Essential spring creek skills

I guess I should blame my high school buddy Mark. I had stumbled along without a mentor in my early fly fishing adventures, fishing small mountain streams on family camping trips but most of my early fly fishing was spent dragging a Woolly Worm behind a primitive float tube in southern Idaho’s desert reservoirs. When Mark and I discovered our common interest in fly fishing, we started to look for new destinations. “I heard about a stream up by Picabo,” he said one day. “It’s called Silver Creek.” My first look into a real spring creek was a life changing moment. The clear water, flowing weeds, emerging insects, and the trout rising to feed on them had me immediately mesmerized. For a few seasons, the selective rainbows of Silver Creek paid little attention to my limited angling skills and more than once reduced me to literal tears. But by my college years, my casting and tying skills improved, and in possession of a well-worn copy of Selective Trout and a Volkswagen Beetle that took…