Last season began for me on a sunny but frigid spring morning, floating past all the summer landmarks on the upper Kenai, earnestly trying to pretend it was July-and making believe it would remain just as tranquil. Empty gravel bars, the tasty seams that invite a thousand casts, my choice of runs to fish: I imagine this is what it was like fifty years ago, no matter the month.

While one rainbow between five anglers might have explained why we were the only boat out that day, it certainly didn't account for the satisfaction I felt at the end of the drift. As far as the concept of self-actualization goes, I might as well have been Ahab, rewriting the end of Moby Dick.

Moving on, the season progressed as they usually do, with some good trips, some great, a few broken rods and waders that persist with leaks. Then, deep into September and unseasonably cold, drenched, worn-out and slightly depressed, I realized it was all over. I broke down my rods at Jim's Landing and threw my waders across the parking lot.

I'd caught at least a dozen good trout that day.

Admittedly, I'm not much of a hard-water angler, which can make winter in Alaska feel endless. Soon enough, left alone for long enough, fish themselves seem a desperate fantasy. About then I'm typically onto strange ruminations about the type of fly that might best serve as a metaphor for westward expansion under President Jefferson (the Royal Wulff), or calculating the likelihood of hooking a permit in fewer than ten casts if I could just find a way to Key West, which is, statistically speaking, hilarious. This year, more than most even, I've stared out my office window at the piles of snow I'll never shovel and I've thought about steelhead.

On the surface, it appears a curious obsession, since my formative years in angling were spent in a state lacking anadromous runs of any kind, but that, I think, is sort of the point. Likewise, though I love fishing for the various salmon species Alaska has to offer, neither kings nor coho, my favorites of the bunch, engender the same sort of wistful window-watching. The freshwater-only versions of Oncorhynchus mykiss take up a lot of my free time during the summer, a lot more, in fact, than their sea-run cousins, but still I can hold off on the rainbow mania until at least May. With steelhead, on the other hand, I'm typically serious about trying my luck in March.

All winter long I've thought about it, and I want to wander beneath the great giants of the temperate rainforest, following a trail that leads over fallen logs and under others, every so often, through only the most serendipitous angles, catching a glimpse of the short muskeg beach and the river that lies ahead. I want to cast Super Prawns tied Spey-style and manage a swing through deep runs on the far side of the water. I want to use the little Egg-sucking Leeches I've tied thin with peacock herl bodies for low, clear water conditions. And, of course, I'd like to come tight to a nickel-bright hen that erupts massively on the take and tail-dances about the place like she's on fire.

Whether all this is because I've completely fallen for steelhead remains moot. It's spring again, and they're first.