Lee’s Ferry is the only place in Northern Arizona where steep canyons don’t surround the Colorado River. In 1872, John D. Lee established Lees Ferry, also known as Lee’s Ferry (with an apostrophe) and Saint’s Ferry, at the direction of the Mormon Church. Five years later, in 1877, Lee was the only person executed for the murders by Mormon militia of 120 gentile men, women, and children at the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre.

In 1939, Lee’s Ferry was cinematically burned by Apache warriors in John Ford’s Stagecoach, though in the movie the ferry’s location had migrated to Southern Arizona. Stagecoach is a great movie, but its geography surely is imaginative.

Standing on the west bank of the Colorado and looking left upriver is Glen Canyon National Recreation Area topped by the Glen Canyon Dam, about 15 river miles away. To your right is the Grand Canyon, which continues for 277 miles. Everything left and right is steep canyon. Lee’s Ferry is the only crossing.

Lee’s Ferry isn’t usually spelled with an apostrophe, and Lees Ferry is how it appears on maps (if it appears at all). I recall that some Park Service signage uses Lee’s, but that may be wishful thinking, and Lees is far more common. I’m a stickler for apostrophes though, and its painful for me to leave it out.

Lee’s Ferry is the staging point for raft trips through the Grand Canyon, and it’s a busy place. It’s also popular for sit-on-top kayaks. Outfitters ferry boatloads of kayakers about ten miles upriver from the ferry past Horseshoe Bend, then drop off the kayakers who paddle home. This is not technical whitewater kayaking, and there’s a lot of traffic.

If you have good enough resolution on your computer, there are some little white specks in the river in Kris’s photo of Horseshoe Bend. The specks that aren’t rocks are kayaks.

Thirty years ago Lee’s Ferry was the Southwestern Mecca of big trout, lots of big trout. Wendy and Terry Gunn owned Lees Ferry Anglers and they were famous, at least among fly fishers. My friend Mark says he remembers an issue of Fly Rod and Reel–you remember magazines?–with Wendy Gunn visibly pregnant on the cover. Ladies could fly fish! Even pregnant ladies could fly fish!

Their son, who would have been in utero on the magazine cover, is now in his 20s and runs Kayak Horeshoe Bend, an offshoot of Lees Ferry Anglers. It’s a kayak ferry and rental service. He rescued us when the starter on our guide’s jet boat conked.

Glen Canyon Dam was completed in 1966, and it was always controversial. The Sierra Club hates Glen Canyon Dam, Monkey Wrenchers plan to blow it up, and its success for water storage is dubious. It does, however, let trout thrive where no trout have thriven before. Fly fishers (who tend towards the environmental side of the ledger) may feel queasy about Glen Canyon Dam, but that doesn’t mean they’re not going to fish it. Big wild trout? Lots of big wild trout? You gotta fish that.

Something happened though, and since its heyday the number and size of trout in the river have decreased. Terry Gunn speculated that trout sizes decreased because of the introduction of bad genes from stocked fish during the 90s, or maybe from the reduction of raw sewage from the Town of Page–there’s nothing like just the right dollop of raw sewage to boost insect life. Current studies posit that the drop in numbers of big fish is caused by increased water temperatures, reduced nutrients, reduced dissolved oxygen, and increased numbers of predatory brown trout. Some of the reduction may be drought related, some global warming related, or maybe those are both the same thing.

They should think about adding some raw sewage. It’d probably be good for all those kayakers too.

There are still a whole lotta fish, and fish or no fish, it’s beautiful, with clear green water surrounded by steep red canyons. I can kinda understand why most of those kayakers forgot their fly rods. By all reports there are still big fish in the river. The fish we caught were somewhere around 16 inches or a bit north, and they were solid, healthy wild rainbows. We caught plenty. I caught the first fish early, and Kris caught the last fish late, and we caught a bunch in between. We never worried we wouldn’t catch our Arizona fish.

We fished with Natalie Jensen of Lees Ferry Anglers, who started working for the Gunns in their fly shop in 1995, and started guiding at Lee’s Ferry in 2006. Weirdly Natalie was only our second woman guide. We actually delayed our trip a day to fish with Natalie.

Guides use jet boats on the Colorado. There has to be some kind of motor to get upriver, and jet boats work better than propellers in rocky water.

Natalie’s boat was big, heavy, aluminum, with a Ford inboard V-8. It had a Bimini top, because in Arizona bringing along some shade is a brilliant idea. One of us stood at the back of the boat casting and singing hey-nonny-nonny, carefree as a meadow lark, while the other stood at the front singing blow blow thou winter wind because he had convinced himself that he couldn’t clear the Bimini with his backcast. Which one of us was a walking breathing puddle of mess, unable to throw a fly line? I’m still traumatized.

Natalie would also say that I’m one of the most accomplished line tanglers who ever graced her boat. I spent a goodly part of the morning trying to untangle my line, and after I’d made the tangle worse trying to untangle it, I’d hand the whole mess over to Natalie. She’d keep the boat on track, clear my tangle, continue to give Kris advice, and make it all look easy. Good guides are born to multitask.

We were fishing a double nymph rig, with two flies under split shot and a bobber, so I might as well have been wearing my “Here to Tangle” tee shirt. Layering in my perfectly unreasonable phobia about casting over the Bimini just made things worse. I really should remember to take photos of some of my better tangles. You don’t get my full fishing experience without contemplating a really good tangle.

Natalie was patient though. By mid-morning I had settled down. I remembered that she had said to make a high lift off the water, and I changed my cast so I was making her high lift with a kind of big loop over my left shoulder instead of over the Bimini. It worked ok. I spent the rest of the day without tangles. Ok, mostly without tangles.

Early on I would try to set the hook by lifting my rod left upriver. Mostly Natalie used the oars to keep the boat drifting stern first, so on the bow I was at the back of the boat. We fished mostly to the right of the boat, and left was upriver. I don’t why, but that upriver strike seemed like a good idea, but it pulled the fly away from the fish. Natalie told me to strike straight up, which after the first few misses I managed. After that I still lost a few fish, but not many. I caught a lot more.

How many fish did I catch? Of course I have no clue. I can’t count past one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish, and then I lose track. I caught a pretty good number of fish. Kris caught a pretty good number of fish. It was a day of a pretty good number of pretty fish on a pretty river.

Late in the day the boat’s starter died. It had been cranky all day, but it had the grace to wait to die until the day was almost over. Natalie rowed to keep us out of trouble, Kris kept fishing–now with a big foam cicada fly on the surface–and I daydreamed about the S.S. Minnow and how when we were marooned I’d have to be Gilligan. The Gunn’s son came to rescue us. We listened to the cicadas get active in the afternoon, and we could see them flying off the cliff face. We saw bighorn sheep on the shore. Kris caught a last fish, a brown trout on the dry cicada pattern. I put my rod away and managed to do it without getting tangled.