It is Mid-November in Utah. It is 10 degrees fahrenheit with a wind-chill of minus 3. It is snowing and I’m thigh-deep in the middle section of the Provo River outside of Park City chasing fish. Large spawning Brown Trout are rising all around me, jumping at the falling snow, mistaking the flakes for the small gray midges that hatch and land softly on the surface of the river. Not a single fish will so much as look at the dry-fly I have greased up, floating over a deep and beautiful trout hole and I begin thinking back to how I ended up here. In another month it will have been 3 years since I culminated my undergraduate education, packed my belongings and left New York City. I had never fly fished.
I grew up fishing the ponds and lakes around the St. Louis County in Missouri with a small yellow and white rod with a built-in reel and the likeness of the dog Snoopy on the side. I received that rod as a Christmas gift when I was two years old. When I was eight I bought myself a Shimano spinning outfit and began harassing bass and crappie and catfish.
Mid-way through my tenure in New York I bought myself a larger spinning set-up so I
could fish the bluefish and striped bass run as they migrated south from the Long Island Sound through the East River to the New York Harbor. Once my classes let out I would head to the large hole near my apartment along the East River Park and throw bucktails with colored surgical tubing trailing off the hook alongside a motley assortment of anglers, most of whom had over a dozen rods in the water, rigged up with chunks of shad on treble hooks.
I first picked up a fly rod during my six-month stint in San Francisco while attempting to find a job and begin a career. I learned that I preferred the small fishing towns along the Northern California coast to the Bay Area start-up culture. I learned to fly cast over the pools of the Golden Gate Angling and Casting Club and spent every weekend I could near Mendocino and Fort Bragg fishing and free-diving for Red Abalone.
While spending two months in Paris I discovered California no longer held any appeal for me and thus upon my return I once again packed my car and drove back home to St. Louis. Since graduating from high school I had not spent more than three consecutive weeks in my childhood home, so to preserve my sanity I bought my first fly rod – a Temple Forks Outfitters 5 weight with a Ross reel – and fished streamers for Rainbow Trout in the stocked lakes of the public parks.
That spring I packed my rods and flew to Alaska to catch large wild fish. I fished flies for Salmon, Rainbow Trout and Dolly Varden on the rivers and lakes and caught Salmon – Chinook, Coho and Sockeye – Halibut, Rockfish and Cod in the Ocean. I returned the next summer to do it all over again.
One and a half years later and I’m here, bare fingers numb and burning, eyelets along my rod freezing, consistently forcing me to submerge my rod in the river to thaw, further chilling my hands, beginning to wonder if I’ll catch a fish today. I switch from dry flies to small yarn egg-patterns mimicking trout roe. I had been fishing successfully with the egg-patterns throughout the past few weeks but with the surface-feeding activity I believed I would be better off with midges. I tie on one of my own flies, a pale green egg-pattern with an orange blood-spot, attach a strike indicator and a few lead split-shot weights and reach cast my line into the center of the riffle. Several seconds into the drift the indicator plunges and I lift my rod, setting the hook into what felt like a heavy trout. It peels line off my reel in fast, smooth pulls as the fish tears down-stream with the current. I finally have the fight.
I net the trout and my new friend takes a photo before I release it, running water through its gills and watching it swim off again into the deep, fast-moving water. I cast out again and after several drifts I feel another strong tug which turns into another fine trout.
After pulling three good fish, my friend and I relocate to another hole down-river and around a large bend. I net one decent trout quickly then change the color of my egg-pattern to a bright orange and with that came several more large brown trout. What began as a seemingly questionable idea; brave through sub-freezing temperatures to wade the Middle Provo and chase large, spawning Brown Trout turned into another one of my greatest days.
It has been a strange and unorthodox trajectory that landed me here on this river in Utah, but I’m here, the fishing is good and I’m excited for rivers to come.
Here on this page I will tell in greater detail some of the fishing stories of my past few years as well as the stories of the fish in my future.
See you on the water.
