Editor's Note: First published in 1984, "Mountain Time" opened the eyes of many readers to the wonders and tenuous situation of Yellowstone National Park. The author's love of fly fishing underscored what was valuable about the resource, and the book developed something of a cult following for its ability to cross the scientific, ethnographic and sporting currents that helped define the author's work as a Park ranger. "Home River" is an oft-quoted chapter from the book.

FISHING HAS A REPUTATION as an innocuous, fairly mindless pastime enjoyed most by shiftless people. Perhaps that impression would be lessened if nonfishers understood more about wild water. Calling fishing a hobby is like calling brain surgery a job. The average visitor driving through Yellowstone sees no farther than the surface of the water. At best the lakes and streams are mirrors reflecting the surrounding scenery. For the alert fisherman, especially the fly fisherman, the surface is not a mirror but a window.

Drive through Hayden Valley, along the Yellowstone River. If you aren't a fisher you'll see many things, but the river, except where it is ridden by waterfowl or waded by moose, will rarely enter your thoughts, much less stimulate your spirit.

It's different if you fish. The surface of the water tells a story: that hump followed by a series of lessening ripples (if they were larger they would be called standing waves) is proof of a rock or a stump submerged below. Those boulders on the far shore break the current, which moves slower close to them as the rock rubs, catches, and retards it; fish and smaller creatures press themselves close to such obstructions to ease the labor of maintaining position in the current. The quiet eddies behind this log jam are home for schools of minnows and the occasional dragonfly nymph that will feed on them if it gets a chance. Soft swirls and rings on the river's surface are made by trout rising gently to inhale newly hatched mayflies floating on the surface as their wings dry. This water is a wilderness of its own, full of life we do not know and beauties we have not imagined. The fisherman is not unique in appreciating it — any good naturalist finds it absorbing — but the fisherman has found special ways of becoming involved in it.

The Gardner River is a small rocky stream born at about 9,000 feet in the Gallatin Range a few miles southwest of Mammoth. In its entire length of about twenty miles it drops over 3,500 feet to its mouth at Gardiner, Montana, where it joins the Yellowstone (because of a quirk of events, the town is spelled with an "i" and the river is not). It flows from its headwaters pond at first north, then east, then southeast, and across Swan Lake Flat to its junction with Indian Creek at Indian Creek Campground, where it crosses under its first bridge, the road from Norris to Mammoth. After this brief encounter with civilization, it runs east and then north, around what we call the "back" of Bunsen Peak, where it drops into its little-traveled canyon. Far below the vertical basaltic cliffs, the river gurgles along, pouring 150 feet in one jump over Osprey Falls and out across the eastern foot of Bunsen Peak. It passes under another bridge, the Mammoth-to-Tower road, and almost immediately is joined from the southeast by Lava Creek, which has just left its own canyon. The greater flow then follows the west foot of Mt. Everts almost due north until it dumps, rather privately, into the Yellowstone River right at the park boundary in Gardiner.

I caught my first trout from the Gardner. When my brother, a fly fisherman of long commitment and great learning, heard that I was going to move to Yellowstone he forced into my hands a complete fishing outfit, insisting that I learn to fly fish and initiating me in a pastime that has at times been more a way of life than a sport. That first time, however, I was so intimidated by all the new devices and techniques that I was busy fiddling with the reel when a hungry little brown trout grabbed the fly I was paying no attention to, and I landed him only after considerable discussion and with relief that I'd chosen such a private spot for my first outing.

It turned out, as I was then just discovering, that fly fishing is genuinely unlike other types of fishing. The flies — usually small, delicate imitations of various forms of insect life, made of feathers, hair and yarn tied to a small hook — have practically no weight. They cannot be cast with a spinning or casting rod like other lures that weigh enough to be thrown and drag the line along behind them as they go. In fly fishing, you are casting the weight of the line, instead. Fly lines, the best of which cost thirty dollars, are thicker than other fishing lines, thick enough to be worked back and forth through the air on the same principle as a bullwhip. The fly is attached to a fine monofilament leader on the end of the line, and simply goes along for the ride. Fly lines are usually plastic-coated and tapered on the end to improve the smoothness of the cast. It takes some practice to master this kind of casting, but to watch an accomplished caster working seventy feet of line on an eight-foot rod, to see the line looping and rolling straight out behind him, then, as he pushes the rod forward, to see the line roll cleanly out in front of him and settle gently across a stream, brings to mind more artful motions — ballet, perhaps — than are normally associated with fishing.

I spent my whole first summer fishing alone, in the privacy of my own home river, until I could push out a decent trout-fishing cast of forty feet and could catch Gardner fish with some regularity (it was only later that I even realized that some people could cast three times as far with less effort, and learned how much there actually was to getting good at fly fishing).

Learning to cast was only the beginning, and the least fun, of learning to fly fish. fly fishing introduced me to the aquatic world I mentioned earlier, led me to look under countless rocks in the shallows for squiggly little marvels I never dreamed existed. It led me to learn to read water: to study a current and its behavior for what it could tell me about what lay beneath — where the insects, shelter, and fish might be found. In this it taught me to appreciate running, moving water and the constancy of its workings. For never did I visit this river without seeing something new, some slight change in the flow or in the cut of a channel or in the shape of a bank. The changes became part of the excitement for me, and each spring I eagerly awaited the passing of the snowmelt runoff, not only so that I could fish but also to see what new shapes the flow had taken in favorite spots. Over the years some pools silted in; others deepened. A dislodged log would jam in a new position, and I would investigate it as the current dug a new trout shelter beneath it.

Most of this happened very slowly. A tree might be washed from its place on the bank by a sudden flood, but more often it would be undermined gradually, as the water loosened the soil, bit by bit, finally persuading the tree to fall. If rivers were human, they would be very patient people.

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