I’ve written before about how fishing places with lots of people just isn’t my thing. That’s one of the reasons I log a lot more hours on the river during the off season than the summer. But even during the crush of summer there are still a lot of places that just don’t have many people.
One of those places is a mountain range around here. If you know it, it should be pretty easy to recognize from the pictures but I’m not going to name it here. Since I started dating Kaitlyn we have spent a lot of time out in the woods hiking around. It just happens that this particular mountain range has a lot of lakes in it with pretty good fishing…
I’m really not in the best of shape. So when she wanted to go back in to this one series of lakes with a pretty big elevation gain, I was understandably hesitant. The trail follows a beautiful creek for almost the entire way up, so between wheezing for breath I could distract myself by looking for fish. (They were there).
As so often happens when Kaitlyn and I try to go do something, it rained on us. Fortunately not until we had made it all the way to the top, but still. If you’ve never sat on the shores of a mountain lake as a rain storm moves in and watched the still waters ripple with the drops you should put it on your list. With no one around, no highway or airplane noise, no nothing but nature, the peace was complete.
The fishing was pretty decent too. I pulled some out of the first lake before handing the rod to Kaitlyn at the second. I’m more and more proud of her every time we go fishing. She’s learning quickly and seems to genuinely enjoy it. Always a good sign…
The sun came back out and a group of bros disrupted our little bubble of quiet. As we headed back down the trail we ran into two more groups of people. Even in the remote places you’ll find people in the summer. That just means we’ll have to go farther next time. Both of us felt restored after spending the day up there and when it comes down to it, you can’t ask for more than that.
The whole alpine lake game is still fairly new to me. It offers an entirely new dimension to summer fly fishing. Expect to see a lot more of that on here next year.
