Last Dance

 I'm pretty sure it's not going to be great, but this is the walk I want to take on the last morning of this trip.  Its either this, or Dillon, and the easy turn at Cardwell is left.  The evening is windy, but this morning is comfortably cool and dead calm to start.  Just me and a white Jeep in the lot at 7am.  The water at the top of the island has some weeds, but not like the weedy MO.  The Foundation calls the water "turbid," or increased turbidity, I call it Beaverhead clear.  It's not Fork clear like a month ago.  I get in, and slow dance my way down, scanning the water thinking of opening morning, windy afternoons, and brown drake evenings.  I think ahead to mahoganies peppered with baetis in September.  Maybe a grasshopper or two.  Its quiet.

Behind me, I hear a bloop.  I turn around and 30 feet back is a ring of the rise, right where I just danced through five minutes earlier.  A couple minutes later, there's another one above that.  Both one-timers.  A bloop is a light sound, the nose of the fish still coming out of the water, but sort of a spinner sip.  A blurp, on the other hand, often leaves a bubble, like eating a dun or escaping emerger.  A deeper tone, and more arousing.

The water is pretty bugless, just a rare PMD adult or spinner floating by.  Big ones though, big enough to get a big rainbow's attention if even only once.  A couple of tricos hang on my sleeve.  Some fluttering caddis glow in the sunlight above the water.  All together, they're still hardly worth a bloop.

An hour in though, half way down and dead-center on the long dance floor, I finally see two fish start to work.  As I step downstream to get in range of the steady risers, the dreaded north wind quickly pushes down river at my back.  The flags on the ranch lawn show themselves, and that stops the rising fish on the formerly mirror-smooth Millionaire's pool.  I finish the walk down, taking my time hoping its just a passing gust.  Nope.  I see some PMD's flying in a tiny lee south of lower island.  But there will be no morning rise.  On the trail out, there are grasshoppers in the grass and sage brush.  I wonder what might have been.  For now, the dance is over.

Oh, the morning dreams

A confirmation

See you in September