Safely vacationing in the time of Covid is no
small feat. My friend and I mostly succeeded, on a week-long trout fishing
expedition to the Henry’s Fork of the Snake River, in eastern Idaho. What
nearly ruined our trip, however, wasn’t coronavirus, or even slipping over our
waders into the river.
No, what came close to ending our August vacation was David’s bicycle wreck on a deserted trail to the river. More on that later.
When I picked him up at the Idaho Falls airport, no hugs, despite our 40-plus years of friendship. He had flown from the East Coast, and I’d driven from the West Coast. Now, elbow bumps – a meager greeting for a momentous reunion.
Not so, when I met Tom, the owner of our Airbnb. Out of habit, I thrust out my hand, then visibly flinched as he took it. Tom noticed, and said, “Oh, I don’t worry about that.”
“I do,” I replied, but what was done was done.
Out here in Idaho’s rolling ranchlands, blanketed green with vast, irrigated fields of potatoes and hay, Covid precaution is a resented formality. This is, after all, a state that’s solidly conservative red. And Mormon.
Tom’s house, which he and his wife vacate to a next-door travel trailer for a few weeks of summer rental income, was a shrine to Mormonism: The Book of Mormon and pictures of Mormon temples prominently displayed. Mormon hymnals on the piano. Shelves packed with Mormon books and bric-a-bracs.
Visitors are welcomed with a thought-provoking plaque: “Have you thought to pray today?” Dozens of photos of their large, mostly blond, photogenic family smile out from the frig door and shelves.
A miniature replica of Noah’s ark, with animals, two-by-two, heading up a tiny ramp, covers one shelf. My favorite art-of-the-faithful was a large painting of a vegan lion laying down with a lamb.
I thought about exploring their eight-volume VCR set – History of the Mormon Church, curious about how it might explain the Mountain Meadows massacre, wherein their ancestor Latter Day Saints shot and clubbed to death 120 men, women, and children on an immigrant wagon train headed from Arkansas to California, on September 11, 1857.
But I digress. We hadn’t come to Idaho to be cultural or political critics, a trait that comes oh-so naturally to both David and me. We’d come to fish, starting with the Fall River, a stone’s throw from our Airbnb’s back deck. Unfortunately, the river was running hard and fast, making wading its slippery cobbles dangerous, even in water only knee-deep. We caught a few tiny rainbow trout; then, for the rest of our week, we just enjoyed the river’s music, its resident osprey, and sunsets.
Our rented house was less than a half hour from the Henry’s Fork. We’d fished it for a week last year, but that was earlier in the summer, so everything was different this time. Especially the insect hatches, which determine which flies you use to try and catch trout. None of early summer’s big stoneflies or green drakes; now we were looking at small mayflies and honey ants – tiny flying ants that get blown into the water.
We met a local woman coming off the river our first morning, clad in appropriate waders, hat, sunglasses, and a bulging fly-fishing vest. We’d caught nothing. She had caught a couple of nice ones, though fishing had been slow. She told us about honey ants and gave us two that she had tied herself. Over the course of the week, they did tempt a few trout.
If you’re a fly angler, the Henry’s Fork, especially the seven miles where it flows through Harriman State Park, is what you picture trout fishing heaven to be like: broad flat water, mostly wadeable, rich with complex insect hatches, chockful of big trout, and flowing through sage meadows ringed by distant mountains. Until it was turned into a public park, 43 years ago, it had been the exclusive playground for the Harriman railroad barons and their privileged friends. Locals still call it the Railroad Ranch.
“The Henry’s Fork is the favorite trout stream of so many flyfishers because it’s exactly what you’d dream up for yourself if you could invent the perfect place using only thin air and the loftiest elements of the fly-fishing tradition.” – John Gierach (The Big Empty River, in The View from Rat Lake)
But as we had learned the hard way, home to trout that are just about as smart and wary as trout get. Finicky doesn’t begin to do them justice. These are trout that get fished every day by the best anglers on earth. Not just fly fishing bumblers like us. They see a nonstop parade of drift boats, with clients paying $600 (plus tip) for a half-day float, guided by guys who catch trout for a living.
We watched these pay-to-fish anglers catch more fish than us, but from what we could tell, no one was doing all that great. Part of the problem may have been that it was prime irrigation season on all the downstream ranches. So at the upstream impoundment of the Henry’s Fork, they were releasing lots of water, to be sucked out downriver. You could tell the water level was high because the grassy banks were flooded, making sloshing into the river, in waders, a tricky walk. I learned that approaching the river sideways, shuffling step-by-step, was best, to avoid tripping into an unseen hole.
A rule of thumb on the Henry’s Fork is that “blind casting” a dry fly – casting to water where you haven’t actually seen a trout rising, as it eats bugs floating on the surface – is almost always a waste of time. With an actively feeding, rising trout, however, you at least have a chance.
