Curling, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is an arcane winter sport of Scottish origin in which one player slides a 42-pound disc of polished granite down a sheet of ice toward a kind of bullseye target. This disc, called a “stone,” moves at a glacially slow rate of speed, and as it’s doing so the other players furiously sweep the ice ahead of it with brooms in order to influence its velocity and direction of travel.

I realized last week just how spoiled I am to have the South Fork of the Snake River in my backyard. It’s a painfully predictable river that sports typical western river features, like tailouts, wood close to the banks, undercut banks and braided channels that offer some of the best dry-fly and soft-hackle fishing anywhere.