ESPN Great Outdoor Games staff
In a few days outdoor competitors of every size, manner and ilk will gather in Reno, Nev. for the start of the 2003 ESPN Great Outdoor Games.
Nestled on the edge of the Nevada Desert and the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Reno is known as America's Adventure Place.
With good reason!
The timber competitors will be chopping wood within miles of where our early pioneers passed as they followed the Oregon Trail to the promises of the West. Those early pioneers may best personify the spirit of the American outdoorsman: they were normal, hard-working people who had to rely on their outdoor skills to survive the passage by wagon train to the west coast.
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| Reno: Where else can you mend a line outside the doors of world-class casinos? |
Pyramid Lake is right up the highway with its very own species of native trout. The Target competitors will compete with the scent of mountain spruce from Diamond Peak in the air. The backdrop for the Big Air dogs will be the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Lake Tahoe will be just over the ridge with all of its storied trails and vistas.
And running smack in the middle of Reno is the Truckee River. It is a fitting place for Reno to host a Fly Fishing competition as well as the entire stable of Great Outdoor Games competitions in sports that are in their infancy in some respects, even as they are ancient in others.
Reno is a town that attracts normal, everyday families who may not be interested in hiring a guide to row them down the Lower Madison, but who might find the Truckee River an easy place to dip their toe in trout water.
| The image of an angler in sage green waders casting to a rising trout just outside the glow of the neon lights of the Silver Legacy Casino may seem out of place to the uninitiated, but in Reno it's not inconceivable or even surprising. | ||
There is certainly a segment of fly fishers out there who will cringe at the thought of "accessible" and "everyone" being uttered with the same breath.
This group may fear that their pristine, piscatorial pursuit will be warped into something directly at odds with the transcendence they experience while standing in thigh-deep water trying to coax a fish into eating some feathers tied on a hook to look like a bug. But the experience of fly fishing itself is highly personal and has different meanings for different anglers.
In 1992, Robert Redford began to change the experience of fly fishing when he interpreted Robert McLean's novel "A River Runs Through It" for film. The romantic and idealized image of Brad Pitt chasing his rainbow down a breathtaking Montana trout stream was like a siren song for Americans grown weary of the corporate overload they had just experienced in the past decade.
As a result, the fly fishing industry boomed — from rod manufacturers to fishing guides. Today, it is not uncommon to hear a guide in Bozeman, Montana, speak with pride of how he was a flyfisherman "before 'A River Runs Through It'" or hear a tackle rep talk disparagingly of a stall in sales that is "as low as before 'A River Runs Through It.'"
While there are those who long for the days before "A River Runs Through It," when the parking lot at their favorite launch ramp was less crowded, outdoor sport has benefited. And there are those who are happy that a celluloid saga filmed in Paradise Valley, Montana, attracted them to places like upstate New York, eastern Pennsylvania and northern Nevada to try their hand at fly fishing. These relatively new anglers have come to the sport and stayed.
Now, some 10 years after the movie, fly fishing competitions are growing in popularity, and in some ways it was inevitable.
The purist may protest the idea of competing at so noble a pursuit as fly fishing, but it is in the human nature to compete. Since the first time we sized up our brother, narrowed our eyes and hissed, "Betcha I can beat you to the fire hydrant!" we have found ways to turn play into competition.
It's simply in the genes of many people — whether it is marbles, nerf football, the stock market or fishing — we'll find a way to measure who won.
What angler hasn't laid down a friendly challenge of "Who can catch the most?" which quickly leads to "Who can catch the biggest?" after it has sidled by "Who can catch the first?" It's probably much more common that we imagine. Especially in those born with the DNA component that carries the "I can win" message down the brain stem.
Fly fishing has been considered an elitist hobby by some. Certainly the strange garments that are donned might put the novice off. Snapping open an aficionado's fly box may produce a slack jawed stare as the stoneflies and mayflies in all their entomological stages are explained. But largely through television and print media, the mystery of fly fishing is being unveiled and the numbers of participants continue to rise.
Of course, there will always be those who feel like the door to the trout stream should have been closed and bolt-locked after they passed through it, but today the common guys can explore the sport with greater opportunities than ever before. Ultimately, that is a good thing.
In cities like Reno, you can walk out of your office door and watch the river run by. Taking the next step of sliding into the neoprene waders and figuring out the caddis hatch is not far away.
And the Great Outdoor Games, like the movie, could bring many of those tourist families a step closer to finding their way into the river and teaching them the difference between a stonefly and a mayfly.
Meanwhile, the city of Reno will continue to emerge as a destination that brings more people closer to the great outdoors. After all, a river does run through it.
