’ll catch fish on dead-drifted nymphs, but I prefer dry flies. A
hopper take? Now that’s a different story. A big brown trout who rests in the
pocket water or shoots out from under a downed tree on the bank to take an easy
meal is a fish worth an angler’s patience. I fish the hopper-dropper rig for the
hopper, and the droppers keep me from getting bored while I’m waiting.

The Golden Hour
There is a sacred time on the river, in the fall, when the temperature begins to
drop, and summer starts to slip away. One feels a sense of urgency. I go out in
the evenings after work and cast as hard as I can for a few hours, knowing that
each day I’ll have less and less time. The sun begins to drift below the mountains
earlier, and somehow the dusk seems darker. This is the time when the leaves on
the willows and the cottonwoods turn bright gold, forming a cathedral of
flickering yellow along the river banks. The raw beauty takes my breath away
and is all the more sad and sharp for the knowledge that in a few short weeks
this too will be gone — the last gas of the season. There are still hatches, to be
sure, but they are fewer and less frequent. I pick up a rock and the crawling,
squirming nymphs that once covered the stones have largely disappeared. A few
caddis husks and midges here and there — that’s all. I know that in a few weeks
I’ll be back to fishing size 22 patterns on a strike indicator, so I tie on a streamer. I
range and prospect and pound the banks, night after night. I fish until the
distant horizon becomes yellow-orange, and the downstream pools resemble a
black and white photograph — slick and gray with dark shadows, the last light
reflecting off the swirling water behind rocks and crisscrossing currents. We are
sliding into winter. I can feel it in the sting of my fingers after putting my hands
in the water to release a fish. I can feel it in the cold tips of my ears and nose.
Day is done.

The Doldrums
Can you fish in the winter? Yes. Should you? That’s debatable. My observation
is this: only the addicts are out in winter. Am I an addict? Yes I am. I thought I
was a reasonably competent angler until I fished through the winter in the
Rockies. I thought I had a handle on things and that given enough time and
persistence I could figure out where the fish were and what they wanted to eat,
but the winter knocked me down a few notches. I needed it, really. First and
foremost in angling, be humble. To fish the frigid waters of winter I had to start
again from nothing and build up new skills and a new set of rules. Fortunately
other anglers were generous in sharing their knowledge, and that made all the
difference. And what the Rocky Mountain winter lacks in fishing productivity it
makes up for in sunshine, pristine snow along the banks, lattice patterns in the
ice among the river rocks, and a profound silence that graces only the coldest
days. Next winter I’ll be out there again, and I’ll be ready.

Early Spring
In so many places where I have lived the early spring is a disappointment. It is
more or less still winter — not warm enough to take your coat off, and marred by
intermittent snow storms and mushy, slushy sidewalks. On the Eagle, early
spring is the reward you earn after toughing it out through the sparse fishing
months of December, January, and February. Fish start feeding a bit more again,
and you may catch a BWO or midge hatch —a gift after so many long months of
watching a strike indicator. Those of us who live in North America often refer to
spring as a period of renewal, rebirth, and hope. As an angler, early spring in the
Rockies feels like all of these things, and this year, for the first time in my life,
early spring was, well, what spring should be.

Coming Home
I used to feel that leaving the river was a time of strife. When will I see you
again? How long until I come back? The uncertainty and the sadness was
palpable and made always for a bittersweet end to all of my fishing trips. Now
coming home after a long day on the water is one of my favorite rituals. Driving
East through our little valley, watching the storms that gather among the high
peaks roll across the landscape and recede, the feathered fringes of thunderheads
signaling much-needed rain, I no longer feel the sense of longing that used to
accompany my after-fishing drives. Instead, I feel grateful. I’ve said goodnight
to the river and left it to continue in its course as I go about my other business,
knowing that my waders won’t have time to fully dry before it is time to use
them again. Seasons on the Eagle ebb and flow, and the river is always a
mercurial beast, but I know her now. I am always there, patient and
accommodating, and my fishing is unfraught. I like it this way.

-EH, May 2021