“It’s a good little stream and it’s got some big fish: cutthroats, like 15-16 inches,” I told him, as we discussed where our next day off would take us.

“Do they take dries?” Spence asked, trying to gauge the day in advance.

“Yeah, that’s all we’ll need, just hoppers, caddis, whatever really. They don’t discriminate, and it’s a cool canyon. You’ll like it.”

That was enough. We were going.

For me, these were memory’s trout, some of my first stream fish, the innocent and red-streaked golden jewels bouncing the end of my first clumsy fly rod.

My mind wandered. “They must still be there,” I thought, confident that the day would be a good one.

So we woke, early like usual, loaded gear in the still silent darkness, and, just as we did on every day off, we turned out onto the highway; only this time we drove, not east, but south.

The drive went as it always does, the passenger dozing off and the driver sucking down Dr. Pepper like life depended on it. That early in the morning it does. Who knows who drove? The drive is just a necessary blur.

The sun touched the lower mountains to the west just as we turned east toward the high plateau country of central Utah. Fairview, a nearby town, was again true to its name that early August morning. Summer’s green oak brush leaves blotted autumn’s bright yellow grass on the west-facing slopes of the foothills.

The ascent up through the canyon began once more to divulge memory’s visions and youth’s wonders. My father’s words whisper at nearly every turn of this steep mountain road. In this canyon my dad taught me more than he knows or even intended; everything from the nature of aspen and fir forests, to elk and black bears, and especially about automobile gears and trout. One should always gear down, both going up and down the canyon. This I learned almost before I knew exactly what gears were. My dad must have told me more than a dozen times about how to navigate this steep and winding canyon, but I mostly heard the words about trout.

We passed the steep little draw on the left, where a black bear had climbed a big aspen (his claw marks in the soft white bark the evidence) and I felt the summit nearing. Just below the top of the plateau, on the right in a meadow that blooms every July, stands an abandoned ski resort. It’s just one old remnant building now. The poles that supported the rope tow have been removed, but I can still recall their deep red rust against the light green grass and white meadow flowers.

The slopes here are insignificant, especially compared to those of the more youthful and adventurous resorts of the Wasatch range. Perhaps rural skiers weren’t as daring or reckless as the suburbified skiers of today. They had to make it home at night to feed the cows, the turkeys, and the kids.

Over the years, my dad had pointed out many elk and mule deer grazing on these grassy slopes long ago cleared for a little speed. He also knew that little trout, some of them hatchery-raised rainbows, lived in the small stream at the base of the ski hill. We never fished there.

My mother, who had accompanied us on several occasions, often informed us of the variety of wildflowers in the meadow. Their names largely escape me, maybe paintbrush, columbine, or wild daisies. She had taught at a summer camp for ll and 12-year-old kids about 10 or so miles from here. The flora and fauna, about which my mom provided a skillful annual exposition to a few hundred short suburbanites, are the same as those found in the ski resort meadow. This day the flowers, nameless to me now, were still there, not in full bloom, but subtly asserting their assuring presence.

At the summit of the canyon, the top of the plateau, the world opens. At that time of day the sun in the east seems close enough to shake hands over the ridge and bright enough to kill. We swerved a little, searching the road for yellow, or white, or any lines and then we guessed and continued into the light on a faith in pavement. The valley sat low, shaded and still, beneath the morning light. We curved a little to the north and rattled down a gray dirt road through small pale clouds of cool morning dust.

The wide rolling valley, split by the meanders of the creek, lies between two long parallel ridges and empties into a steep canyon. The ridge to the west rises gently from a wide, mostly treeless, flat that is perhaps a mile across. The earth here is a pale gray and tan clay. When wet it forms a substance “more slippery than snot.” I’d heard my dad say it every time it rained and once or twice we had lost traction and direction driving through afternoon downpours. The trees out to the west consist only of a few straggly groves of twisted aspens that seem to grow that way in order to dodge late afternoon lightning strikes. The flat is covered, of course, with sage. It is, however, not the brittle brown thorny stuff that holds down the dust in the lower valleys. This is mountain sage, blue-gray and semi-moist, lying low between clumps of green-yellow grass. And the smell of it, ah, the smell.

My family sometimes, more often just my father and I, had camped on the edge of the flat nearest the large shallow reservoir. Our camp spot had no trees but it offered a solid, flat tent site and an irreplaceable view. It was the perfect place in my mind for one to perceive the valley, and it offered a perfect vantage point from which we could watch the water for signs of trout.

