Got an email from FF&W reader, Dan Knox, and thought it would make for an interesting blog post. Dan wrote:

Is there any stream that you have always wanted to fish, but have never done so?
In the USA?
In the rest of the world?
Might you still get to go there?

Where do I begin? Some of the places, well, I’d probably have my tires slashed for mentioning them, so I’ll leave those alone. But, yeah, there are places that I’ve never been that call out to me (and I’m going to go beyond streams here).

In the U.S. of A…half the high-mountain creeks that I drive past when heading to other water, a stream in Wisconsin that I stopped and looked at once and forgot to mark on the map, a hunk of the Golden Trout Wilderness in California, a place I hiked into sans rod in Rocky Mountain National Park, a river in northern Wyoming that requires a special permit, the Marquesas (at about the time Jeff Cardenas lived his book), an island in Lake Huron that I kick myself for not visiting, approximately 98-percent of Alaska that I’ve never fished, a couple of places in/around Yellowstone Park that are insignificant and don’t have big fish, the Sandhills of Nebraska (just because), wherever Conway Bowman and his crew are catching Mako, a couple of rivers in Upper Wisconsota (a/k/a Minneconsin) that contain muskellunge measured by the yardstick, a special steelhead stream with hanging waterfalls and emerald pools and no easy access, a certain really good cutthroat stream “somewhere” in the Intermountain West, a bluefish spot on the East Coast that I have standing invite to fish, and some guy’s stock tank in Texas that has the biggest, meanest, surface-bustin’ largemouth around!

As for the rest of world…half the places I see every month in the Japanese “FlyFisher” magazine, some of the backcountry stuff I missed in Tasmania’s central plateau, about 100 streams I’ve flown past in places like New Zealand and Russia’s Kola Peninsula, a secret stream in Chile that I have pictures of on my hard drive, Costa Rica, the Cook Islands (just because), the mountainous rivulets near the Côte d’Azur (more pix on the hard drive), parts of the Scottish highlands (the parts with brown trout and old ruins), a river I saw in Iceland, that golden dorado stream that Grant Wiswell shows off in the latest “American Angler,” a few “no-name” lakes in Canada filled with angry pike, and a white-sand, blue-water wonder someplace that is devoid of people and filled with easy fish, warm breezes, and no sense of time…

How’s that to get started? Will I get to them all? I hope so. Even if I don’t, I have still been to so many other places that probably fill someone else’s list, that I certainly can’t complain! I hope that all FF&W readers get a chance to cast a line in a spot that they yearn for…even if that spot is a local stream on a quiet evening during a good spinner fall.