It was one of those hopeful moments, laced with a touch of experience from years of watching Rocky Mountain skies and trying to decide whether it would be wise to wave a 9-foot lightning rod around with a potential thunderstorm building on the horizon.

“I, uh, think it’s going to go north of us,” I said, waving my arms off to the west and pushing them to the right like a local TV meteorologist. Only my greenscreen was the Beaverheads and Centennials as they poked into stormy skies off in the distance “We might get a little spray, but I think we’re gonna to be OK.”

I guess you could say the upper North Platte River in southern Wyoming is my home stream. It’s an easy couple of hours from the house, a river my family has long embraced as a refuge from the heat of the high plains in July and August, a place we fish in the summer and I hunt in the fall, a thread of emerald and sapphire in a landscape of gray and tan.