Headed for the End of the Road
I have been heading for the end of the road all my life. That’s where we find the good stuff. As a small boy growing up in north central Missouri, my parents let me walk a block to the end of the road, cross a hay field and explore the ditch I called The Crick. Both my parents grew up on poor farms, by their nature at the end of the road, and heading to the big city always felt a little spooky in our family. We were a family that fished and hunted and all that stuff that happens after the end of the road.
When I met Mary I was a college drop-out living in Sheridan, Wyoming driving coal trains in Powder River Basin for the Burlington Northern Railroad. Mary changed everything. When we parked at a trailhead in the Big Horn Mountains, I left the road with a partner. Nothing is better.
When we both wanted to return to school, we moved to St. Paul, where getting to the end of the road took a lot of driving. But we paddled in the Boundary Waters and explored the St. Croix River when we could. When we launched our careers and had two girls we kept our noses to the grind stone and everything else for the family, the end of the road a luxury we could rarely afford.
After moving to Gunnison 22 years ago it was easy to get to the end of the road and we bought out first boat, a 16 ft Boston Whaler Dauntless. My parents spend summers in Sheridan at the time and I got to take my father fishing for salmon on Blue Mesa Reservoir. Mary and I started going to Lake Powell about 2010, dragging the Whaler for 7 hours each way and camping at the Bullfrog Campground in our tent. We retired in 2015 and replaced the 16 ft Whaler with a 21 ft North River, a boat we could camp on for a week at time. Now the end of the road is a 7 hour drive, a splash at the end of the boat ramp, and a 2 hour, 60 mile run to the end of the San Juan River arm, and throwing out the anchor off Piute Creek. More recently we added boat camped and kokanee fished at Navajo Reservoir and Flaming Gorge. I am the luckiest guy alive.
Now I’m looking at the end of that other road. Four years ago the day before Thanksgiving I was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer and given four to five years to live. I have been getting top rate care at Univ of Colorado Health, including chemo, and the cancer has not progressed much. But the drugs that keep the cancer from growing work well until they don’t and the big gun medicine, Lupron, isn’t working as well as it did in the beginning. My doc tells me I’ll be fishing next summer and we plan to be heading for the end of boat ramps again. Life is good.
My thinking is that I’ll write and post in the Off Topic Discussions forum about fishing and boating mostly, but also about living and dying. My primary care doc thinks it will be good for me and I’m pretty sure he is right. I appreciate that what I propose to do is a stretch at this Forum and that the Forum rules allow the moderators to cancel me if they think I’ve derailed my train. Wouldn’t be the first time. My doc thinks I might be able to help others with health problems; lots of people get cancer but not many talk about it. Getting ready to die doesn't have to be horrible. I also know this forum in hard up for new content during the winter and that KFF people need to read about fishing.
My next post will be about our two, week long bass fishing and boat camping trips in October to Lake Powell. Later I intend to post about kokanee fishing at Blue Mesa, Navajo and Flaming Gorge. We’ll see where this road leads and if it fits on the KFF site. I know some readers will want to express sympathy, it is only natural. Maybe a good way to do that would be to go to my profile page and make me your friend. You can also leave comments for me on the profile page, especially if you think you are interested in what I plan to write or want to ask questions. There is a sign outside the Urologic Oncology Clinic at UCH that sums up my attitude, “I don’t want your pity but I may need to borrow some of your strength.”
Roger Hudson, aka Kokanee64
Dec 1, 2022
Gunnison, Colorado
Wishing all the best.......
...to all here and facing any myriad of health problems. I am most fortunate to have come through several health scares in recent years including open heart surgery for valve repair, a major stroke, and radiation treatment for prostrate cancer. Through out all, and like all of you, my appreciation for life and health, has only grown while cherishing every time I get to be with family and watch grand kids grow. or get outdoors to camp, fish, or hunt.
Best wishes to you and your wife!
I have always enjoyed reading your posts since they are so well written and informative. Thanks for that! I think you could have made a living as a writer if you did not do that. Your attitude about the "End of the Road" is one I hope I can adopt as I approach that junction.
I am curious about some of the details of one of your recent posts. I will send you a PM and hopefully you can share your knowledge.
Best regards,
Gary
That Special Fishing Trip
Mary and I are busy planning our summer fishing trips and want to extend a fishing invitation to anyone with medical issues who wants to take that special fishing trip. If you or a friend have serious medical issues and want to have a special fishing trip to Flaming Gorge this summer, give us a call. Roger Hudson, in the Gunnison, Co phone book. We think we can accommodate a wheel chair. Although I no longer have the brute force strength to get a person and a chair on and off the boat, we expect that we can always find brute force muscle ready to help at launch ramps. If you can get to Green River, Wyoming by car, bus or train, we have the problem solving skills to put you on the water and, hopefully, hook you up with salmon. Kids are particularly welcome. Don't be shy. Fishing starts soon. Kokanee64
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Our Summer Fishing Part 1
Our summer fishing turned out great but it didn’t start that way. The big snow pack took all of May and much of June to melt, and the lakes were muddy early. We tried Fontenelle late in May and again in June but it was too muddy for good fishing. We finally had better luck in July. Fontenelle is shallow – the area where the kokanee hang out was only about 90 feet deep even with rising lake levels and the deepest water is only around 120 ft. And of course it doesn’t help that Fontenelle kokanee are caught near the surface, where visibility was a few feet. Mary and I call Fontenelle “hard fishing” both because of the challenging fishing but also because of the camping. We camp in the back of our open boat either in one of the two campgrounds or in the parking lot of the dam boat ramp. The camp ground below the dam is right on the river; welcome shade, song birds, water birds, the sound of the river, a terribly rough road, and swarms of bugs. One night was enough. The other campground is much closer to the lake’s inlet and La Barge. It looks like the abandoned film site for a post-apocalyptic movie. This is a place where the wind moans and tumble weeds blow across the road. At first, we thought it was deserted but as drove in we found campers hidden from each other by tall weeds and clouds of bugs. (OK, so perhaps not as many bugs as told, but more than we wanted.) We also found Duck Harvester, his lovely wife and their lab for crew. We shared stories and told fishing lies before heading for the parking lot above the ramp near the dam. Here, the wind blows the bugs away and the double outhouse doesn’t stink badly. What it offers otherwise is an incredible view from a cliff over-looking the lake, dam and a good chunk of Wyoming. Weekday mornings there were 6 to 8 rigs in the lot and on weekends it might double that. It seemed to us the majority were after trout – Fontenelle is known more for its large trout than for salmon. By early afternoon the wind is up and the lot empties. A few people drive in after sightseeing the dam but the lot is the turn-around at the end of the road. Some people stop to ask questions or chat. We talked for about 20 minutes with a friendly deputy sheriff on patrol and he had no problems with us sleeping in the back of a boat in the parking lot. Wyoming fish and game had a person collecting creel information on some days. Otherwise, the place was ours. We took sightseeing trips in the afternoons to get out of the heat and wind.
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The second afternoon of the third trip we met a minister from Lander and his nephew, who were on a camping and fishing trip. They stopped and chatted us up in the parking lot, asking if we knew anything about shore fishing. We invited them fishing and started down the ramp before sunrise the next morning. The short, steep ramp has a turn near the top and a narrow dog-leg at the bottom. Far from the worst we’ve seen but a challenge on the first launch of the season. Fishing was good. The nephew caught 4 or so 2.5 lb salmon and a large trout or two, with 12 keepers total and a prayer at the end of the day. Three days is about all we can do at Fontenelle, so we towed the boat south to storage at Lucerne Marina near Manila, Utah.
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