Nature Pictures from Trout Streams, Page 58

A beautiful braided reach of the Sag River, with the Philip Smith Mountains in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in the background.

This pool produced a few good grayling for me once I found a safe way down around the high gravel bluff.

I missed one strike in this pool after taking the picture. It was a good fish that first showed itself with a telltale bulge and eddies below my fly, the sign of a nice trout refusing without quite breaking the surface. Five or ten drifts later it took convincingly, but I missed the hookset. That was the story that day -- missed hooksets. I didn't stay to fish this pool very long, because I tried to cross to fish it from the side that's on the right in the picture, obviously the best angle, and I found that what looked like an easy crossing near the tail was a swift, bouldery flat of very deceptive depth in the clear water. I found myself half-way across, past what had originally looked like the deepest water, only to find that the water that looked easiest was even swifter and deeper. I thought surely I was in for a swim, but somehow I made it back to the near bank dry and jumped in the car to head for less treacherous wading.

I think this picture really conveys the size of the lower Sag River.

These were the first aurora I saw after moving to Alaska, rising over a mountain above the moonlit Middle Fork of the Koyukuk River in the Brooks Range above the Arctic Circle.

Tundra puddle

This incredibly expensive estate holds most of the land on a prime upper stretch of one of the midwest's best trout streams, and it's the envy of hundreds of anglers who float by it every summer.

A muddy, mile-wide cobble bar on the very lower Sagavanirktok (or "Sag") River.