This
summer, as a sidelight to the Quill Gordon mystery series, I’ll be writing
occasional blogs about memorable days of fishing. It’s a good way of getting
those memories on the record and keeping myself in the right mood for writing
the next book in the series.
To begin,
I’ll recall a day from the first year I took up fly fishing, 1982. That was
also the year Linda and I bought a used 1977 VW camper and took one of our
longest driving trips ever. Leaving Santa Cruz in late July, we drove north to
Seattle, spent a few days with my sister there, then headed north to Canada
through British Columbia to Jasper and Banff National Parks.
From there,
we went south, spending a few days at Waterton Lakes National Park in Canada
and Glacier National Park in Montana before finally coming home. Total elapsed
time: a little over three weeks. It’s hard now to imagine that we could ever
get away for so long.
Right Equipment, No Clue
That June I
had bought an Orvis fly rod (my first of three), and it could be argued that a
sales person with any ethics shouldn’t have sold it to such a greenhorn. Before
the big trip, I’d taken the rod out on a couple of weekend trips where I hadn’t
caught a thing. Much as I’d like to blame it on the fish or the weather, the
fact was that I had no idea what I was doing.
I fished at
Banff and Jasper with similar results and by the time we got to Waterton was a
bit down on my new hobby. Looking around for a day hike to take, we found on
the map a trail leading from Waterton to Alderson Lake, about six and a half
miles away. On a day with no rain in the forecast, we started out, with me
carrying my fly rod by hand; waders and a box of flies were in my backpack.
It was a
stunningly beautiful hike, steep with switchbacks, through alpine terrain with
breathtaking views. It took us about three hours to get to the lake, and we
arrived a bit after 11 a.m. It was sunny, with passing clouds; the air was
achingly clear, and the lake, more like a large, glacier-carved pond, had fish
in it that were sporadically feeding on the surface.
Trout for Dinner
The lake
had a rocky bottom, but I was able to wade out waist-deep and cast a dry fly
(an Adams or Humpy) over deeper water. The fish were cruising the lake and I
and I caught three when they came near me — two cutthroats and a brook trout,
13, 11 and 10 inches long. It was legal to keep a few then, and it was before I
converted to catch-and-release fishing, so we took them back to camp for
dinner.
In the
three or four hours we were at the lake only a few other people came by, and
they didn’t stay long. We pretty much had the place to ourselves. At some point
we had a picnic lunch of sandwiches we had brought, and I had to take breaks
from fishing on a regular basis because the lake was so cold it was numbing my
feet, even through the boots and waders.
Alderson
Lake and the hike to it were so splendid, it would have been a special day if I
hadn’t caught any fish. But because it was my first decent result with a fly
rod, the day was even more special. You could say that was when I got hooked.
