Back on the Water: Prospecting for Upland Grayling in Mongolia's High Country

It felt good to finally get out on water our last September in Mongolia. It had been too long. Prospecting for grayling on a small upland river took us back to prospecting for trout in small waters in other places.

Translucent as water, nearly, marked like stained glass, the grayling's dorsal fin. And every hue and shade, color and curve of their muscled body matching the wet, polished granite of home.

Autumn comes early here. Larch trees gold with it by early September. First snow not long after that.

Dark with Autumn, the year's last grasshoppers.

A splash of crimson...

We went with a friend who drove up to the headwaters in an open four-wheel drive, water swirling across the floorboard as we pushed through the river. Parked. Hiked. Drove and hiked some more. Barbra and I headed downstream. Our friend and his son went upstream.

And then we found the water - the depth, the flow, boulders that had spilled off a steep hillside breaking up the current. A few blue-winged olives, sunlight in their wings. We didn't cast. We stayed back and  watched. Until suddenly, in front of us, tens of fish materialized out of nothing - out of water as clear as air - porpoising and splashing across a run maybe 60 feet long and half that in width. Several times the fish rocketed completely out of the water. We became lost in it, nearly every cast a fish or at least a take, Bar fishing a delicately tied blue-winged olive, me fishing a bead head pheasant tail.

And these fish... Eight inches or eighty pounds... they came to our flies. They were still rising and taking when we left, the sun low behind the hills, our friend anxious about the fading light and the long trip down the mountain. 

A backward look... This would prove to be our first and only fishing in Mongolia. A perfect day.

A mountain river. Water clear as air. Grayling. Grayling water. Mongolia...