Earlier this spring I ventured into the Tongass National Forest of southeast Alaska in search of coastal steelhead. During the trip a friend and I hiked deep into the boreal rainforest, scrambling through deadfall blanketed by moss and clambering over and around boulders the size of Volkswagens, hopscotching from undercut bank to midstream riffle to a tea-stained pool gathered beneath a waterfall. We piled into a DeHavilland Beaver and probed the waters draining the Fortress of the Bears- Fear Island as the Russians called it- beating through miles of alder and devil's club only to find a fresh moose-kill and a compelling argument in favor of returning to the plane.

We also boated across Lynn Canal to access an isolated peninsula on the mainland and en route happened upon a pod of frolicking humpbacks, if indeed they frolic. The whales would surface and blow, surface and blow, and once passed directly beneath our boat, immediately reminding us how big the ocean was and how small our skiff. Hour after hour, as one day became a week, it rained, sleeted, and even snowed. The temperature dipped below forty-five degrees and never rose. Then it rained some more.

When I got home and began to both dry out and defrost, I learned I'd been on no kind of angling adventure at all, at least not as defined by an industry suddenly eager to appeal to a generation that views dangling by one's ankles from a canyon bridge as no big deal. "Adventure angling" is all the rage these days; the term shows up everywhere, from product spots to destination catalogs and fly-fishing magazines, and in its ubiquity lays my concern. For one thing, I've never really been sure I know what it's supposed to mean.

Is it like skydiving with fly rods?  Must I strap on a snowboard and shred my way to the creek, or could the requirement to mix in an extreme sport with my fishing be less than rigid?  Perhaps, in the end, the whole thing just has to do with attire, as contemporary angling accoutrement has stretched beyond functionality in design and now gives off a vaguely paramilitary air. If, like me, you find your mailbox stuffed with equipment catalogs and travel brochures, you already know that an angler with pants featuring fewer than three cargo pockets has never been on an adventure.

Apparently there are no limits to where this might be headed- ghillie suits and camouflage face paint for the stalking of spooky trout? A sport-fishing-only version of The Deadliest Catch?- but it is safe to say that traveling any more in the current direction can only remove us further from angling's indelible roots.

For myself those roots took hold in Montana, when my grandparents would show up to whisk me off into their much more arcadian world, where I imagined my life exhibited more than a passing similarity to the literary existence of the brothers Maclean, only without the religion. Every morning, after wolfing down a plate of bacon and eggs and burnt toast and then zooming through my chores with hurry and half-hearted attention, the ranch-life equivalent of shoving a pile of dirty laundry under the bed, I was turned loose in the shadows of the Beartooths to fill the remainder of the day however I wished. I chose to fish.

We had only one creek on the property, a ditch-like trickle of water hardly worthy of the name, but there were miles of it to choose from and as the summers passed I learned each and every inch. There was no sense of staidness, either, which while doubtlessly aided by a great number of brook trout also reflects well upon the unassailable sense of discovery that attends a day spent on the water. Back then, the notion of traveling to fish was unfathomable to me. I had no idea what a tarpon was and over a decade still separated me from my first public humiliation at the hands (or fins, to be anatomically precise) of an ocean-bright Chinook. I took my adventures where I could get them- over the hill, around the next bend, in one last pool shaded by evening light- and that was just fine with me.

Lately, of course, I've been afforded much greater opportunity to bring my definitions into line with the rhetoric being bandied about as definitive, though sadly, as the trip to Southeast suggests, I remain unable to turn the corner from ordinary to odyssey. Maybe it's my reluctance to don combat fatigues before a jaunt to Willow Creek, but it all feels pretty much the same to me. Whether Katmai or the Kenai, Costa Rica or the Florida Keys, I feel lucky enough to be there at all. And unencumbered by guilt or a desire to make excuses for my behavior, I've no need to stack hyperbole atop itineraries that are magical on their own.

Early on, dappling a size 16 dry for brookies in a stream that should have held no secrets, I learned that one can find as much mystery in the familiar as in the new. Since then, mostly lost among the beauty and bounty of Alaska, I've learned that all angling is an adventure, no matter what anyone says.