I grew up under the roof of a fly fisherman, a well-respected guide whose father - a guide himself - was a pioneer on his native Snake River. I remember him as a skilled caster who could throw a line more that 90 feet and make it seem effortless. I remember him, too, as a superb oarsman, getting his low profile raft into the tightest of positions. But more than anything, I remember him as a fly tier.

In a small room of the house I grew up in, my father would toil away the short days and long nights of a Wyoming winter churning out an endless supply of flies - between 12,000 and 15,000 every off-season, filling orders for local fly shops and private clients, as well as making sure his own boxes were full. As a small boy, I would follow the heavy smell of head cement into his tying room, where I'd watch him work amongst the piles of deer hair and stacks of hackle, an unfiltered Camel dangling from his lips and a constantly filled cup of coffee sitting off to his left - out of the way, yet within easy reach of his non-thread hand.

"It's been a grand tournament so far - don't you think?" asked the prideful chairman to the leather-tanned skiff guide approaching the trophy table.

"Grand, perhaps, in the sense of fine weather," the guide scoffed with a sidewise glance toward the competitors gathered on the dock.

The chairman set down his Styrofoam cup with the lime slice wedged on the rim and nervously fingered the embroidered sponsor logo on his shirt. "But, has it not been grand overall?"

"No. Overall it's been a tad less than grand."

"The competitors? Have they not been grand?"

--Mike Muri

It's an orgy that would have made caligula jealous. an unusually warm mid-may day filled with frenzied lovemaking, the participants' bodies locked together coupling with a purpose, oblivious to all that surrounds them. Onlookers are left to gape in wonder as caddisflies in every shape, color, and size procreate with an intoxicating intensity. My riverside campsite, tucked in at the end of a rugged dirt road, provides an unmatched view of the broad Yakima River and surrounding cliffs. A large cottonwood tree in the middle of the site offers blessedly cool shade in the afternoon and a place to hang my waders at night. The tree also serves as a boudoir for the amorous insects that wander anxiously about its new spring leaves. Caddis cover everything within 20 yards of the river - tent, car, cooler, camp chair, legs, arms, head. Many are joined at the abdomen, sometimes in threes and fours, crawling everywhere.

The pacific ocean covers 70 million square miles of this planet. A vast network of birthing rivers is needed to fill a biologically meaningful portion of so great a sea with salmon. One of the most crucial of such networks is the Columbia/Snake river system, a single great Y-shaped flow, each wing of the Y a thousand miles in length, draining 260,000 square miles of continent all told.

The entire salmon and steelhead population of the Columbia wing was destroyed in a day, fifty years ago, by the Grand Coulee Dam. The Snake wing is now the only significant salmon sanctuary left in this system. Thanks to the Wilderness Act, hundreds of its tributaries remain intact and healthy. Yet extinction for the remaining Snake stocks is predicted to begin in 2017 and be complete a decade or so later. The problem is the infamous lower Snake River dams. A 130-mile corridor of flaccid, desert-heated, predator-filled slackwater and four killing sets of turbines sit between the Pacific and the salmon's vast wild refuge, killing in past years up to 97 percent of ocean-bound juveniles and 40 percent of returning adults every year.