The Skagit is hallowed ground — the river that gave its name to the line and the casting style, the spiritual home of the modern two-handed wild-steelhead game. It's a big, glacial North Cascades river, partly held back by Seattle City Light's dams up top, carrying some of the most storied wild winter and spring steelhead in the country. And it is the most carefully handled water in this whole pack, by necessity: the Puget Sound steelhead are ESA-listed, and the famous spring catch-and-release season exists only under a tightly managed ten-year plan — open in some years on a specific reach from Concrete up to Marblemount, and in others closed outright when returns or even funding fall short. So the honest truth about the Skagit is that the first question isn't where the fish are; it's whether there's a season at all this year. Because it's glacier-fed it clears slowly, rewarding patience on a long drop. We surface the run and read the water, but we don't nudge anyone toward these fish — they're too precious, and the privilege of swinging for them, when it's allowed, is the whole reward.

• Glacial