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It was a beautiful trout, true, but Jon seemed to be looking at it longer than usual. There, in his hands, cold water dripping from the fish and Jon's arms, was a 19-inch rainbow trout as fat as any I'd ever seen. His flank was as broad as a billboard and the advertisement read, "Lunker!" His belly was a soft rose color. His bright red stripe was painted on a deep green background. His jaw protruded with the proud kype of an aggressive male, and tucked into the corner of that jaw was a tiny flash pupa, size #28. The trout had taken Jon downstream a hundred yards before finally allowing himself to be landed.

A big, beautiful fish caught with fragile tackle in a willow-lined river channel at the end of a gorgeous fall day - I understood the feeling. I, too, would have held that fish a few seconds longer than usual, savoring the moment, but Jon seemed unwilling to let him go. He held that trout as if he might never hold another. He finally released him with a look of nostalgia that spoke of finality. When Jon finally said something, I understood why.

"That's my last trout of the season."

"Huh?"

"My last fish. I'm going home in the morning, our season's over back East. I won't fish again until spring."

Here, we have no closed season. Trout are legal all year and some of our best fishing comes during the winter. Some of my warmest memories are of crystal clear winter skies and low-angle light on dark water, or of snowy days spent on misty rivers surrounded by rising trout.

Twenty years ago, the winter after my previous wife had died, I fished the San Juan almost every day - sunshine or snow, pleasant or bitter cold - trying to forget. My best buddy and fishing pal, Bud, had suffered his own hardships. Fishing had become our gesture of hope. Bud was a superb angler and probably the best midge fisherman I've ever known. That winter, as our recent wounds healed and the scabs began to form, I became a pretty decent midge fisherman myself, largely thanks to Bud.

In the years that followed, I discovered other winter treats: the Frying Pan and the Roaring Fork up near Aspen, fished on the way to and from Denver where I was working, and in the past two decades, after I stopped commuting to the Front Range and remained in Durango full time, more and more winter days of delight tossing Baetis imitations at the trout in water closer to home, right here on the Animas. What better way is there to chase away the potentially foul mood of a dark time than to spend glowing afternoons waiting for trout to show themselves, and when they do, to cast dry flies to them?

The midges a little further south, on the San Juan, still scurry across the surface of the eddies. They still clump in winter coaxing rainbows to rise, and anglers to forget their nymphs and tie on a dry fly.

Does anything chase the blues from winter bones better than the slow disappearance of a tiny fly into a huge mouth, the sudden tugging of life at the end of a fly line and leader, the splash of a broad tail sending icy spray onto your cheek as the fish swims away after you release him? A slow dance in powder between aspen on a steep slope? As good, not better. A quiet tour on skinny skis uphill through ponderosa to gain a sun-kissed ridge and turning to smile at your wife, whose smile returns yours? Very, very good, indeed.

But still, not better.

A hundred wonderful things, a thousand moments, countless events so good and warm and real their goodness, warmth and authenticity cannot be measured, wonders all - especially, in the middle of a cold winter that makes old wounds ache - but none of them, as wonderful as they are, any better than the wait, the cast, the rise, the take, the run, the release.

That day with Jon, I wondered if we'd lost something by opening our regional rivers to winter trout fishing - wondered if we'd come to take this amazing thing just a little bit for granted. I wondered if it might not be better to know, one day each year, that this would be the last such day for a while. I wondered if it would bring back some lost appreciation. But I didn't wonder very long.

I hope, when you see me releasing a trout sometime, somewhere, this winter, you'll notice that I linger in the release as if the moment were so beautiful I did not want it to end, as if I understood, although I hoped it would not, that trout might be my last. Because, even in a place where the law permits us to fish in winter, no angler should ever forget that one day, one trout will be his last.

Winter is the time to remember. And appreciate.

Steven J. Meyers is the author of On Seeing Nature, Lime Creek Odyssey, Streamside Reflections, The Nature of Flyfishing, Notes from the San Juans and San Juan River Chronicle.