A Rainbow on the Ranch

This is a story about luck. Not often enough, do I realize how lucky I am to be able to spend a precious few months in Last Chance. And too often do I also fail to recall that success in fishing is partly due to fortune. In pursuit of a large, wary trout in Harriman state park, an angler needs equal parts skill in the presentation of a fly, and also a certain quantity of luck. 

It takes skill and experience to build a lengthened leader with properly tied knots, and to identify a subtle rise of a large fish. And it takes practice to nail the approach, cast, and presentation; but it also takes a significant good fortune to feed your fly to a large rising fish. Any angler must be fortunate enough to have properly timed the emergence window, the weather conditions which encourage the hatch of large insects, the lack of external predators (ospreys, otters, paddleboarders) which may frighten your target, and perhaps most importantly, fortune to find a large trout who even cares to eat from the surface, considering they can acquire most of their diet under the surface. 

Lastly, after all the skill it takes to present and feed a big ranch rainbow a dry fly, and once the line is burning your index-finger as the fish cartwheels in the air downstream from you, all you can think is “Oh boy, I hope I hooked him good.” These conditions most anglers have little or no control over.

But against all of these odds- a fly fisherman at heart is an optimist. 

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The rain pattered on the roof of my truck from a cool June thunderstorm swiftly passing overhead. The rain jacket over my waders made me impervious to the weather, with the exception of my wet hands and the drip forming across the front of my hat brim. Just beyond the dark cloud above, there was the promise of milder clouds and calmer winds. 

I am a young angler. When I moved to Island Park last season, I knew there was much learning to be done. Learning the hatches, learning the water, learning how to fish it. I had grown up reading about the Henry’s Fork of the Snake River, and following its legend was also the irrefutable fact that many considered it the ultimate test of an angler. Picky fish, huge hatches, and long leaders with light tippet are a few of the thoughts that come to any angler's mind when mentioning the Henry’s Fork. Catching a big wild rainbow on Railroad Ranch is a rite of passage for any serious fly angler. It grants you membership into a club of proficient dry-fly anglers. I wasn’t in it. 

I fitted together the old Scott rod as the rain slowed its rhythmic pace on my jacket’s hood, and began the hike downstream towards Osborne. This riffle had small pockets which could be home to some smaller fish. Unstringing the leader from the base of my reel, and sharply tapping the rod dropped the fly from my eyelet into the river, with the leader unfurling in the current next to it. And then I spotted it, a Flav, the small western green drake. Her dark wings pointed high and proud in a small hydraulic behind a stone. The bug spun around in the current awaiting liftoff from the surface film of the river.

 In the riffle, fleets of mayflies bobbed up and down, and unlucky bugs were being slurped up by the occasional trout. The spotted noses of rainbows pushed small wakes creating targets for my down and across presentation. Splashy rises up to my CDC Dun Flav brought several wild rainbows to hand, but mostly little fellas, rosy pink cheeks and dark haloed eyes staring back at me as I gently shook the flattened barb free from their noses. Above me the local Terns squawked and swooped. On the water Swallows hovered over the mayflies, collecting meals to return back to their young. The rain had stopped, and so had the wind. I pulled back the hood from my rain jacket and casted my way down through pods of rising rainbows upstream of the bridge. When my rod bent from the pull of a little wild rainbow, I wondered if the people driving past on highway 20 were watching from the warm cabs of their vehicles. 

Wading boots sloshed water onto the rock bank as I stepped out from the run in search of new water. The late afternoon had passed quickly, and mayflies had become less prevalent on the water's surface. As I waded across a channel, I saw that my CDC Dun Flav had been chewed into frayed pieces of wing and thread. On the far bank, I clipped it off and stuck it onto my hat. I had one left in my drake box, and I withdrew it knowing it may be my last chance for the evening. 

Crossing an island I stepped over a piece of obsidian shard, and I thought briefly about the people who had been here before. What had this fork of the Snake River looked like long ago? I thought about the Nez Perce, and the Shoshone. I thought about a young boy practicing chipping obsidian with an antler and Bison leather. I reflected on how long this river has held meaning.

I casted to the far bank, and drifted my fly gently down, hoping a fish would ambush it from the undercut. None did. I turned around to focus my attention on the confluence with the two channels, noticing how deep it was there. Even in the glittering golden sunset of Last Chance, I could tell this was the deepest part of the run, the darkness hiding away the details of the depths. Then, I heard something. 

The sound was like a drain being pulled from the bathtub, and the suction on the surface was directly in front of me. A fish, undoubtedly large, had given away its position in the confluence of the two currents because of the sound it made when feeding. Taking a half step back, I false casted upstream and across, adding a gentle mend to the current so that the wings of the CDC Dun matched the speed of the current. I held my breath, and for a split second as the fly passed perpendicular to me in the current, I saw it. 

The trout hovered beneath the lure for a moment, inspecting the meal, and for a split second I saw the large black pupil of the fish look at me, into my face, into my own eyes. As quickly as it had appeared, the fish disappeared back into the depths. Sunset was approaching, and the rain had stopped, and the clouds darkened the water making visibility minimal. 

A chill had seeped into me as I carefully backed away from the fish’s position, sure I had spooked it. I collected my slack line and slowly retreated into the grass. But I wasn’t done, I was going to rest this fish. Staying low, I crawled over to the other end of the island, and thirty yards upstream crossed the channel to the other side. The slowness and stealth required took me nearly ten minutes to position myself across and upstream from the last place I saw the fish as it refused my fly. The sharp snap of my nippers clipped the 5x tippet from my Flav, and I withdrew with careful consideration a Mercer’s Stealth Link, Green Drake, size 12. It was a little big, but it was close enough to a Flav. I pulled the knot tight.

