Norinally our membership meetings are held on the 4th Monday of the month. Because of the later date for the banquet this year we are moving the next two membership meetings to allow a better transition to the April 7 banquet date.

The January membership meeting will be held at the MCAR center on Monday, January 29th at 7:00 pm. The guest speaker will be our WCO officer Joe Morris. Joe has been with the PA Fish & Boat Commission for six years as a waterways conservation officer. Prior to joining the fish commission, he served as park ranger and prior to that a schoolteacher. Joe plans to speak on stream bank improvement, and the newly approved trout-stocking program on Yellow Creek. Come, say hello, and welcome Joe.

The Super Bowl will be history so plan to begin fanning the smoldering "fishing coals" that evening. We will have raffle and banquet tickets for sale at the meeting and can answer any questions about the banquet or joining TU. Please mark your calendars for January 29th and I will see you there.

We will also be holding chapter elections that night. In order to maintain a strong chapter we need your attendance and vote at the January meeting.

John Gierach - Some Ramblings
(Ed. note - Pieces were taken from an article appearing in the Denver Post by Bill Briggs.)

John Gierach is a prolific writer with a cult following in the world of trout fishing. His work appeals to grizzled diehards and soft-palmed deskjockeys. John's essays take us to exotic places and deep within our own psyches. John is a self-proclaimed "trout bum" from Lyons Colorado.

Gierach is 53 vears old and does his best fishing in the stream of consciousness - that murky place where stray but brilliant brainstorms bob in endless waves of superficial trivia and everyday fluff. He always touches the reader by retrieving a memory once thought lost. Some of his statements will stop the reader cold and cause several minutes of self-inspection. He has done that to me on several occasions.

Says Gierach; "It's not like I'm out there asking the big questions. I'm just out there fishing." "Actually, I don't sit down (to write a story) knowing how it's going to come out. I start writing about a place or a trip and just see what comes up." John's clever observations are the result of being what he calls a fishing man's philosopher. (He has a degree in that field.) As he likes to say "just an old hippie who moved up from Boulder."

In the late 60's John fell in with a ragged corps of counterculture writers, including "Beat Generation" poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. Back then John fished to eat and worked as a garbage truck driver and firewood cutter. All the while experimenting with words, intending to be "a serious writer" because he "liked the sanctimonious sound of that".

His first articles were for penned for outdoor magazines. John then began, in 1982, as a writer for the Longmont Daily Times-Call. (He still writes a column for them.) His first successful book was "Trout Bum" published in 1986. It was a word of mouth smash with the fly fishing crowd. His 1990 offering "Sex Death and Fly Fishing" finally hooked a mass-market audience.

Friends say John is still the same old guy: the white beard, the pickup truck, and the shoot-from-the-hip personality. But thanks in part to him - fly-fishing has blossomed into a popular and stylish pastime.

John doesn't much care for the yuppie segment of fly-fishing. "They really don't know fly-fishing". "They want to buy fly-fishing. They can buy the gear and buy the trips, but they can't buy fly-fishing. They can't get good at it ' " he says. "They want the experience, but they don't know what the experience is". There is a sunny side to the fly fishing boom, Gierach believes. It has given the environmentalists more political punch as they fight against dam projects. The proposal to dam and flood the South Platte River was killed because of the fly fishermen who used that river.

Politics is dear to Gierach's counterculture heart. He has stumped loudly against development projects in Lyons CO., admittedly making some enemies in the process. People say he won those fights because of his fiery spirit, not his name.

Gierach once wrote that he wasn't exactly sure what fly-fishing taught people about life- yet he thought it was something we needed to know. "There's something aboutjust doing the one thing that's worth doing, doing it for its own sake," he says. "There's something about that that kind of put things in perspective."