1. Close to Home 1. CLOSE TO HOME I live in the foothills of the northern Colorado Rockies with dozens of trout streams within day-trip range, so it''s easy for me to recommend fishing close to home. The advantages are obvious. You can play hooky to go fishing at a moment''s notice; it only takes one trip to the pickup to pack your minimal gear (you know how little you need because you need so little); you know right where you want to go and have plenty of backups in case someone has high-graded your spot; and a rained-out day isn''t a deal breaker--you just go home and come back when the creek clears. Eventually fishing becomes such a normal part of daily life that you can stop for a half gallon of milk on the way home. I understand that not everyone is so lucky; a precious few have it easier, but most have it harder. I might once have said that you make that kind of luck for yourself, and in some ways you do, but it''s just as often true that people end up where they are through no fault of their own and are then faced with making the best of it.
I know that because I''ve temporarily ended up in a few places I didn''t care for over the years (Cleveland comes immediately to mind), but I was young and unattached enough to be able to move on as soon as I comprehended my predicament. I may also have understood that the option to move on would begin to wane with the accumulation of possessions and entanglements, which at the time only made the idea of blowing town seem more attractive. In fact, there were a number of years when literally or figuratively blowing town at the slightest provocation was my modus operandi. I didn''t exactly weigh all my options before I finally bought property and sank roots where I am now; it was just that when the opportunity came for that to happen I liked where I was and thought, Why not? I''d recently turned thirty and my father had died, leaving me a small inheritance: two things I didn''t see coming. A few years earlier this might have gone differently, but by then I was just old enough to realize I only had two choices here: wake up in five years dead broke and with an epic hangover, or spend the whole wad on something I could hold on to and make use of, like a house. There were those in my family who said my modest windfall would be enough for a down payment on a nice little starter home in a decent neighborhood, but they''d overlooked my position as someone with no credit rating who''d be hard-pressed to convince a bank that I was "employed" as a freelance writer. Even I could see I wasn''t the type to come up with a mortgage payment once a month like clockwork. So I found a wretched but habitable little house with an asking price of about what I had on hand and bought it outright.
It was the cheapest house for sale in the county and with good reason, but it was within walking distance of a sleepy little town I liked and across the road from a trout stream I fished often, which made up for a lot. There was a tense moment when the seller balked--even though people weren''t exactly lining up to buy this place--but in a rare burst of insight I realized he''d taken one look at me and assumed a cash transaction of this size must involve drug money. So I took him aside and straightened him out. He said he was sorry to hear about my dad and the deal went through. As I said, I already knew and liked the stream across the road from my new house, but with a home base just downstream of the confluence of its three forks, I set out to explore the entire drainage as time permitted. The majority of it was on federal land--national forest, national park, and wilderness area--that was sometimes difficult to reach, but at least it was public. A few stretches lower down were private and had to be finessed in one way or another. (By that I mean I always at least tried to get permission.
) The project went on for decades in a haphazard way and I can''t swear that it was ever actually completed, but to this day if someone asks me what''s down in here or way up there I can tell them in convincing detail. Naturally I discovered some sweet spots that held good-size trout and where I never saw another soul and I believed--or wanted to believe--that these places were unknown to anyone except one young, intrepid trout bum. That was the kind of glamorous notion that''s irresistible at a certain age, even though it stretches the bounds of belief. Some years later, on a junket to Canada''s Northwest Territories, a friend and I talked a guide into taking us to some bona fide virgin water. It was a feeder creek that the lodge we were fishing from--the only lodge that had ever operated in the region--knew for sure they''d never taken sports to. Furthermore, this wasn''t the kind of place First Nation netters would ever have gone; they''d have stuck with the bigger water that would be easier to fish and yield better hauls. So we alternately paddled and walked a canoe a few miles up that creek, where we caught arctic grayling weighing around a pound each and some hammer-handle-size pike. The only thing that was exceptional about the place was that we were pretty sure we were the first ones to ever fish there.
It was an ambition satisfied, but by then new ideas about preservation had stolen the romance from the notion of breaking new sod like a pioneer and replaced it with the sneaking suspicion that maybe we humans, with our monstrous egos and appetites, should leave a few places unspoiled. So I came away with mosquito bites and mixed feelings. I never felt guilty about fishing there, but I wasn''t as pleased with myself as I''d expected to be and I dropped the part of the fantasy where I named the creek and then went on to live long enough to see that name on a map. As time went on I worked hard, or at least steadily, traveled more, and finally reached a point where I actually could convince a bank I was gainfully employed as a writer. But I''d never developed the habit of borrowing, so the only time I actually did it I got so creeped out that I paid off the loan early, incidentally saving myself a pile in interest. As Craig Nova said, "Credit is a good friend, but a hard master, while cash is a constant like the speed of light." Another constant was the water near home that I''d become thoughtlessly familiar with and felt I knew better than anyone. My evidence was--and still is--that when the streams are fishable I know where to go, what fly to tie on, and where and how to cast in order to catch trout.
(More and bigger trout than any other competent fly-fisher could manage? I like to think so, but who''s to say?) Sometimes I''m even able to pick the species I feel like catching: brown trout lower down, shading to brook trout at higher elevations, and finally to some cutthroats holding on way up in the high country, where the streams are cold and narrow and the season is short. The transitions between species are indistinct; they occur at different elevations depending on the creek, and they''ll sometimes move around from year to year, but seldom by more than a mile or so. Of course that''s not counting fish that pop up unexpectedly where I''ve come to think they shouldn''t be, but then however intimately you think you know a stream it can still surprise you. A good-size trout in any of these creeks will be around 10 inches long, with plenty smaller and a few larger. A 12- or 14-incher is a real nice fish and in the forty-plus years I''ve fished here I''ve landed a handful in the neighborhood of 16 inches, including one lovely cutthroat that almost brought me to tears and probably would have if there hadn''t been a witness present. And more recently there was an 18-inch brown that made me glad I had a witness along to measure the fish and back up my story. But even then we got looks from friends that suggested they thought we''d shared a recently legalized doobie and gotten hysterical about a 14-incher. I was insulted at first, but then decided that if anyone chose not to believe in the hidden pool where the big trout lives, it was okay with me.
I''ve caught larger and more exotic fish elsewhere. I wouldn''t trade a minute of that, and plan to do it again as often as possible, but this modest, hometown water where the benchmark trout will always be around nine or 10 inches long is a fine thing to come home to, regardless of where I''ve been. This isn''t the kind of destination water that attracts hordes of technicians and headhunters. It''s fished mostly by locals and the odd tourist with a day to kill. For decades its well-deserved reputation for mediocrity has saved it, although that''s not to say it hasn''t changed. In the years I''ve fished here there have been high runoffs, and one massive thousand-year flood that profoundly rearranged the drainage in places, not to mention droughts--some lasting as long as five seasons--plus all the other natural and man-made slings and arrows trout streams are heir to. In some big snowpack years the water stayed so high and cold that there was virtually no fishing season at all unless you wanted to resort to worms and sinkers. But fish eat well in high water, so the following year, after a more or less normal runoff receded, the trout were big and fat and there were lots of them.
On the other hand, late in some drought years there was hardly enough water to keep a trout wet and by the following spring we''d lost whole age classes of larger fish to winterkill. These are undammed streams, so it''s all about rain and snow, heat and cold, absent the human greed, shortsightedness, and lawsuits that begin to kick in at the first irrigation head gates. Once the runoff comes down in a normal year, the online readout from the gauging stations forms a gentle w.