It had been 20 some-odd minutes since I had last laid eyes on my finned opponent. I zipped the fly into the air, and false casted three times, before reaching upstream to set my line with a mend onto the water. In the rapidly approaching darkness, I could hardly keep my sight on my fly as the hair-winged imitation danced downstream in the current.  

I lost track of the fly, and for a split second there was a disconnect between my eyes and my brain. Then I saw the swirl from the eat. Suddenly every neuron in my mind screamed “SET.” 

As I did, I felt a weight, and then a headshake which seemed to flex the entire range of the Scott, and then the line went slack. 

I stripped in hard, once- twice, and felt the friction burn on my index finger. On the third strip I felt tension again, as the fish had run directly to my feet. Relief washed over me, and the heavy headshakes returned. Holding the rod high above my head, I felt the fish start to turn out towards the current, and as it propelled itself away out from under me, the line bounced in the air as I gave slack to let the fish run. Then came the first jump. Knee deep in the river, the heavy fish cleared the water to eye level, with three slow motion shakes of its entire body. I bowed my rod down as the finned fiend shook my line wildly in midair. Silver as a Coho, it crashed back into the river. My heart pounded in my ears when it finally dawned on me that I was in for a rodeo. 

Upon returning to the water, the fish ran, taking all the slack collected in loops in the water, and then the ZING of the reel knocked me out of my trance. The first run ended, but the reel continued to backspin after the fish paused. The tension on the rod tip wavered. 

After a hard strip to get back into the fight, my hands swapped, almost automatically, my left hand grabbing the rod and line, and my right hand ever so gently moving the reel drag tighter one hardly noticeable “Click.” Try to overspool me now! But the moment of peace and collection was over, and the second run came.

Once again, the small loop of slack I had just stripped down was heading back out the rod tip, and the fish was ripping from the reel again. This time it tore downstream, into some serious current. The drag still wasn’t tight enough, and as I started to take several steps downstream, the fish jumped one last time, backflipping a good deal farther downstream. The fly line didn’t leave the tension of the water’s surface this time, it just curved upwards towards the fish in the air. Again, the enraged trout came back to the water with a “PLUNK” and a splash of water from the heavier current. I couldn’t chase this fish downstream, now I had to hold my ground.

Changing from being on the reel, which hardly felt useful against this fish, I held pressure, and stripped in slowly and steadily, nosing the fish back upstream. In a stroke of luck, without pulling too hard, the fish ever so slowly was led by its nose back up stream. On two occasions, the fish flexed and pulled out further into the current, but I slowly nosed it back upstream. My arm ached, and my left hand reached for my net.

But it was too soon. I pinched the net between my knees and lowered the rod tip as the Rainbow drew line away from my hand with a single turn of its head. I felt the fish lose its streamlined position in the hard current as it shook again from side to side, mouth agape to throw the steel hook from its tongue. Then, it stopped, and the fish looked at me through the ripple of the water passing by. The fierceness in its eyes made me forget the cramp forming in my forearm. 

I was a good deal further downstream than when I had hooked up. But in the fading light, the world had narrowed down to a single fly, and a shadow in the deep. The battle had turned into a tug-of-war against a Ranch Rainbow that felt as old as the obsidian shards up on the bank. 

Thrice the fish eluded the net at the sight of it, one more halfhearted run, then two dodges. Finally, sliding near the surface, the fish’s front half entered the net, and dripping with water I raised the hoop into the air as the remainder of the fish slid into the rubber basket, the square tail hanging from the end backdropped by the gray clouds above.

My whole body, which had been tensed like a rubber band stretched to the breaking point suddenly relaxed, and I sighed. The battle was over. It wasn’t the largest Rainbow the Henry’s Fork had ever seen, but it was a trophy in my eyes. Gently in the current I laid the fish against the fly rod, clearly marked with paint marks to denominate length. The opening and closing mouth of the fish fell just short of a mark, and I counted. 

Then, throwing my rod onto the bank to save from the current, I cradled the fish and removed the fly with my forceps. The barbless fly slipped out of the fish’s sharp tongue and I noticed the hook had nearly bent straight, one more lucky break in an evening full of them. 

I fumbled for the cell phone, and took a quick image to recall my first real ranch rainbow held in the net. For a moment, I aimed the fish upstream, admired the gumption of this wild beast, and gently pushed it away into the current. The fish swam forward on its own accord, slipping back into the labyrinth of swirls and riffles which made the fish transition from an object, to an abstraction, and finally back into nothingness. I felt myself wearing a stupid grin on my face, as I shook the water from my net bag.

My jacket sleeves were soaked from holding the fish in the water, the droplets rolled down from my forearms and dripped from my hands. I walked back to my truck still shaking from the encounter. It was a golden hazed and misty sunset. I felt quite proud of myself for being skilled enough to fool an animal with the brain the size of a pea. I had read stories about the famous waters of the Henry’s Fork, and now I had my own.

As I walked downstream along the bank, I thought about all the books written on this river, this place. And I hoped that there would be many more volumes written about this spring creek, and about these fish. And I wished that I could be lucky enough to read them.

A bit of luck goes a long way.

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Admittedly, all good fish stories usually end with the big one getting away. And with my track-record on the water, they usually do. Something special about working for Henry’s Fork Anglers is that at any moment, a veteran angler who has been fishing these waters for fifty years, or a novice heading out for their first cast might walk in those shop doors. 

It is my wish that this short tale reminds you of your first Ranch Rainbow, and the chaos which ensued in order to get it into the net. Or, to those like me just entering into these storied waters of fly-fishing, I hope that this tale encourages you to go seek that fish, hidden in the riffle, under the bank, or rising among the weed beds. Mostly, I hope your next well-earned Ranch Rainbow is a memory you get to recall for the rest of your angling days. 

Wishing you the best of luck out there.