The river in winter

"A River Never Sleeps" is a simple but profound pronouncement; Roderick Haig-Brown wrote that phrase as the title of what many consider his best book.

No other angling author captures the essence of fly fishing in words as Haig-Brown did. Some might grab it for a sequence of phrases, a paragraph or an entire passage; none did it as well as Haig-Brown for the length of an entire book.

He wrote from a sense of intimacy with his home river, the Campbell on Victoria Island in British Columbia. The Campbell at the time Haig-Brown fished it was pretty much unspoiled. It has always hosted magnificent steelhead and salmon runs, and the upper river is home to some pretty decent cutthroat fishing when the salmon aren't in.

Today the river is crowded as compared to Haig-Brown's era; the town of Campbell River where he was a magistrate judge is now a city roughly half the size of Missoula; still, you can find a virtually unspoiled river there that offers some prime angling experiences.

A fly fishing conservationist

Haig-Brown understood and appreciated the many-layered nuances of the fisheries he enjoyed. His life was a fulfillment of Lee Wulff's observation: if one becomes a fly fisher one might ultimately become a conservationist.

If he were alive he'd bemoan the crowds but could take comfort in knowing that despite the piracy that Japan has inflicted for generations on the high seas, if the salmon make it home to the upper Campbell, the spawning grounds are still there.

The scenery, lodged and etched into the rough and majestic rock that surrounds the riverbed, seems unchanging. The river itself hasn't been serially abused. There is still a sense, when an angler shares a riffle today that he might have had to himself in years past, that the intricacies of life-chains and their habitat are pretty much unspoiled.

Haig-Brown was a pioneer fishery conservationist who set the tone and provided the example for many who followed. Where he wasn't a leader he was a spokesman. One man can only do so much; he did a great deal.

The unspoiled sense that we crave

Today there are more conservation organizations on the Bitterroot than on Haig-Brown's Campbell. To put it bluntly, they are fighting a battle of attrition and losing against the bureaucratic and commercial interests that are sacrificing the Bitterroot River on their own altars of career-building and financial gain.

You can still get an unspoiled sense of the Campbell when you fish it, even if you're not alone.

That unspoiled sense we yearn for is disappearing here on the Bitterroot. Trophy homes continue to sprout up along river and stream banks. The river's vital streambed habitat is being wrecked with domino-like chains of consequences. The fishery itself is under constant attack.

The river would restore itself, and it wouldn't take too long or demand too much from us, if we could exert the collective will to change just a few things. Unfortunately, doing so would take a considerable push, given the sophisticated self-interest, mellifluous lip service and money-driven greed of the spoilers.

Now we must go elsewhere to experience that unspoiled sense of a river and its fishing experience that Haig-Brown wrote of; we used to have it here.

The river in winter

For the time being, the forces working against the river take a hiatus under the blanket of snow that brings the construction equipment and chainsaws to a standstill. The serenity returns, for a while.

Beside that canopy of snow that is etched by her currents along her banks, the river is not asleep.

The leaves, needles, twigs, beaver-chewed willow ends and fallen trees that are the uniquely indispensable, integral, woody base of this river's living matrix, will continue, ever-so-slowly but incessantly, to decay as their component nutrients become food for a wide range of biota – bacteria, algae and phytoplankton.

The nymphs of aquatic insects that feed on this biota will continue to grow. Along the way some of them will hatch into the little bugs we call midges, and later, snowflies. Others will hatch when the river warms in seasons to come – and they are maturing now.

And the trout, too, will continue to eat. They consume less and expend less energy, now, but they still eat. Every now and then you can catch some.

The snow brings its own beauty, tranquility, and serenity; it can be deceiving as far as the river in winter is concerned – though quiet and still, it never sleeps.