for a couple of weeks now i've been waking up, unprompted, about 06:00 – regardless of time zone. i did it again this morning, even though i'm running the personal battery well-low, and took awhile to drop back off.
neither my brother, nor i, watch TV, but we consider it to be part and parcel of the WY fishing experience. we watch an excellent show about the history of the US along with a side of “pickers” while intermittently making the plans for the next two days … there's a small menu of fishing spots available to us ... and as i do with my friends, we refer to nearly all of them by nickname – so much so, in fact, that my mom (born and raised in WY) will often have no idea of places we're talking about in casual conversation. we're spinning through the possibilities as we make side comments in the TV shows we're watching ... the new place, the red meated dams, mcclain creek, jack creek, mcclain creek II, and hey look how cool those animated buffalo look.
we're definitely going to hit the new place. it's a spot where it's possible to catch a staggering amount of fish, and my brother believes the fish activity there is mildly different. throughout the entire front range of the rockies, nearly all wildlife are most active in the mornings and evenings – going into a rest, that sometimes seems to border on a torpor – in the middle of the day … this goes right on down to the fish in the streams. except my brother believes that the fish at the new place are actually more active in the middle of the day and settle down toward the end.
of course the one wild card that is never fully predictable – no matter what meteorologists say – is the weather. we know for a fact that the weather is good right now. the clouds are back, thank god, i have no idea what happens with two cloudless days, but it's gotta be the absolute worst of omens. just as importantly, there's no wind right now. it takes awhile for the wind to work up, and this is a part of the world where the wind can whip the flesh right off your bones … i've been out here this time of year when the wind was blowing so strong that my fly line wouldn't go down to the water.
we decide on the new place for tomorrow, and although i'm curious to see what the current situation is mcclain creek today (a spot that i have long, and very good, relationship with), my brother's got an itch to go back up to the snowy range. i'm fine with that. the WY rockies are about as far removed from airline travel as you can possibly be in the continental US … it makes a nice counterpoint to my trip.
we eat at mom's, in violation of the rule that says not to – but in saratoga you don't have a lot of options, and mom's is actually pretty good. the proprietors, once again, do not recognize us – even though we've eaten here multiple times per year for the last 20 – which means that everything's as it should be.
we make our way back up to the snowy range, stopping to look at several watersheds along the way. the water level is a little low, but we're here about a week later than usual, and it's been hot the last few days. they've had a lot of snow on the front range this past winter, which can be problematic in any number of ways – but everything aquatic looks right. bugs, plants, shoreline. it's all the way it should be.
in the WY back country it's obscenely rude not to speak to anyone you happen to run across ... so in the parking lot of the upper set of snowy range lakes we strike up a conversation with an australian microbiologist. he's studying microbes, DNA and their relationship to the weather pattern. this is something b1-67er and i both know a little bit about and my brother uses the word nucleation in passing, the aussie lights up like a christmas tree and we end up talking for a couple of hours.
we'd planned to head to the upper lakes, but you don't want to get caught out after dark up here ... black body radiation absorption at this latitude and altitude is tremendous -- you can go hypothermic if you're not careful -- and we've burned a lot of time just standing here in the parking lot ... so we decide to stay lower.
my technique for this kind of water is better than my brother's, so it's not surprising that i catch two and he gets skunked.
both of us get a bit chilled, so we drive immediately to the hot springs and soak for a good half hour.
