Chadd Van Zanten looks at how autumn can sometimes gently slip away into winter and how at other times the change can be more dramatic.
Let me explain the way winter arrives here in the mountainous country of the western United States. Because you might be under the impression it arrives at the Winter Solstice, December twenty-first or thereabouts, the same as in other places. You may think it has something to do with the tilt of the earth’s axis and the declination of the sun—the way it rides so low in the sky and sets before ever chasing the icy sparkle from the banked-up snow.
You’d be wrong about that.
Around here winter begins in December, but it always arrives much earlier.
It may come as early as September. It might hold off until November. Most typically, it’s October. It happens like this. You’re on your way to the stream in a shortsleeved shirt and you’re wearing shorts under your waders. There are nine different dry flies pinned to your cap. You’ve not decided which to tie on yet because the fish you’re after haven’t expressed a clear preference for any particular fly in four months. The leaves on the maple trees aren’t falling but they’re blood-red, and the aspens are golden. If you stay out after dark you might need a sweater but while the sun is up, it still feels a lot like August.
Then you notice the absence of grasshoppers fleeing through the dry grass at your feet, and just as you are about to bring this to the attention of your fishing buddy, a gray wet cloud slides across the sun and instead you ask him, “Hey, did you bring a jacket?”
“No,” he says, face upturned. “Did you?”
“I didn’t.”
It gets cold in a hurry but you fish anyway. The wind blows and there’s rain. Hands get raw and pruned—you wonder if you even know where you left your winter gloves. Under your fly bench, maybe. Somewhere in the truck. You catch fewer fish than you caught a week ago. Fewer by half. That’s because you’re fishing as if it’s earlier. But it’s not earlier. Winter has arrived. It hasn’t started yet but it has come.
This year, winter hit me much harder than it has in past years. The last thing I remember distinctly is a trip to the outer Cub River. Mid-October. The flows were medium-to-low and the water was clear. The fishing turned on around lunchtime and a single, rust-colored caddis pattern worked all day like a voodoo fetish to coax almost fifty cutthroat trout to my net.
These cutts were reckless. They came up from deep holes, crossed from one side of the channel to the other to take a fly. They came up two at a time. These fish were irrational. I was extra careful when returning each to the stream—clearly, they could not be trusted with their own safety.
It went like that until the sun ducked behind the rim of the canyon. When I was sure the fishing had cooled off for the day, I sat on a rock to remove a pebble from my boot. I had been walking on it for hours, thinking if I stopped for a few minutes to take it out, I might break the spell. And that was only the last of a string of such days.
Then it was November. There he was. Dark, cold. Winter.
Temperatures dropped. For a week solid it never got above twenty degrees Fahrenheit. The sun shone through the icy haze like a portal to some paler, colder universe. Ice formed in my rod guides on every trip, and I though I’d located my gloves by then, I worried constantly about frostnip on my fingers. Anchor ice began appearing on the floor of the Logan River and it wasn’t even December yet.
Winter has a way of making everything seem more serious than it actually is. Everything is heavier when the days are so short and dim. A summertime problem is a wintertime crisis. A crisis in autumn becomes a calamity just a month or two later. So, if I tell you I was coping with a major personal emergency in early November, that should indicate my condition on the first weekend in December.
That’s when it got even colder. Single-digit temperatures during the day and it was below zero at night. Keep in mind, the Winter Solstice was still two weeks away. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t go out on a Saturday like that, and my autumn crisis made me want to fish even less, but I’d made arrangements to fish with my friend Littrell, who was visiting from Texas. Littrell had never fished in this part of the country, and he’d gotten it into his head that even though he was staying only for a few stormy days, he must catch a trout from one of our high-mountain streams.
I advised against it.
“You understand how cold it is out there,” I said.
“Yes.”
“You understand there’s a decent chance we may perish,” I said.
“I’d like to give it a try.”
On the morning of Saturday, December 7, the temperature was holding steady at five degrees and the wind gusted to twenty knots or better. With windchill, it was seventeen below zero at the Spring Hollow bridge, which is where we got in the water.
We fished. I think of myself as an enthusiastic winter angler, but I number that day of fishing among the worst I’ve ever known. Ice in the guides is one thing—you cast a few times, pop the ice out with your fingers, cast a few times more, then repeat. Inconvenient, but you fall into a rhythm. It’s manageable.
Fishing that day was something new. After each cast, as I lifted my flyline from the surface of the river, the water froze onto the line itself, forming a glassy sheath that could be broken up only with considerable difficulty. Between the downcanyon wind and the ice on the flyline, it was difficult to cast in a forward direction at all—accuracy was out of the question. My waders, too, were laminated in ice, and hoarfrost formed on my beard.
After twenty minutes, Littrell said, “I can’t cast. Everything’s frozen up.”
I shouldered my rod and steered him toward a promising hole.
“Cast in there,” I said, pointing, voice raised against the wind and river noise.
Littrell made a choppy cast. His ice-hampered flyline flopped over heavily and nowhere in the vicinity I’d indicated.
“There?” he asked.
“If that’s the best you can do, then yes. There.”
By some act of providence, Littrell’s strike indicator drifted across the hole and he set his hook on a small brown trout. For proof of the incident I took a photo. It was hard to know if that fish even wanted to get back in the water. We made several more casts into the teeth of the wind, but within ten minutes we had retreated to our trucks and we haven’t spoken of the matter since.
My troubles deepened and my mood became blacker. My family asked me what was wrong. I refused to explain myself. Friends told me how worried they were. I claimed I was fine. My plan was to fish through it all, like some melancholy and reticent hero. This didn’t really work. Winter had pushed me to the ground and I guess he stood with his foot on my neck awhile because I couldn’t take a clean, deep breath for two or three weeks.
But there’s something else that happens in wintertime around here. Every so often there is a break in the weather. I’d forgotten. It happened one day when I met up with Jason to fish the Bear River. He brought his dog along, a Labrador Retriever with an incurable love for every member of the human race.
It was the first time in a long time I’d fished the Bear. As we made the drive, I confessed I wasn’t even sure about the best way to catch anything.
“We can swing some streamers,” said Jason.
“Maybe try some nymphs,” I replied.
What we were both hoping for was a midge hatch and a chance to tie on a dry fly.
When we stepped out of Jason’s muddy Honda, we both knew that we’d found the kind of day when catching fish is less than paramount. The air was clear and windless, the sky an improbable cerulean.
We put on our waders and hiked downstream. Jason’s dog loped out ahead, mouth agape, tongue lolling. A bald eagle coursed overhead at an altitude of about forty feet—so close I saw its eye as it tilted its head to examine us.
We swung our streamers. We tried some nymphs. Then there was a midge hatch.
I watched Jason land a fish and release it. He looked at the sky.
“This day,” he said, shaking the water from his hand. “I mean, my God, what a day.”
The Vernal Equinox will fall on the twentieth of March this year, as it always does, but spring has already arrived. It hasn’t started yet but it has come.
Read more from Chadd HERE