Going Home

This summer, I’m going back to where I cut my teeth as a fly fisherman, the foothill streams of the Rocky Mountains. I’ve been back every couple of years for the past thirty or so, and am continually astonished by the changes I find every trip. For instance, Calgary, the town I grew up in, was only 150,000 people when I caught my first trout on a fly. Now it’s over a million, and everybody seems to own a fly rod. That would be astonishing enough, but what really surprises me is that the fishing is at least as good as it ever was, maybe better.

Oh, it’s crowded all right. There aren’t too many stretches on the better known rivers where you can experience solitude, but at least the company is other fly fishers, so it isn’t so bad. On the weekends and during the high holiday period it can get annoying at times, but it looks like we’d all better get used to fishing together.

My old home waters, in some cases, look to be getting loved to death, particularly the Crowsnest. It’s hard not to get all whiney about it when you can clearly remember having the whole river to yourself for weeks on end. Unbelievable, huh? True though. I mean no one else fishing the Crowsnest. That was a ways back, I admit, it’s the fifties and early sixties I’m talking about here .

Strange, then, isn’t it, that the fishing now is actually better than it was back when almost nobody was fishing? There were some environmental problems that were a factor, like the coal slag runoff in the Crow, and raw sewage and petroleum pollution in the Bow, but many of the more accessible rivers were nearly fished out as well. The boys that did fish in those days meant business, that’s for sure. None of your mamby-pamby catch and release for us in those days.

I remember washtubs full of cutthroat trout, ready to be sent down to town by a tight group of anglers from Bellevue who camped on the Oldman every summer. The camp stayed set up for weeks, and guys would move in and out of it when family and work permitted. Every couple of days somebody would make a beer and trout run to town, bringing back the full bottles and empty tubs. The rivers stood that sort of thing for many years, but eventually it had to take its toll. Now, with thousands of tooled up and expert fly fishers all over the place, it’s just amazing that one can experience fishing at all, let alone quality fishing. And make no mistake, it’s good fishing out there.

I thought I’d found one of the last good places a few seasons back, people who knew it spoke in code, but that sort of thing just enflames curiosity. That stream is on everybody’s hit list now. I just have to get used to the idea. I mean, if the trout can get along with all those fishermen, I suppose I can.

I just have to get over this nostalgia thing.

Bob Wyatt is a regular contributor to Flyfishing and Flytying magazine