Frost Bites
Long after the last yellow aspen leaves have fallen, hoarfrost hangs on dogwood twigs, and sheets of ice cover the calm shallows along the river. Bald eagles glide down to the water’s surface and compete for trout with a lone, rugged fisherman. Standing in thigh-deep, frigid water, he tries to distinguish his flies from the buzzing white snowflakes around him. What’s the attraction?
For some hardy souls, fly-fishing is a year-long affair; the lure of the lure and the quiet beauty of winter on the river. Ice fishermen have known this for years, as they wait for fish to bite during the coldest days of the year.
There aren’t many dry fly-fishermen in the winter. I’m speaking from experience. A few years back I decided to try my luck. The spring snow lay deep along the Upper Weber Canyon meadows. The weather was typical: it was sunny one moment, a blizzard the next — so warm that I’d peel off layers, then pile even more on again 20 minutes later as a snow squall barreled over Windy Ridge.
I knew there were many open leads of water along the river and had seen the occasional fish peeking out from under the white blanket that lined the banks. So I waxed up my skinny skis, threw my fly rod into my pack and started wandering up the canyon. From the west bank, I flicked a nymph into the swirling pools.
I had been taught early on by my father to keep my fly in the water as much as possible. He said that the person who keeps his fly in the water most of the time is the one who catches the most fish. “There are no flying fish in Utah,” he’d tell me, as I whipped my line back and forth in a frenzy.
At 9,000 feet, the air was full of huge, flat flakes that plastered my upwind side with an icy crust. One minute the sun was warm on my cheeks, but the next, small icy snowflakes were trying to rip my face off. Essential equipment included fingerless gloves, a warm hat, waders that didn’t leak, long underwear and thick wool socks. Hand warmers and a thermos didn’t hurt either, because unlike the rest of the Wasatch, this is not a dry-cold. One stumble can land you in not just deep, but debilitating water, with a scant few minutes to get dry and warm before you’re in deep, so to speak, trouble.
Water droplets froze into small, clear globes along the leader in the sub-freezing temperatures, tinkling like broken glass after each cast. Changing flies in these conditions is a ballet of speed and dexterity that would make a heart surgeon jealous.
The lunkers weren’t very active. They did eat, but they were slow to strike and bit ever so gingerly. Even the biggest brown wouldn’t chase food down — it took too many hard-earned calories. They let the food float to them, and that’s the secret.
In a broad turn in the river, I slid out onto a wide ice shelf. I saw a shadow under the opposite bank — a ghost of a fish — an albino trout, which, introduced years earlier, had somehow evaded all predators. It swam languidly below the surface.
I flicked a nymph upstream and let it coast by, once, twice, a third time, and again. My back had started to chill but I stayed calm. Finally the foot-and-a-half of golden fish decided that effort might be outweighed by the benefits of food, and allowed the fly to enter its open mouth.
I immediately set the hook and the fight was on, or so I thought. There had been one slight miscalculation on my part: I was still on skis, and they were pointing toward my adversary. As the hook set, I shot forward toward open water on the frictionless surface. The smart thing to do would have been to let go of my rod, of course, but, well …
I was able to check my speed with an ugly wedge, and came to a halt right on the edge of the thin, cracking ice. I began to wonder: who was catching whom? Was I slated to be mounted over an underwater fireplace, my title, “The Time the Tables were Turned”?
But then a few things happened, and all at once. The ice finally broke underneath me and plunged me into the shallow but frigid water. The ghost, with a turn of its head, snapped my line and slid back into history. Still on my skis, I floundered gracelessly back onto shore just as the storm blew out. The spring sun blasted me once again with warming rays.
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