Chapter 1

The Lake

One summer, A. K. Best, Larry Pogreba and I walked up into a high mountain valley we know of to find and fish a certain alpine lake. The most recent report we had on it was ten years old but, back then at least, it was supposed to have some big cutthroat trout. This is a remote lake that's not fished much, which naturally gets you to thinking.

I'd never been to this lake, or to any of the half dozen other lakes and hanging puddles on that far southwest ridge, even though I've been fishing, hiking and hunting in the valley off and on for somewhere between fifteen and twenty years and had, only the summer before, systematically fished the entire length of the stream from the last paved county road up to the headwaters.

I'll admit right here that this was more of a writing than a completely honest sporting proposition. I had in mind one of those gradual revelation numbers: Fishing the stream yard by yard, mile by mile, the details would build up novelistically until finally I would catch the last tiny cutthroat trout sucking snowflies from the lip of the glacier and there'd be this vague but satisfying sense of completion, which I would somehow get down on paper. I had it all worked out. Kevin Costner would play me in the movie version, Dances with Trout.

I did manage to fish the whole stream in a single season, all fifteen miles of it. If I remember right, it took ten separate trips between the end of runoff in June and the first good snow in September. Once or twice I went alone, but more often I was with A.K., Mike Price or Ed Engle.

Oddly enough, I never got close to anything especially literary or profound, except maybe at the point where I forgot why I was doing it. The