“These were memory’s trout, some of my first stream fish, the innocent and red-streaked golden jewels bouncing the end of my first clumsy fly rod.”

My dad and I first came here in search of the large cutthroat trout of his youth. At the time of our first trip he hadn’t been back in decades, but he felt right at home when he first brought me there. I know the feeling. On cool summer evenings he showed me, with solid patience and slow turns of the reel, that a few of these, the old resident cutthroat trout, could still be found in the reservoir. I discovered on my own that these old fish were also found in the stream flowing out to the north. These were beautiful small-scaled remnants of ancient strains, a rare discovery in a time when most of the West’s aquatic environments had been given to Californian and European imports. Luckily, this stream has not seen significant numbers of introduced rainbow or brown trout and has remained remote enough to escape pollution and diversion for irrigation. I imagined that the creek had remained essentially the same as it had been since the last ice age.

My dad never seemed to mind when I left him at the reservoir and ambled downstream into the willow-lined canyon below, and he never accompanied me. He fished on in the reservoir, or maybe he napped, and sometimes he went for a run out into the expansive flat to the west, up and down the little rolling gullies that cut through it.

One of my early wanderings in search of the ancient wild trout revealed something at once monumental and disturbing. Clinging to the opposing canyon walls perhaps a half mile or so downstream from the existing reservoir’s dam are two slabs of thick and crumbling concrete. The slopes of the canyon are water-scarred and barren around them. These are remnants of the old dam. A large concrete silo-like tower, full of many holes and even more bats, stands silently just upstream from where the old dam must have stood. This structure apparently drained a larger artificial lake in times long past.

A line from high water cuts into the hillsides here and nowhere else in the valley, an indication that the the reservoir levels reached and stayed near the top of the old dam long enough for waves to cut and scar the slope. I wondered about the crumbled giant and the lake it had once held. The coal mining communities downstream may have used the lake for drinking water, or mining processes, or for electricity, although it seemed too old for that.

I remember dreaming of the demise of the old dam. I’d constructed a chronology of the events in my young mind. It was probably catastrophic. The flood, I imagined, must have raged down the canyon. There are no towns downstream for quite a distance so the water likely dissipated before reaching any inhabited area. There was some evidence. The canyon floor is scrubbed clean down to the bedrock; this you can still see. Concrete slabs littler the canyon floor for hundreds of yards. The collapse must have been quick and powerful. I’ve never bothered to search out a written history. My youthful mind’s reconstruction of the event has always sufficed. Besides, the big slabs of concrete, artificial rock, now make excellent homes for hundreds of cutthroat trout where they impede and deepen the stream’s flow.

As Spencer and I assembled fly rods and walked by the old campsite, now grown in with the grass of disuse, I thought of the summer a sheepherder, who spoke only a little English, shared our campsite with us. He was friendly and as interesting to me then as any man I had ever met. One evening by the fire he told us in broken English and a simple gestured sign language about how he had caught several large trout in the stream with his hands. He had cooked them on the tiny stove in his tin can trailer and it seemed by his expression that they had been tasty. He likely had no license and the stream was closed to fishing at the time he mentioned fishing it. However, my dad and I never commented to him nor each other that catching those fish like that was probably illegal. His story was perfect. To catch wild trout in moving water with your bare hands, like a bear, seemed noble.

The creek is enlarged as it flows through this valley by tiny tributaries flowing in, mostly from the large ridges to the east. The high ridge on that side of the reservoir lies across an open expanse of sage, stunted willows, and sharp sedges. It juts upward abruptly about a half mile from the water. The top of the ridge stands at more than 10,000 feet in elevation and due to its height the morning sun struggles to warm the valley and clear the lake of fog. The trees on the ridge come down the slope and stop just above the flat, except for a few small groves of heavy-trunked old aspens that stand proud out on the valley floor. Elk often graze at the junction of forest and valley meadows and sometimes, for reasons unknown, wander straight west across the valley and around the north end of the reservoir near the dam staring back at fishermen as they go.

The forests on the ridge to the east are dense, moist, and run its entire length. My explorations in these forests are, to me, legendary, and my discoveries remain important. On this ridge the trees talk in unison. My walkabouts here became knowledge and even today, many years later, I walk this ridge and these forests with plain familiarity, seeing it inch by inch in daydreams.

The aspens amplify sound. A gentle breeze shakes every leaf individually while the whole forest of leaves crash into one another. A slight disturbance in the atmosphere sounds like a gale on the ground. However, with just one or two steps out of the aspens and onto any of the north-facing slopes all noises cease. The shaded slopes with their somber stands of dank moss-barked firs and prehistory’s ferns make even the little irregularities in your own breath seem like they could be heard for miles. Bears must be able to hear breathing in the firs.

