Appreciation: Home Stream

I have friends who chase fish all over the world. The mentor who first taught me to cast on Montana’s Big Horn was a fly-fishing raconteur who spent much of his life drinking good wine, telling rude stories, and artfully presenting flies on the world’s most remote rivers. He lived large, always prowling for untrod paths and unmolested trout. He died as one of my role models.

And yet I find myself content these days to endlessly work a clear and cold mile-and-a-half stretch of the Colorado River headwaters, which flow knee-deep and the width of a county road about 50 yards from my house. The rural community where I’m lucky to live controls fishing rights to that fraction of the 1,450-mile Colorado, the American West’s seminal river, and we divide that water into three half-mile sections— upper, middle, and lower. Each beat has its own personality, and the members of our angler’s club worry and fuss over those sections as if they