The Fall River is the largest spring creek in the West and one of the hardest places in California to put a fly over a trout, mostly because you can barely get near the water. It rises from enormous springs in the volcanic Fall River Valley near Mount Shasta and runs as a wide, slow, glass-clear meander through private ranch land — weed-rich, fertile, full of large wild rainbows, and so soft-bottomed and deep along the banks that it is fished almost entirely from a boat. The flow is constant and cold off the lava aquifer; the bed is silt and rooted weed; the surface is a mirror that broadcasts every mistake. This is technical spring-creek fishing at its most refined — long leaders, small flies, the fish sipping in flat water that hides nothing. Wading scarcely figures. It is beautiful, demanding, and humbling in the particular way only a great spring creek can be.

Wading: Soft deep margins, boat water