"I love Google Earth. It saves us during the winter." (Older Bro, Blueliner)

At the L&&T's recent birthday party (39, and leave it at that), I found myself talking to an avid hiker -- one of those people who wander all over the backcountry, but don't think to bring along a fly rod.

Sure, I don't understand people like that, but they're a great source of information, so when he spoke knowingly about a nearby trail that happened to cross a stream, I leaned in and casually asked about an upstream section of that stream -- a stretch that might just contain a few trout.

"Oh sure," he said. "I know the place. You can hike there, or you can drive a 4-wheel drive road to [redacted] and walk over the ridge."

At moments like that, I try to act casual, and he was only confirming what I'd already guessed, but the urge remained: I wanted to celebrate like I just scored a World Cup goal.

Which isn't the best course of action for overweight, balding guys.

 
Every legitimate blueliner has an intelligence-gathering persona -- the side of his personality that perks up whenever backcountry streams or lakes are mentioned.

At that moment, you become a sort of hybrid James Bond/potted plant, hoping someone will voluntarily part with a useful piece of intel, which you'll happily soak up.

If they don't, you're willing to employ your James Bond-esque charm and brazenly ask. (What, you thought I was going to pull a gun?)

Just as in real intelligence work, you're often evaluating the oddly shaped white spaces around the information as much as the information itself. And the best you can usually do is create a loose theory about what's waiting (though in this case, getting it wrong usually just means the waste of a day).

It's like assembling a big jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing, and the best operations are those where you get in, get the information you need, and get out without raising any suspicions (at the party, I found out about the stream's headwaters, but never uttered the word "trout").

The High Tech Blueliner

Of course, today's bluelining spook enjoys access to powerful intelligence gathering technology -- including satellite imaging, which isn't the silver bullet it might seem.

Google Earth doesn't resolve enough to tell me what a stream actually looks like, but with a little work, it can tell me where a certain Forest Service road comes to within a mile of an otherwise inaccessible stretch of stream, and if that doesn't make your fly fishing pulse quicken just a bit, then you probably don't have one.

Especially if that stream fishes pretty well in the parts you can reach.

In the same vein, I've been meaning to try one local stream for a couple years, but until I poked around on the satellite images, I didn't know a logging road approached it from the opposite side of the ridge.

Oy.

The Tech Trap

Technology has its downsides; an Undergrounder once wrote to tell me pictures posted directly from your cell phone sometimes contain GPS data in the metadata.

I haven't checked that out, but it remains a useful warning about the proliferation of social media, which actually encourages you to give up more than you realize.

You wouldn't want to reveal the location of your favorite small stream by posting an update to social media that pinpoints your location using the GPS on your smartphone.

It's either a warning to turn off your phone's GPS, or simply a lesson in the dangers of social media.

Either way, if you don't go overboard, technology offers you access to yet another piece of the puzzle, which is what Older Bro and I are assembling right now.

Planning highly speculative trips in the dead of winter is the best antidote there is for not going fishing, and we've got four post-opening-day trips in the hopper.

Only one potentially involves trout bigger than 12 inches, but then, Lewis and Clark didn't wander all over the west because they were looking for a Boone && Crockett elk.

Turning a few small scraps of information into a pool of flowing water filled with colorful trout -- one that may not have been fished in decades -- is what blueliners are really looking for, so if you see a middle-aged guy doing what soccer players do when they score goals, well, don't ask.

I mean seriously, don't ask. I won't tell.