"My Daddy brought me trout fishing here every summer when I was a kid. I've returned every year since."

The voice was a thin, leathery looking rancher-cowboy with slightly graying hair who just stepped out of the woods right where I was about to go in.

He put down the wicker creel he was carrying and his fly rod, put his two dogs in the bed of his beat up pickup truck, opened a cooler with some food for sandwiches and sat on gate of the truck.

I had decided earlier that as beautiful as this creek was, there were just too many people camping, fishing, dirt bike riding, and just plain hanging around and I was either going to leave or hike up the creek right here where the road left the creek and formed a deep canyon heading off into the wilderness. I figured that a couple miles of hiking might scare off most of these other folks and be enough of a challenge to keep all but the hardiest out.

As I was getting my waders on to do just that for the remaining evening hours, out of the woods steps a vision of how I would have expected a fly fisherman to look 40 years ago. He wasn't wearing any waders, just blue jeans to protect his legs from the harsh California bushes and some wading boots. He had two small dogs following him, a colt 45 strapped to his side, and a classic wicker creel hanging low at his side belaying the presence of no small amount of fish. He had the face of someone who had spent the better part of his life outdoors and at sixty-two looked fit enough to hike wherever he wanted.

He had that ram rod straight posture that comes from always working outdoors and a face and hands that fit that life. Years of fishing had shown him what he needed and what he didn't. On the midsummer days, hot like this one, you certainly didn't need waders. The coolness of the spring fed stream on your legs was a welcome relief from the heat you felt while hiking upstream on cloudless summer California days.

It was six o'clock in the evening and I figured I would fish upstream for a couple of hours and then hike out.

Joe had that endearing central California rancher twang to his voice with a mix of soft spoken intensity, intimacy, and self assurance. You could tell that the day on the stream was the kind of day he could appreciate again and again.

When he told me that he had gone in the canyon at seven that morning and was just now coming out, I reviewed my decision to just spend just a couple of hours here. The review was partly prompted by my periodic glances at his creel and guesses that he either ignored the five fish limit on this stream or had some very large trout in there. Given his lifetime of fishing on this stream, I was inclined toward some latitude on the question of how many fish he was taking home, but as he opened the creel to put the fish in the cooler, I was amazed at the size of the trout he was pulling out. There were only five fish, but each beautiful native rainbow was the length of his lower arm.

I was now convinced that this may well be the place to spend all of the next day, as he recounted how he headed upstream and didn't start fishing until he didn't see any footprints. He kept referring to some holes that were a few miles upstream with large trout and the abundance of wildlife in this canyon including bears. This explained the pistol strapped to his side and caused me to consider the same rig.

He talked on about how the fishing had changed over the years and was open with me about what he fished with. When I asked him if he got any his fish on dry flies, he just said "I only fish with nymphs." He said it with the sureness of someone who had been doing this for years, and I realized that I was only four years younger than him and might have made the determined decision to fish with dry flies whenever possible about the same time as he had made the decision not to. I made the decision by comparing the thrill of a fish rising up to take a well presented fly off the surface and its adrenaline producing visual to the other choice which was a take so subtle that without a taunt line it might be indistinguishable from hitting a rock as it moved along under water. To me there was no comparison; one embodied all that was important and visceral about fly fishing and the other was just another way to catch fish, albeit more of them.

Now it is true that something like eighty percent of a fish's diet consists of nymphs and the bugs taken below the surface of the water, but this just didn't matter to me compared to the thrill of taking a fish on the surface.

I thought about how a more pragmatic thinker could come to the opposite conclusion when looking at the question of how you could catch more fish. Joe struck me as gentle, assured and pragmatic.

The next morning as I entered the canyon heading upstream trying to distinguish his footsteps from the others on the bank, I realized I was following in the footsteps of someone who had done this for over fifty years. As I expected it only took about a mile of fishing upstream for all the other footprints to disappear save for Joe's and his dogs.

My insistence on dry fly fishing whenever possible has left me with many fishless days, but the huge wild native rainbow that slammed my fly in the first big hole I came to assured me that that wasn't going to happen today.

Some of my best memories of fly fishing are days with a good friend that enjoys the sport as much as I do, working our way up a small stream taking turns catching fish. We would each cast until we caught one and then the other would take over until he caught one. There's an intimacy and camaraderie to this approach to fly fishing that I can't get any other way.

I felt that camaraderie with Joe this morning as I moved up the stream with only his footprints. It seemed like every time I would decide to cut across the stream to get a better angle on the next hole there would be his footprints, having made the same decision as I did.

I couldn't help wondering, when I caught a nice rainbow in a deep pool, if Joe had any luck at the same spot. I loved the idea that we were two very different styles of fisherman that actually thought very much alike. That we were two guys from very different worlds that enjoyed the solitude, the beauty, and the excitement that only this kind of "hike up the stream for five miles" can offer.

I thought of this as I sat down for a little lunch and minutes later a deer stepped out of the woods about fifty feet upstream from me. It was one of those rare fortunate moments that occurred only because I happened to be sitting perfectly still, was downstream but downwind, and was wearing sunglasses that hid my eyes. I stayed perfectly still for the next ten minutes as he nervously drank from the stream, ate reeds from the shore, drank more, and eventually slowly sauntered back into the woods as silently as he had come out. A beautiful whitetail buck was as good a lunch companion as one could ask for.

The day got hotter and dryer and I forced myself to keep drinking as I moved upstream, but the pools got bigger as Joe had promised, and the fish got bigger and wilder also.

I always see wildlife when I'm on a hiking up a stream, but today it just seemed like an endless parade of nature's best. With every step a bit of the river or the countryside I was in put itself in front of me. Frogs, snakes, quail, falcons, eagles, and tracks from deer, bobcats, and raccoons let me know that I was never completely alone in this beautiful solitude.

As I hooked into my fifth fish that rivaled Joe's largest, I looked over my shoulder for Joe's nod of approval, decided it wasn't just the heat making me do this, but the feeling of taking this trip with the guy I had only just met but felt as connected to as anyone I had ever fished with.

After a long hot hike out, I made my last beautiful pool a bath tub. Glad to have worn shorts today, I gave myself a dunking in the ice cold spring fed creek. A noticeable gasp emerged as I realized just how cool this water really was. I took off my shirt and used it to towel myself off and wondered how many times Joe had done the same thing.

I realized that the footsteps I had walked in were the result of a lifetime of Joe's experiences like mine today, and today they were the experience of both of us.