When I was younger I would explore these forests with wide eyes and a strange sense of cultural purpose, assuming, like the native people or mountain men, I was the first bipedal visitor to make boot prints in the dark mud around the springs on the ridge. However, as my explorations expanded a man apparently named Eugene Cloward, of Moroni, Utah shattered notions of precedence. I began to realize that Eugene must have walked every game trail and touched every tree on that mountain; he had carved his name and assorted dates in half of them!

From this ridge of my dreams seep hundreds of tiny cold springs that create small brooks in the bottoms of some of the small draws. These brooks then cut deep notches as they push westward across the meadow. They can hardly be seen from any distance, except that the grasses at their banks stay green longer into the summer and scant sedges and small willows line up along portions of their path. It’s in these trickles where the valley’s large cutthroat trout spawn and the newly hatched fry live until they are large enough to survive in the larger streams and reservoirs downstream.

Spencer and I aimed towards a secluded section of stream far down the canyon by cutting across a large bend in the canyon’s path. We walked through yellow meadows and over the tops of rolling sage hills. On the top of one of these small hills stands a single grove of old aspens, which I passed smiling. Somewhere, carved into one of those old white trunks are the names of my father and my younger brother. I once watched them disappear over the small hills and into the grove as I fished. They had mentioned leaving the personalized artifact a few years later. I’ve never seen it.

We descended into the cool canyon air, criss-crossing the slope carefully down to the water, and fished the blissful creek with pure abandon. Although he needed no help whatsoever, I found myself acting subtly as his guide. I had brought him here to try to recreate my youth’s experience with this place, or maybe just to see golden cutthroats again. Either way I wanted it to be just like it had been. For me, I return here to walk further into the intimacies of the place, to experience it each time from another, more experienced, angle.

My dad is a collector of things, all kinds of things. He picks up everything of interest to him everywhere we go. He doesn’t keep it all but he evaluates it anyway. His personal favorites are coins, tokens, bottles, marbles and assorted antiques, but he doesn’t limit it to these alone. He is a bit of an archaeologist, not wanting to lose the past by saving things and reconstructing history in shadow boxes. There is a story buried with and within each of these things.

The current dam at the reservoir is piled earth, covered with stones. These large rocks are composed of a light gray mudstone that contains innumerable fossils, mostly of crustaceans. It’s actually amazing how many fossils there are in these rocks. I used to slam them together and crack them in halves to reveal more and more of the ancient crystalized shells. I once took some home. In my youth I imagined that they had perhaps theft their imprint in the the archaic mud for a purpose; the only lasting story a snail could tell. The tree carving with my brother, not my dad’s usual practice, seemed  the purposeful leaving of a mark, an artifact for the future archaeologist or wandering kid. Eugene’s carvings might have been made for a similar reason; we want to leave a mark. In Mr. Cloward’s case the sheer number of tree marks now reveal that an obnoxious man, though apparently literate, walked the hills with a sharp knife. My dad and brother climbed a hill and made a mark on a tree, it had been, and likely still is, important to them. Call it journaling without waiting for the paper mill. I hoped that my trout would be there for the future.

Late afternoon built shadows from the west and blanketed us with a subtly increasing peace. The creek’s trout were innocent and beautiful, just as they had always been. As the day faded we fished in complete and perfect silence and solitude. That type of silence in the dimming light was, simultaneously, settling and a sure indication that a bear was watching from the nearby forest. I had always reassured myself, that although that bear relished trout even more than I did, he would wait his turn to fish.

We saw plently of the perfect native cutthroats and saw to it that they were quickly returned to the cool waters of the creek. Every native trout here is a discovery and a glimpse into history, not a conquest or prize.

Longing would come, but it was time to go, to keep moving and living. Experience told me we didn’t need to wait for sunset. The ridge to the west is too close and too high for sunset to mean much since sunsets, by their nature, rely on distance to the visible horizon. Mountains hide the still bright sun. It is intense and then just gone, seemingly in an instant.

We moved back up the remainder of the canyon with deepened breaths, past the old dam, and to the reservoir. In the car again, we drove south, bumping down the dusty valley roads and out onto the highway. We geared down to descend. Looking past the oak-covered embankment near the old ski area to the little creek I’ve never fished, dad’s words return. I’ll too tell my children about the bears, the ancient cutthroat trout, and gears. We will leave a mark. It’s important.