Guest Blogger: Michael Vorhis, author of ARCHANGEL suspense thriller, OPEN DISTANCE adventure thriller & more to come

In England and still throughout Commonwealth countries, local roads made of crushed granite fragments are often called “metal roads” or “metalled roads,”  since “metalling” was defined as the practice of binding gravel or crushed stone in a bit of tar to render a rural road durable. If such a term can be applied to overland routes, perhaps a tiny little river that cuts its way through a canyon of granite slabs and litters its bed with the shards of those rocks can be figuratively called “metal” as well.

And so as I type this, I think back on yesterday’s fishing outing with the kind of feeling I suspect the old prospectors might have had when they struck a vein — when men like George Hearst or Pablo Flores hit a shiny seam or mother lode that put a family on the historical map. I think back to the mountain stream I fished yesterday, called the Silver Fork, and I realize that I too have struck “precious metal.”

In this case the effect was to take me off-map, rather than put me on. The Silver Fork of the American River is a tiny tributary of the American River’s South Fork, which itself is one of three separate larger forks of the total Californian American River watershed. The Silver Fork joins the South Fork from a small granite side-canyon high in the tall pines eco-zone; it is a flow of which relatively few are aware, given that most folks scream past the diminutive confluence bent only on shaving a minute off their time to or from the Tahoe casinos.

In this mountain range, such a stream setting is as classic as it gets. Across time, the Silver Fork has carved a small but noteworthy channel through High Sierra granite slabs, and even now slides mostly across them. Although there are loose pebbles in abundance, it is not really a freestone waterway because its real base is largely solid rock. As a result, insect life variety and quantity is somewhat less than what other river bottoms can sustain, and that affects fish growth rates. Terrestrial food supplies are a predominant source of nourishment here. Most water is shallow, and it’s all as clear as the air above it. Roll casts are indispensable, and floating fly lines are the only type that make any sense.

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