Lukewarm dregs of coffee sloshed in my mug as we made a hard right turn onto the highway just north of Peachtree.
Clouds hung overhead shrouding the mountaintops, their exposed bases standing like sentinels and ensuring our course remained straight through the valley.
The plan was to meet at the trailhead just after noon with our good friend Dan and his dad Jeff. Jeff had flown in from Idaho the previous morning, leaving the grandeur of legendary western streams to make an arduous five-mile hike to a remote stretch of Western North Carolina, battle near impenetrable walls of rhododendron, and scramble over massive boulders in search of pocket water holding small, colorful mountain char.
For the masses, there is no frame of reference for such behavior, but to us these little fish exude a near-mythic quality: Their splashy rise to a drifting bundle of thread-wrapped elk hair has consumed the bulk of my daydreams since I learned to cast. My friend Sammy’s infatuation is no less passionate; we had been talking about the prospect of visiting this stream since we met several years earlier.
