A lot of us learned to fly fish on small waters. We cut our angling teeth on brook trout-laden creeks of Appalachia or maybe a high-mountain trickle somewhere in the Rockies. My first fly rod trout came from a tiny beaver pond in the headwaters of Colorado’s Taylor River, somewhere on the shoulders of Tin Cup Pass.

This little trickle likely wouldn’t have been fishable at all if not for the beavers that dammed its course and created the habitat suitable for trout. The fish was a stout little non-native brookie that, along with its brethren, had long ago pushed the native Colorado River cutthroats out of the stream. But to a kid more interested in the fish than the flavor, it didn’t matter. What mattered was the opportunity.

That little trickle — and thousands of others like them all across America—was protected by the Clean Water Act until the 2000s, when the U.S. Supreme Court issued a pair of rulings that left these sensitive waters vulnerable to development. According to the court, these small headwater streams — some of which run dry at certain times of the year—had no proven nexus with the “navigable” waters of the country, and therefore, they were not specifically protected under the Clean Water Act.

If you have never seen Green Drakes and Coffin Flies hatch, well, I recommend you make the effort to do so. I had always been somewhat dismissive of folks who chased these blue-chip hatches. I'm partial to the hatches of pale yellow mayflies on late spring evenings on my home waters so I never really got into being on rivers outside my normal range just to fish something exotic. It was an error not to pay attention to the Drakes. They're pretty damn fantastic.

In mid-June Jonny and I were heading west with the hope of taking some carp in Indiana. Driving eight hundred miles to fish for carp may not seem like the most sensible thing but we had good reasons. It's not something I'd done before -- neither the epic road trip nor carp fishing -- so I was looking forward to having an adventure. But being a trout angler I couldn't tolerate the thought of driving so far, passing some of the finest trout streams in the east, without stopping to wet a line.

Penns Creek, our original target, was bank full from storms that had tracked across Pennsylvania the week before. We set our sights on the Delaware system which seemed to have been spared. The fly shop mentioned Drakes and Coffins and when I saw the size of the dries and emergers I had a "holy shit!" moment. It would be quite something to see a trout pluck one of these from the surface.