Almont, CO. January 31, 2013.
Sometimes I can’t figure out what it is I am afraid of… looking stupid, feeling inadequate, getting yelled out, hurting myself… hurting others! One thing I do know is that I am working hard at conquering those fears.
I had a frustrating experience this week with trying to get my SCAMP trailer hooked up to my Jeep. I couldn’t figure out how to get it up high enough so that the hitch from the Jeep would match up. As is often the case, I go to brute force thinking that I am just not strong enough. In this case, my force stripped the gears on the jack and broke it. It was definitely worth some strong swear words, and I so wanted to find someone else to blame, e.g. my husband. I had to order a new jack, which is now in place, but I certainly understand how jacks work now. Why can’t I learn without making such costly mistakes?
Fortunately, I made it through my last day on the Taylor River without any mishaps, which was quite challenging. I got up to my fishing spot (Avalanche Hole) just below the bridge that’s below the Taylor Park Dam, and there was a full-on raging blizzard. By the way, it’s appropriately called Avalanche Hole because there was, in fact quite a large avalanche there in recent years.
It took me about 20 minutes in below 0 temperatures to put all the paraphernalia on my line and my hands started to scream at me before I even got down to the river. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have the rest of my winter attire figured out, but you really don’t have any choice but to leave your hands gloveless when tying on these tiny flies. Thank goodness for the hand-warmer packets that I keep in my parka pockets (thanks, Fred.)
Getting down to the river was a challenge in that there was several feet of new snow that the plows had piled up on the side of the road. The picture here shows me making a trail from the river to the road the day before when we had abundant sunshine. I was able to follow that trail down and got to the hole where I had seen two fish jumping the previous day.
My first cast on the water landed the second of the two flies on my line under a rock and broke it off. [swear words] My hands could not face another 5 minutes without gloves so I fished with just one fly on my line for about 15 minutes knowing damn well, the chances of me catching a fish were about nill. I finally bit the bullet and put another midge on my line and started casting again.
The wind was blowing so hard that instead of my flies drifting downstream so as to imitate the natural course of events under the water surface, they were being blown upstream due to the action on the top of the water with the indicator (bobber in more common fishing terminology.) This was just not the day to fish… until…
A large flash of pink jumps about a foot or so in the air about 15 yards downstream of me. That was certainly the inspiration to stay for a while longer and try to say a close-up hello to this beautiful creature. In the end, that was not going to happen.
After about 2 hours I climbed back up the bank, took off my frozen waders, cranked up the heat in the car and headed back to Denver. I may have not caught anything, but I felt really good about being off on my own and knowing that I managed the situation as well as I did.
