Montana Creek in May is not the most glamorous destination. Even on the very best day, during the best year, it’s not a time or a river with the cachet to have rod-toting, reel-packing masses of sculpin enthusiasts depleting their air-mile accounts in order to arrange an early-season rendezvous. Naturally, that’s just fine with me, and I’m relatively certain the trout don’t mind.

Late June into July means something different, however, for this gravel-bottomed stream with the lucent flows and the sparse springtime fan club. As with virtually every piece of Alaska water that boasts both road access and a solid run of king salmon, the coming of the Chinook also brings a good dose of foot traffic to the river’s banks. Things slow sharply as the king season closes, with anglers poking around the lower river for chum salmon or pinks or walking the upper stretches in search of grayling or rainbows looking to feast off the king spawn. The river rises again in popularity as the coho arrive, with our modern wand-wavers once more bumping Gore-Tex on the stream’s many gravel bars.

Late fall is strictly a rainbow gig—fat rainbows, of course—but despite the river’s solid fly-fishing characteristics and the good size and number of trout to be caught, it stays moderately quiet, particularly as compared to the height of summer.

I catalog all this because during a jaunt up the Parks Highway this spring, I noticed that my interest in Montana Creek runs pretty much inversely to that of a lot of the fishing public. In other words, I like to get started early, skip the big dance in the middle and leave late. Not because I don’t enjoy fishing to kings or coho—far from it—or because I’ve developed into some kind of Thoreau-inspired snob for solitude, but rather that other flowing destinations have held a firm grasp on my concentration for most of the past ten or so Julys. That’s the thing about Alaska—three million lakes, three thousand rivers and innumerable small streams: Water, to state the obvious, is not in short supply. Nor are great gobs of gamefish.

At first description, much of the state must seem to the Outsider as far-fetched as any realm sprung from the mind of film director Tim Burton. Only instead of a fairly weird version of Sleepy Hollow, there’s the tea-colored streams and misty coastlines of Southeast, where the boreal old growth banking the moving water is so overwhelming even Edward Scissorhands would have trouble breaking trail. In some parts of Alaska, glaciers the size of states sprawl across the landscape, snow-capped peaks tower above valleys that apparently extend forever and pristine rivers cut through the land like veins. There’s no oddly creepy version of Alice’s Wonderland up here, but there is the fjord-like Wood-Tikchik system, the wild and desolate Lost Coast, the untamed Alaska Peninsula and many other places that have no comparison in the Lower 48.

Although, now that I’ve carried the analogy much further than it ever should have gone, I should also affirm that the point in all this remains the same—nearly all of the freshwaters that grace this fair state are filled with fish. Five species of Pacific salmon return to Alaska in strong, healthy populations. Wild rainbow trout have staked out their most critical and productive North American habitats here at the limits of their northern range, and steelhead return widely—to over three hundred streams in Southeast alone and who knows how many on the Alaska Peninsula or the still unexplored Lost Coast. Dolly Varden, Arctic char, lake trout, cutthroat, grayling, northern pike, and even the sheefish call Alaska waters home. And a lot of the fishing for this murder’s row of gamefish is available in July, even peaking. It goes without saying then that an adventurous angler is faced with a mosaic of choices, and often, that means neglecting the waters closest to home.

That’s what I thought of this past May, standing nearly alone on the creek in a chilly rain, casting Zuddlers at nothing in particular, hoping a rainbow would show up before the kings did. Things sometimes come together in moments of tranquility, I’ve learned, and small epiphanies seem unusually welcome these days—and that’s why this July, rather than looking to explore new waters full of the same fish, I’ve decided to rededicate myself to learning about the Alaska I thought I already knew.