Michael Wright: Remembering the best adventures of 2024 … or at least some of them

Most days, I carry a small notebook in my back pocket. I’ve done this for years, and it’s probably my only useful habit. It’s a great way to preserve thoughts that would otherwise evaporate – story ideas, grocery lists, where the car is parked.

Eventually, the notebook either fills up or vanishes into thin air.

In June, after one of the notebooks disappeared, I started a new one with a new idea. Instead of treating it solely as a repository for mundane miscellany, I’d treat it like a hunting and fishing log. A journal that could help me remember important seasonal occurrences, like the timing of the damselfly hatch on Amber Lake.

Plus, if I was really reaching for something to write about at the end of 2024, I could pick it up and mine it for some “year in review” gold.

Flipping through it this week, I was reminded that I lack the diligence required to keep a complete diary. There are more than a few trips I forgot to record, including some of my favorites. Several entries were clearly written a week late.

They also vary widely in length. Some are just a few words, and others spread over three or four pages.

But the notebook is nearly full, save for a few inexplicable empty pages in the middle. Only a few of the entries are completely off topic, and I even occasionally wrote down the date.

There are notes about bass and panfish at Fan Lake and about a glorious stretch of July in Montana. There are notes from the North Fork of the St. Joe and snippets from walks in the Salmo-Priest and Cabinet Mountains wilderness areas.

Several pages cover the full range of emotions that occur in steelhead country, from the afterglow of catching a fish on a skating fly to the hopelessness that comes after days of not catching fish.

I wrote about most of those adventures for this newspaper in one way or another in 2024, but the notebook also includes trips I didn’t write about. Random scenes from the dog’s first bird season, for example, or that trip to the Methow with my wife that started horribly but recovered on the second day.

Most of the days were memorable enough on their own, but the notes preserved details I’d forgotten. Like the steelhead that nudged my fly on Oct. 14 on the Clearwater. It wasn’t on long enough for a memorable fight, so the grab had been wiped from my brain.

Overall, the notebook is evidence that the second half of 2024 was pretty good.

The first half was good, too. I wandered around caves in the scablands, had spectacular dry fly fishing on the North Fork of the Coeur d’Alene and watched my friend Joe break his fly rod on a Rocky Ford rainbow.

There was probably more, but I don’t have the notes to prove it.