Breakfast at Trout's Place

Book excerpt: "On drizzly August evenings, a bear-fearing man with an eight-weight rod and a large-bore rifle -- a .300 H&H magnum is about right -- could go there and catch silvers, catch them until his forearm wore out. The secret lay in a wisp of a game trail, known only to the hard core, that threaded for a mile through dense black spruce that bristled with the blond, frizzy shoulder hair of passing grizzlies. Often, you could hear silvers before you saw the creek, rolling, tailing, swirling, as silvers will, in the quiet water". From a roadside cafe with huge rainbows covering the walls to a remote fly-in shanty a willowed mile from an unexplored river that might hold steelhead, Ken Marsh will take you on a flyfishing adventure as only a native who has lived and flyfished his entire life in Alaska can. You won't find a catered, cozy flyfishing camp with protective, professional guides in these stories. Instead, you'll join Ken and his sometimes crazy, always interesting friends as he flyfishes through the seasons in the real Alaska. For the anglers who live there, flyfishing is much more than the salmon and big rainbow fishing the outsider rushes in to do. It's quiet evenings float tubing for grayling and flyfishing adventures after prehistoric pike. It's investigating rumors of steelhead and prowling coastlines for sea-run cutthroats. Most of all, it's a search for solitude, for the untrammeled, and for a place where angler and fish can meet in one moment that can't be taken back or forgotten. It's the same search all flyfishers are on, but the scale is, like the state itself, much grander than those in the Lower Forty-eight can grasp during a two-week, color-brochure trip.