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Over the winter while we were fighting cabin fever and stuck in the winter doldrums, HopBack (Brian) said to me that we should book a trip to Colorado fishing. Basically, he said that we might as well book it then and now or else we might never get to actually doing it. That's a sentiment I agree with, so we booked the trip with a flight to leave BWI on June 21 and to return to BWI on June 28. He had been out there once before on a fishing trip roughly three years prior, and I had never stepped foot into Colorado. He booked the flights; I booked the rental car. We were ready.

SATURDAY - 21
June 21 arrived, and we left Brian's house at roughly 4:45 am. We had an uneventful flight, and we touched down in Denver, secured our rental car, which was a Jeep Grand Cherokee, went to Wal-Mart to get provisions, and then we left the Denver metro area as quickly as we possibly could. Roughly 60 miles west of Denver lies the town of Winter Park, and just outside of Winter Park is Arapaho National Forest On this trip, National Forest lands were extremely important because the plan was to be wandering, nomadic, dirty fly fishermen who would camp in a different spot each night. Brian, who served as the chief navigator and trip organizer, chose this spot due to its relative close proximity to Denver since it would be a long and tiring travel day. My chief role on this trip was to drive wherever Brian directed me, which would total roughly 850 miles through Colorado in a week. Anyways, the stream that he had chosen to eat up some of our time on that first evening was Vasquez Creek. We arrived along the shores of Vasquez at roughly 5:00 pm, and we found a multitude of others camping in the National Forest. We pitched our tents, and we decided to fish the waters of Vasquez. I was exhausted, and nothing was going right for me this first night. The water was so cold that I was miserable. It actually hurt. And the little stream was raging so hard that it was hard to get your...