With 30-plus years of fly fishing under my belt, I no longer care how many fish I catch in a day. The experience of fly fishing is about more than size or numbers. I just don’t keep count anymore. But this day, I was fishing a place called Hellroaring Creek, and this day was different.

Hellroaring Creek isn’t easy to get to. It starts with a 1,000 foot descent, then you cross a 200-foot high suspension bridge above the Yellowstone River. Then a few more miles of hiking until you reach the creek. It’s in grizzly country. You can’t let your guard down. I knew I would find solitude there and I was right.

The very first cast resulted in a nice sized native cutthroat trout. After its release, I laid down a second cast and once again the water boiled as my fly was snatched. And then it happened again, and again, and again. A while later, I was sitting on a log outside a ranger cabin, having lunch, contemplating the poster warning me of a nearby elk kill, and the grizzly that was likely on it. And I began to wonder just how many cutthroats I had actually caught that morning. It was surely more that than I had ever caught in such a short time before. I suddenly had a desire to know just how epic of a day it was. I decided that after lunch, I would count and keep track of every fish.

The epic fishing persisted, and after a few hours’ time, I was up to fifty cutthroats landed and released. I knew that meant that I had most likely caught well over one hundred fish that day. I stopped fishing. No one deserves to catch more than a hundred fish on a dry fly in a single day. Next to me was a deep pool at the foot of a cascade. I took off all my clothes and swam naked with the cutthroat for a while, thinking about what I had experienced. And then my thoughts turned to the grizzly. “God, I hope I don’t get eaten on the way out!”