The Drift: Saving It For Next Year

There’s this river a couple hours from home that runs mostly on private land, is lousy with grizzly bears, and is the worst river to wade in the West. It’s like walking on bowling balls while someone greased up your boots, and you’ve got a serious amount of ice-cold water trying to take you for a swim. Going there is an all-day adventure, since you have to hike around one enormous ranch to access the public land.

But it’s the prettiest river I’ve ever fished. Being there feels like being in Middle-Earth. None of the landscape feels real, not the bears, the giant brown trout, or the wolves you sometimes hear howling at night on the long hike out. It’s a truly wild place, cows and horses in the pasture a few miles downstream notwithstanding.

This river is a freestone giant, draining a basin the size of some small states. The water usually stays clear and cold well into July, even in the hottest years. We’ll usually give it a break in August, when temps here tend to soar past 100. Come late September, just before elk season opens, though, it’s fantastic fishing. Even early in the spring, with snow on the ground, the fish are still willing enough to eat the odd skwala or blue-winged olive.

I have at least one trip on the books to fish it this year. Usually, I spend a half-dozen days there, because two hours isn’t a far drive, and it’s so much fun to fish. I try not to fish it too much, at risk of ruining a good thing. As I look out the window in my office, towards the mountains, though, I wonder if we really should fish it this year.

The river is two hours to my West; my office looks out at the mountains to my East, where there’s almost no snow at 9,000 feet. Only the highest peaks, above 12,000 feet, still have snow on them. The creek out back is off-color from snowmelt, but flowing at the same level it should in August. I worry about those trout, too.

But I really worry about the trout in this river that feels like you’re in Middle-Earth. The whole fishery has me concerned, because the winter of 2024-25 wasn’t spectacular, either. It was cold, and we had snow (a far cry from this year) but summer came hot, lasted long, and a good portion of the state burned. It was too warm to fish in September, like usual. It wasn’t until the fires closed down elk season that I finally made another trip to the river, where the fish seemed sluggish and at the end of their rope.

I have no idea what this year will bring for the river. It’s only at about 6,000 feet, not terribly high as far as the West goes. It’s definitely susceptible to the insane warm spells we’ve had to start the year.

Because of all this worry, I think I’m going to skip fishing it this year. Even now, when the caddis are going off and the water is cold and clear enough for the trout to be happy, I think they deserve a break. For what’s coming this summer, and what may come next summer, too, if we have another bad winter.

I fear we’ll have to make a lot of these decisions this year. It doesn’t feel fair; then again, life rarely is.