I spent all of last week fishing two small streams back in my home state of Utah. One is tough to even call a stream. It’s more of a trickle through a valley 10,000 feet above sea level, where it meanders for almost ten miles before dumping into a lake. In some places it gets deep, and beavers have built up a few ponds along its stretch, but it’s the sort of creek where you don’t need fly line out of the tip of your rod for 99% of your casts.
As you’d expect, it’s stuffed with brook trout, but I caught some decent rainbow and tiger trout from it in the past. By my count, though, it had been a decade since I’d fished this stream, so I didn’t really know what to expect.
The first few holes didn’t yield anything, but once I found a spot with some depth, I landed a decent brook trout. That story played itself out over and over again; any hole with depth to it was loaded to the seams with brookies, most of whom were willing to eat.
A small midge hatch popped off in the afternoon, along with some October caddis and blue-winged olives. The fish that were rising didn’t want my size 16 Parachute Adams, but I was catching enough on the WD-40 dropper that I didn’t feel the need to accurately match the hatch.
It was small stream fishing at its finest—plenty of eager, willing fish, and a few that were either large enough to be special, or so beautifully colored I wonder why we still call them brook trout instead of jeweled trout. But the fish weren’t idiots, either. If I got too close, bungled a cast, or slapped the water too hard, they’d scatter. The fish kept me honest, but didn’t demand perfection, a trait that we humans could use a lot more of.
Fishing this stream was a walk down memory lane. My favorite holes hadn’t changed much in a decade, even if the beavers had seriously rerouted portions in the flatter sections. The world’s usually like that, though. We change more than it does, or perhaps more accurately, we change more quickly. It’s at once jarring and comforting to return to old haunts that haven’t lost the charm that originally made them endearing.
This trickle in the high valley is almost smack in the middle of my old haunts, the waters that raised me as an angler. It’s a mix of small streams, ponds, large reservoirs, and a few spring creeks with truly massive trout. Other than the Green River below Flaming Gorge, this part of Utah shaped me as an angler more than perhaps anywhere else.
Maybe that’s why, even in my adopted home of Wyoming, I still seek out similar water. A favorite fishery here in the Cowboy State is another small trickle, in a similar high valley, although this stream has brown trout along with brookies. The fish are pickier, the hatches are a bit more diverse, and it’s lousy with moose, but it feels a lot like the area I left behind. Ironically, that small stream is further from my house than the two world-class tailwaters that bookend this part of Wyoming.
My angling skills are average, so maybe that’s why I’m drawn to the simpler world of small streams and ponds. I can hold my own on a tailwater, and few things get me as excited as a float during an epic blue-winged olive hatch. But there’s something businesslike about the larger rivers, with their unspoken rules, the ordered chaos of boat ramps, and silent rivalries between guides and outfitters. Small streams can be just as temperamental, but they’re more blue collar. Rarely will you see a high-powered executive casting a brand-new thousand-dollar rod on a stream full of eight-inch trout, while dutifully ignoring the advice of his guide.
In the end, it doesn’t much matter why I love small streams so much. But in the silences between hook sets, when the brilliance of the surroundings forces you to take notice, it’s hard not to think about why you’re so far off the beaten path, standing in a river and waving a stick.
Perhaps it’s best not to think about it at all, and just focus on the next cast.