Assuming that you’ve picked the right insect-imitating fly (Trico, PMD mayfly, caddisfly, Callibaetis?), in the right life stage (dun, emerger, cripple, spinner?), in just the right hook size (14, 16, 18, even smaller?), and color (grayish, tannish, yellowish, olivish?). And that your leader is the right length (9’, 12’?), with the right tippet length (2’, 3’?) and strength (5X, 6X?), and that your cast drops your fly delicately in the trout’s feeding line, and that your fly doesn’t drag unnaturally in the current.
After all that, is the damned trout even in the mood? But maybe, just maybe, the trout will eat your fly. And then maybe, just maybe, you will set the hook in time, before it spits out your fake, feathery bug – which happens for me a dispiriting percentage of the time.
If none of your floating dry flies work, you can try a smorgasboard of underwater imitations – nymphs or streamers, for example. Or maybe a terrestrial (fake grasshopper, beetle, ant?), with their own variations of colors and sizes, depending on infinite preferences of the fly tier.
If by some convergence of luck and skill you happen to hook a big trout, netting it is another story. On the Henry’s Fork, regulations favor the trout. Fish hooks usually have a little barb on the point, which keeps a hook from slipping back out of a fish’s jaw. But on the Henry’s Fork (as with most blue-ribbon trout rivers), barbs are banned. With each new $3-$5 fly you use, you first must crimp down the hook’s barb with needle-nosed pliers.
By the way, if all this sounds terribly expensive, that would be correct. When we arrive and walk into the world-famous fly shop in Last Chance, adjacent to the river, we start by buying $75 worth of flies. (That’s on top of fly boxes we already have, filled with hundreds of flies from a lifetime of such trips – none of which seem to be what the trout are currently feeding on.) Then, as we fish and learn which flies work for us and which ones we’ve lost, we return to buy more. (I’ll not even mention the extravagant price I paid for a new Winston 5-weight fly rod, the week before our trip.)
By late summer on the Henry’s Fork, a lot of weeds are growing in the river. A hooked trout’s instinct is to burrow into those weeds. Sometimes that’s all it takes to escape. It might break your hair-like tippet, or your knot might fail – the one you’d tied for the hundredth time that day, as you (mostly fruitlessly) changed flies, often in fading light and eyesight, searching for the magical fly that the fish want.
What fly do you tie on, for example, when the water is covered with millions of minute, dead Tricos (Tricorythodes mayflies)? Even if the trout were feeding on them (which, apparently, they were not), why would any reasonably intelligent trout pick your fake bug amid Nature’s all-you-can-eat buffet of real ones?
If, after all that, you do hook and net a trout, it has to be released, unharmed, to inspire and entertain the next frustrated angler. The river has 5,000 trout per mile; I suspect nearly all have been hooked at least once. Which must be how they get so smart.
Fortunately, the Henry’s Fork is not all about, or even mainly about, catching fish. It’s about:
Fishing sacred trout water once reserved for the filthy rich.
And, of course, this:
The only way to reach most of the prime fishing water in Harriman State Park is on foot. Or by bike. I’d brought mine, and David rented one in Idaho Falls. In the middle of the park, a mile-long two-track, closed to autos, leads from busy US-20, across sandy sagebrush meadow, to the river.
One morning, we parked our car at the trailhead, unloaded our bikes, and headed down the sandy road. We wore our fishing vests, put our waders and nets in backpacks, and carried our fly rods in hand.
We hadn’t gone a quarter-mile, however, when David hit a patch of loose sand, flipping his front wheel sideways and dumping him to the ground. He landed hard, scrapping one knee raw, bruising his ego, but otherwise in one piece. Not so his shattered fly rod, which he landed on.
After David finished cursing, we assessed our situation, and agreed it could have been a lot worse, since David just two months earlier had a hip replacement. Our vacation could have ended right there.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” I said. “I’m going to ride back to the car and get my spare fly rod. But I’ll carry it.” Which is what we did.
I’d like to say that David’s crash was the price for getting to where we caught lots of fat rainbow trout, but that didn’t happen. Only a few smallish ones. We did, however, have to ourselves some of the most heavenly trout water on earth. Just what we had come to Idaho to find.
For a full week, we mostly escaped the reality of this insane year of 2020. Except, not entirely.
Our Airbnb had cable, so in our isolated evenings after dinner, we couldn’t resist watching a good share of the Democrat convention, and listening to the talking heads on MSNBC. We found it all quite uplifting and hopeful. The DVR taped each night’s session, and we made a point of leaving them for the Mormons to watch. In case they had missed any parts.
When I dropped David, along with his rented bicycle that nearly messed him up, at a relative’s in Idaho Falls, we started to say goodbye with another elbow bump routine. But I couldn’t stand it anymore. I gave David a full-on hug, and we held it for long seconds. It was the first time in more than six months that I’d had genuine, physical, human contact with anyone except my wife. It felt good.
Fighting tears, I drove off into the West, back to masks and social distancing, and into the apocalyptic fires that seem only appropriate in this surreal time of Covid. If a plague of locusts is next, I only wish they could have shown up while we were trout fishing.
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