Beaver-Pond Leviathans

“Half-a-thousand feet later, we soaked our hot feet in the stream and breathed deeply of the fresh air, cooled by the willows and massive sentinel cottonwoods. The fly box came out, as did a 3-weight rod and a fist-sized reel older than both of us. Most of the flies — the patterns anyway — were generations old, a reminder that anglers who waded before us had the right ideas about what attracts a trout’s attention….” Dave Buchanan clambers about mountain streams and beaver ponds and advises that an angler can learn as much about reading water from flipping short casts to pockewater as they can from big rivers. In the Grand Junction (Colorado) Sentinel.