I guess I should blame my high school buddy Mark. I had stumbled along without a mentor in my early fly fishing adventures, fishing small mountain streams on family camping trips but most of my early fly fishing was spent dragging a Woolly Worm behind a primitive float tube in southern Idaho’s desert reservoirs. When Mark and I discovered our common interest in fly fishing, we started to look for new destinations. “I heard about a stream up by Picabo,” he said one day. “It’s called Silver Creek.”

My first look into a real spring creek was a life changing moment. The clear water, flowing weeds, emerging insects, and the trout rising to feed on them had me immediately mesmerized. For a few seasons, the selective rainbows of Silver Creek paid little attention to my limited angling skills and more than once reduced me to literal tears. But by my college years, my casting and tying skills improved, and in possession of a well-worn copy of Selective Trout and a Volkswagen Beetle that took me to Silver Creek on almost a daily basis, I eventually figured a few things out.

Since those days, my path in life has followed along the courses of many spring creeks in Idaho and Oregon and California. After an aborted academic career taught me that teaching was my real passion, I was lucky to make the transition to director of both the Orvis and the Mel Krieger fishing school programs in California. Almost 40 years ago, I made to the move to Montana and settling in Livingston, near the Paradise Valley spring creeks—Armstrong, Nelson’s and DePuy’s—was not a coincidence. After a number of years as a fly shop manager, I have been a full-time outfitter and guide, with most of my personal guiding for the last 20+ years on the local spring creeks.