The tall country along the Continental Divide of central Colorado still keeps its secrets. But aquatic biologist Alex Townsend is slowly unraveling the natural and human history that percolates from the waters of Twin Lakes into the towering “fourteeners” along the spine of the continent.

His ultimate prize? A rendezvous with a ghost fish that disappeared more than 120 years ago, a victim of “progress” as miners crawled along granite ridges in search of the motherlode and loggers razed black timber from the slopes of the Rockies.

A New York Times Service story credited Richard Hollingshead Jr., of Camden N.J., with opening the world’s first drive-in movie theater in 1933. I beg to differ. Ten years earlier, as a sprout of eleven, I was attending weekly movies at a drive-in theater in the all-but-deserted village of Dakota, which overlooks the Mecan River, one of a splendid network of small trout streams that meander through Wisconsin’s Waushara County.