just my story

The man sits and wonders just where the time has gone and where it is going. His memories are full of his youth, a youth that that was filled with wonderful things, hunting, fishing, hiking, camping, sumiting the high peaks, observing nature and learning the interconnection of the natural world. He remembers times when even the smallest of creeks held an abundance of trout, both rainbows and browns where beaver dams created quiet ponds, where small communities of the local wildlife made their homes. He remembers a time when rabbit, quail and deer hunts where a means of supplementing the dinner table, not just for trophies and bragging rights. You see this man grew up in the Sierra Nevada’s of California in a small logging town where everyone new his fellow townsmen where no one locked their doors and trust was a given unless abused . As a young man he spend many a fall, winter and spring living in Yosemite national park, a time when during the week days, the valley was almost empty. Spending many a day casting upstream during a hatch, to countless trout holding in the Merced river, he can still remember the first golden trout he caught up in the high country and the alpine lakes, their surface boiling with Brookes, the bear, bobcat, raccoons , mountain lions, owls, gray squirrels and chipmunks. And the ever present camp blue jays. These things he speaks of happened not so long ago, from 1970 to 1989. But the 1990s brought an influx of people and a circus atmosphere that seemed to change the park forever. Now as a wild young man he enjoyed the parties and the people he met during those times, but in hindsight he never saw what was to come.