Photos: Best Summer Internship Ever?

Written by: Mike Mazzoni, summer intern at Falcon’s Ledge

Catching a big brown like this one in pitch blackness is a thrill worth any amount of dishwashing. photo by Mike Mazzoni

I never would have thought one of my greatest fishing experiences would start and end with a pile of dirty dishes. When
Falcon’s Ledge Head Chef and fly-fishing guru Scott Pizza and I crunched the timeframe and steps necessary to make our evening dash to a local stream worth our while, we knew it would be a race against the kitchen clock. Scott, as always, served an extravagant meal. I rounded up the dishes, threw them in the sink to soak, and then we were off.

Casting over the heads of massive browns during the a yellow-sally and caddis hatch produced a fishing experience like nothing I could have imagined. Scott calls it “zip code” fishing, in which you throw a single dry fly into the hordes of bugs, and in absolute darkness, set the hook based purely on sound and feel. It was a forty-five minute blitz, and it was so worth it.

I can remember returning to Falcon’s Ledge to a pile of dirty dishes; I did them all with the greatest sense of happiness and accomplishment an intern could imagine.

Mike Mazzoni is a senior at Kansas State University, and was an intern at
Falcon’s Ledge this summer.

Here’s one happy angler who will be dreaming of the Utah mountains when he’s back in Kansas. photo by Scott Pizza