Imagine taking a year off work, buying a little RV camper, and travelling around the West to fly fish in places with awesome scenery. How sweet would that be?
Shelley Walchak did that before hiring on as director of the Pine River Library last fall; and she wrote a book about it.
Her self-published book is "52 Rivers: a Woman's Fly Fishing Journey."
Walchak's adventure started after she helped organize an international library conference in Telluride in 2012 on ways for libraries to reinvent themselves and expand their roles in their communities. Judy Poe from the Pine River Library also was part of that.
The conference included balancing risks and rewards, Walchak told members of the Pine River Centennial Rotary Club on Sept. 30. "I took this risk and reward conference really seriously and decided if I didn't take the risk (of a year off work) then, it wouldn't happen. It was a year of discovery, the great outdoors... I started planning for a year off and fishing one river a week in the seven Rocky Mountain states. I bought a small camper and equipment, and started blogging."
She continued, "It wasn't just self-discovery. I'd been a librarian my whole life, everything to do with books except publishing one." She also discovered a love of photography during her travels and has received several awards for her photos. They are a major part of her book, which also has won three awards.
The adventure started in January 2013, a very dry year. She was living in Denver at the time, so she started on the South Platte near Deckers, then headed west to the Blue River and the Williams Fork. She fished tailwaters below dams that don't freeze because it's always in motion. That included the Taylor River north of Gunnison. Sometimes she was out there in minus-10 degree conditions.
"There were a couple times during snow storms when I wondered, 'What am I doing?'" But she said she knew exactly what she was doing out there.
In March, Walchak was in southern Utah. The fishing was poor, but the scenery made up for it.
She fished in some pretty remote places and got there however she could, including by snowmobile and even by small plane, also making some float trips. She hired local guides to get her to the good places. "They were all characters," she said. Her father, who had died recently, provided the money for her to pay guides. They are expensive, she said.
Much of the time, she was by herself. In March on the Fremont River just west of Capitol Reef in Utah, she found herself on quick-mud. "One step, two steps, then I couldn't move. It was a bit scary," she said. She got out of that by getting down on her knees, which released the suction hold on her feet, and crawling out.
All of Walchak's fishing was catch and release, after holding the fish up for photos. They are beautiful creatures, she said. She showed a picture of a 27 1/2-inch trout she caught on the Yampa River in April. It was fish like that all day long, she said. It was still winter there, and she got to that spot by snowmobile.
The adventure continued in other parts of Colorado and Utah, and into Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana. In June, her sister joined her and caught a 26-inch brown trout on the Strawberry River in Utah. Walchak called that river one of her favorites.
She was fishing on the Rio Grand near Creede in July during the West Fork fire and had to be evacuated.
August had stops in Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. She continued in Montana in September. October and November were more rivers in Colorado and New Mexico. Walchak finished the year on the Animas River.
One complication was that water law is different in every state regarding access to land along the stream or setting foot on the ground under the water. In Colorado, the private land owner along the river also owns the land under the water to the center of the stream. If you set foot on that land along or under the stream, you are trespassing. Stringing a fence across the stream is illegal, but people do it, Walchak said.
After her year of fishing, Walchak said she "played J.K. Rowling" for the next year and went to coffee shops to type her book. "Literally the day I sent off my file to the printer in Hong Kong, I got a call from Russ Burwell from the (Pine River) library board asking me to be the library director." She started at the library one year ago.
"I really enjoyed the whole self-publishing thing and hope to help people with that at the library," she said. The hardest part is the marketing. She won a 2015 Independent Publisher Book Award for the west-mountain region for best regional non-fiction.
Before heading off on her year of fly fishing, Walchak was a senior consultant with the Colorado State Library in downtown Denver. She worked at the Fort Lewis College Reed Library from 2001 to 2005 and was on the steering committee for the new Durango Library. She still has a townhome in Durango from that time.
The conference in Telluride came about, she said, because during the recession, "people started questioning libraries, whether they were still an institution that we need to fund. We put on this international conference to get libraries to reinvent themselves. We have a great example in Bayfield. We are more like a community livingroom than a warehouse of books."
It was two years after that conference that the Pine River Library was named the Best Small Library in the U.S. About a month ago, the library followed the community livingroom idea with a pop-up livingroom in various places around Bayfield, including Mill Street. Walchak is organizing a Nov. 5 forum on civic engagement for young people, with the idea that it doesn't get enough attention in schools.
