Don’t Hurt Yourself

A few weeks ago, Alex Stulce and I were out fishing early one morning, hoping to find fish rising to a trico hatch. We parked the trucks and hiked a ways down the river, looking for a safe way down the sheer, rocky bank. This particular river flows at the bottom of a narrow canyon, and there’s only a handful of spots with easy access to the water. To get to most of the river, you’ve got to channel your inner billy goat and hope you don’t slip and fall.

Which is exactly what I was doing when my footing suddenly gave out, I pitched forward, and the next thing I knew I was upside down and about 15 vertical feet further down the bank. My rod had bounced off into the tall grass, and I’d smacked my hip on a rock hard enough to make me worry I’d broken something. Alex had heard the fall and subsequent cursing, and looked at me with that mixture of concern and amusement we use when our friends are hurt, but not horribly.

With Alex’s help I eventually righted myself, but my hip hurt something fierce, and I was bleeding from a few different spots. Thankfully, my rod was undamaged. Fish were, in fact, rising to tricos, but I couldn’t catch any. I eventually tied on a nymph rig and put a decent rainbow in the net, which was a nice distraction from how bad my hip was throbbing.

About a week after that fall, when my hip was still store, elk season opened, and I found myself hauling a front shoulder about 1,000 vertical feet out of a canyon back to the truck. My friend Brett had the backstraps and tenderloins in his pack, and it took us the better part of two hours to make the mile-and-a-half hike out in the dark. By the time we made it to the truck, I was seriously considering paying a nearby outfitter to go in with his horses to haul out the rest of the elk.

The next morning we took a longer, but less steep, route and used a game cart to pack the remaining quarters out.

A few days after getting home from elk hunting, I was at my desk in my home office working, when my back started to hurt. I stood up to walk and stretch it out, and that’s when my back spasmed and I about fell over. My dog padded into the room when he heard me shouting and swearing, but he thought I wanted to play. All I really wanted was to lay down immediately.

As I lay on the couch with my back aching, I realized that between my fall and hurting my hip, elk season, and now my back, I’d missed out on about three weeks of great fall fishing. This fall has been oddly warm and drawn out here in Wyoming, which doesn’t bode well for next year’s snowpack, but makes for good fishing right now. Shoot, it’s been warm enough I haven’t yet busted out my waders. There’s no snow in the forecast, either. Just a long run of sunny days in the mid-70s, and very little wind, which means the tricos are probably still hatching back in that canyon.

Now, if I can get to them with an aching back and the memory of my just-recovered hip, maybe I can salvage a bit of this fleeting fall season.