A River Runs Through Them

Ian McCreary—who grew up in Oregon—remembers being in the 6th grade and getting up around 4 a.m. to go fishing for steelhead trout with his father on the Santiam River.

“[I would] get to school at 11 [a.m.], get to class and my teacher would say ‘Where were you?’ I would say ‘I was fishing’ and she did not like that response at all,” said McCreary. “I pretty much grew up fishing in the [Pacific] Northwest.”

McCreary has lived in the Platte Valley for nearly five years, moving to the area from nearby Walden, Colorado.

“We were living in Walden [and] I was teaching down there, then there was a job opening in Saratoga. I applied for that job and got it and taught there for two years,” said McCreary. “That first year of teaching, I was commuting from Walden up to Saratoga and then back home. Then we bought a house in Encampment.”

He’s not difficult to spot, tall and slender and often sporting a beard and a ballcap. He also seems to be averse to shoes, wearing sandals nearly year-round.

“I’m pretty easily identifiable throughout the year, I’m probably wearing Chacos,” said McCreary. “It’s always summer in my mind.”

The Oregon-native turned Valley-resident now serves as the state coordinator for Wyoming Trout Unlimited. It’s a role he seems born for, traveling across the state and helping the 12 chapters with events and outlining projects. He also helps the Wyoming Trout Unlimited State Council with their biannual meeting and fundraising efforts.

“Last year, I was doing a lot of business in person,” said McCreary. “This upcoming year, I’ll be setting up events on behalf of the [state] council for chapters to make my visits to those chapters a little bit more impactful.”

McCreary is also involved with Mother Mountain Anglers, a local volunteer group co-founded by Josh Craig. McCreary serves as secretary of the group and it was Craig who had told him about the state coordinator position. At the time, McCreary was working as a contractor.

“I was doing construction for myself [and] I did some work with Brad Hebig. I helped do the reconstruction of The DiVide and Pine Lodge,” said McCreary. “Then, Josh Craig saw the posting on their [Wyoming Trout Unlimited] website and it fit really well with all of the work that I was doing with Mother Mountain Anglers.”

According to McCreary, the group is an example of the community mindset in the Platte Valley. What started out as a small congregation of anglers finding time to get together and fish turned into a community-based organization with a focus on children and conservancy.

“Working with Mother Mountain Anglers and volunteering with them, that kind of shows that there’s a group of guys who are trying to make our community better one event at a time. Whether it’s doing the fireworks ball to put on a better fireworks show each year, showing kids how to do fly fishing or the ice fishing clinic,” said McCreary. “Who knows what the impact of that’s going to be. Maybe when we offer that kind of information we could save a kid’s life because they went through that informative day and remembered to bring their ice picks out. We’ll never hear about that information, but that’s still informative to kids and could be impactful in the long run.”

While there are a variety of fishing techniques, McCreary prefers to fly fish, which he learned from his father.

“Before I moved to Colorado for grad school, I got into fly fishing. I was doing a trip up to Alaska and I really wanted to fly fish for trout and salmon. I had my dad show me how to cast a fly rod, I went up there and enjoyed myself. I don’t think I’ve touched a spin rod that many times since. It was fly fishing for me. It is just so much more interactive,” said McCreary. “I’m reading the water, I’m constantly moving, I’m thinking about how things are going.”

Fly fishing has also given him an understanding of the different species of insects—or macroinvertebrates—in the areas he fishes. According to McCreary, the Platte Valley has a good biodiversity of species in the North Platte and Encampment rivers, ranging from caddis flies to mayflies to salmon flies. Being able to identify those species and when they hatch, he said, can turn a person into an amateur entomologist.

Along with fly fishing, McCreary likes to tie his own flies. It’s not a cheap hobby, he said, due to the amount of materials someone needs to produce the different species of macroinvertebrates for fly fishing. According to McCreary, on the day of the interview, he had 16 different leg materials. While it may not be a cheap hobby, it has certainly been one which has helped him through rough patches in his life.

In the past six years, McCreary has battled cancer twice. He was first diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, a type of cancer which affects a person’s lymphatic system. This system, according to the Mayo Clinic, is part of the body’s immune system and helps in fighting germs and diseases. The lymphatic system is composed of lymph nodes, which are found throughout the body.

“I did radiation down in Edwards [Colorado], the nice thing about that treatment facility is they had a house I could stay in for the week at no cost because radiation treatment was everyday for five-days-a-week for a month straight,” said McCreary. “For the first two weeks, I’d get up and go do my radiation treatment and I’d have nothing to do for the rest of the day. Luckily, it was right there on the Eagle River so I could go fishing.”

Even when the side effects of the radiation therapy kicked in, McCreary would fish as long as he could before going to the hospital housing. Eventually, he overcame Hodgkin's Lymphoma. Then, one year ago, he noticed a lump in his armpit.

“I relapsed after six years and had to go through chemo [chemotherapy]. One of the potential side effects for chemo was I could experience neuropathy. I was pretty well determined I was going to do whatever I could to prevent neuropathy because I wanted to be able to fish,” said McCreary. “I wanted to be able to do the things I enjoyed doing without experiencing pain. One of my thoughts [to prevent neuropathy] was if I tied flies.”

McCreary estimates he tied between five and 10 flies per day when he first started chemotherapy. Eventually, the amount of flies he tied went down when he noticed he wasn’t experiencing neuropathy in his hand. According to McCreary, his doctor had also told him that it would be a case of either getting neuropathy or not and there wasn’t anything he could do to prevent the condition.

As he continued through the process of chemotherapy, McCreary used tie flying as a way to pass the time. He’d bring a bag with him to each appointment which contained a vice and fly tying material.

“I probably tied about 15 flies while going through chemo because I didn’t want to sit there and watch TV the whole time,” said McCreary.

Whether it’s Oregon or Wyoming, McCreary sees far more similarities than he does differences with the biggest similarity being the access to remote areas.

“You can go from here up to Bennett Peak and you’re really remote and away from any major city or civilization, for the most part. Where I’d go fishing in Oregon, very similar. Get off the beaten path, go find rivers, hike up tributaries to find spots where salmon are running up,” said McCreary. “Fishing brings you to wild places but fish don’t like ugly places. If you’re going to find a good diversity of fish or size of fish or abundance of fish, they’re going to be somewhere that’s naturally beautiful.”

Just like his father instilled a love of fishing and the outdoors in him—McCreary still remembers fishing along the Nehalem River where his parents owned a house—he hopes to do the same for his daughters; River and Willow.

“Willow is too young but River, I think she’s been tying flies with me since she was a baby. She’ll sit on my lap and tie flies for a little bit. She likes going through my boxes of bugs that I’ve tied and points them out,” said McCreary. “I hope my girls can get some sort of interest—and it doesn’t have to be fishing—of enjoying the outdoors.”

That may already be happening with River, who McCreary said was fishing for Bluegill during a family vacation in Wisconsin using a rod and worms.

“This summer will probably be her first summer getting on a fly rod and trying it out,” said McCreary.