TRAVELINGWITHTOOLS

I’d spent the last several days staring at the surface of the river. I was on the Henrys Fork of the Snake at Last Chance, Idaho, and I’d been there for two weeks.

The Harriman Ranch stretch of Henrys is world renowned as a dry fly fishing paradise. On opening day, June 15, you can expect to see a crowd of dry fly purists searching the water, looking for the noses of big rainbow trout. The fish are looking up at the water’s surface, searching for recently hatched mayflies to slurp down and fill their bellies.

There are some big mayflies hatching around this time of year… green drakes, brown drakes, grey drakes… there are also pale morning duns, caddis and stoneflies. The river is a bug factory, which is why the fish are so healthy.

I come here looking for the green drakes, because the big size 10 or 12 flies are easy to see on the water, and when the fish are keyed in on them, they get aggressive… less fussy than when they are eating tiny size 20 BWOs.

The last time I was here for the opener, pale morning duns (PMDs) were on the menu, and I got a couple of nice fish that morning. There was a fish to cast to in almost every direction. Noses poking through the surface, giving away their positions, and most anglers on the water were actively working a fish.

This year, I was on the water for two hours before I spotted a nose, and most of the other people stood or sat on the banks, scanning the surface for any signs of activity.

My fish was close by, and I only had to shuffle upstream a little bit to get into position. I had on a PMD of some flavor, and my first cast was on target. The big rainbow came up to look at the fly but didn’t open its mouth. I waited a few moments and cast again, and this time, the fish popped its nose above the water and sucked the fly in. WOO HOO!

I lifted the rod too enthusiastically and missed the fish entirely. Well dang.

Buck fever, more than one guy replied later when I was describing the encounter.

And that was it. The last sizeable trout that I saw rising in 12 days on the water, with a couple of days lost to a cold front with snow and sleet.

So there I sat on the bank of the river on the last day, scanning the surface for signs of a fish. The wind had come up and the birds had mostly settled down, with most of the anglers heading in for lunch and a siesta. Some diehards remained, or were we desperate?  I recognized one of them as the guy who caught the only fish I saw the day before. Less desperate than me, I’d hazard a guess.

The water’s surface reflects an image of the sky, the morning’s calm air giving mostly a mirror image.  Breaks in the mirror indicate current seams, swirls and eddies around rocks. Sometimes, I spot a disturbance in an otherwise calm stretch and think, is that a fish? Usually,  no. Some feature under the mirror has made an irregular yet recurring displacement of water.

Yeah, but. That could have been a fish eating just under the surface. I stare at the spot for a while longer, a ghost of the vision fading from my retinas.

Then the wind comes up and changes the mirror to a blue washboard. A ripple across the surface from one bank to the other obscures all but the largest features in the river. Only a small stretch of water close to the bank retains its mirror-like surface, as the breeze is somehow deflected.  Four or five feet of water, this is now what draws the gaze, and where the hopes of an angler rest.

(Postscipt: I typed this on the bank of the river on June 27, 2025. I managed to catch one last small rainbow that evening, in the fading light, before pulling up my tent stakes and heading over to Montana.)