It was my last day fishing with the “Michigan guys.” I first met them when Joe Sprys invited me to speak and tie flies at the Michigan Fly Fishing Club’s annual banquet. That’s when I learned that a group of club members made an annual fishing trip to Colorado. Each year, they picked a base camp area and fished the rivers, lakes and streams around it.

They invited me to join them, which I did almost every year until COVID derailed their trips. This year, Joe reunited the group, and they came back to fish.

We based ourselves out of Salida and fanned out to the upper Arkansas River at Hayden Meadows near Leadville, south over Poncha Pass to the South Fork of the Rio Grande River near the town of South Fork and a nearby high country lake at 11,000 feet.

The Michigan guys planned to fish for several more days and, after that, some would head to Utah to fish the “cutt slam” where you attempt to catch all the cutthroat trout subspecies in the state.

However, this was the last day for me. I had commitments that couldn’t wait on the Front Range. For my last day, we decided to fish a small brook trout stream in the Collegiate Peaks that we’d fished every year we’d been near it.

The stream is populated with your everyday kind of brook trout where a 7-inch fish is commendable and a 10-inch fish a trophy. These aren’t the gargantuan brook trout that the rich guys travel to Labrador to catch. They’re the dinks that teach kids how to fish and older anglers hold briefly in their hand to marvel at their beauty.

You won’t typically find this trout delicately sipping an emerging midge in some back eddy. Even the smallest among them attack a dry fly with reckless abandon. If they’re too small to get the fly in their mouth, they keep pounding it anyway. I’ve caught 4-inch long brookies that managed to get and keep a size 12 grasshopper imitation in their mouths.

If brookies could talk, and I have wondered on a few perfect high country days if they weren’t indeed whispering to me, they might say reckless is the only way to live when the wintertime snows that blanket the high country are always just around the corner and you need to bulk up while you can. And don’t forget that brook trout spawn in the fall, and that takes a little added energy, too. I’ve had their exuberance rub off on me a time or two, and it’s a good thing that it did when I faced a hike out of the backcountry with only my head lamp for company.

Anyway, we bumped and banged our vehicles up the wash-board road where it’s impossible to not let out a yelp when you crash into a larger than average pot hole. We parked on the edge of a meadow where I could hear the stream when I got out of my truck. Some of us suited up in our hip boots, and others chose to gear up for wet wading. It didn’t take long before we scattered out of sight of one another up and down the stream.

This was one of those windless, crystalline days that you sometimes get toward the end of August and into September. There was just enough chill in the air that I pulled on a sweatshirt, thinking autumn is surely on the way just like I do every time I’m high up in the mountains this time of year. I knew that the snow could fly any day now but also knew it wouldn’t happen this day and the brookies would surely be looking up.

Once on the water, I cast my Yellow Stimulator up against the opposite bank into a narrow ribbon of shadow. A chunky 6-inch long brookie attacked it in a reckless, splashy rise. This trout was decked out in flashy orange spawning colors. I quickly removed my fly from its mouth and took moment to enjoy its slippery, silky body before I released it. He was gone in an instant. That first trout was followed by at least a strike and often a hookup every time I cast my fly to a spot I thought a fish should be.

My day was magnificent.

I understood that the drive home would be long, and I didn’t want to go. I wondered if there might be some way, at least in my mind’s eye, that I could distill a little brookie recklessness for myself and inhabit that place forever.