An edited version of this post may be on the Patagonia field report web page. The thermometer read 12 degrees! Not exactly an ideal temperature to go fishing. I was helping guide a steelhead outing for a group from Patagonia and hey they should be all about extreme fishing. When it comes to steelheading your plan has to be flexible and often you use every card in the deck. The plan was to pick up my guy Bill Klyn with the intentions of working a small stream for a couple hours. Then head for the Grand River and bounce our way upstream. Unfortunately the cold was a problem on the little creek. Shelf ice was rapidly building and flow ice made it difficult to get the line to sink. If you happened to cast onto the shelf ice, the fly would immediately freeze in place. Until the day warmed up, it wasn't feasible to fish the creek. I accelerate my plans for the day and we moved onto the Grand, where the water temps would be slightly warmer and the problems of flow ice and shelf ice would be minimized. Of course this was still no pic nic, but I figured the Patagonia fly fishing guys probably suffer from some inferiority complex around the rock climbers and extreme skiers and all, so I thought at least Bill will have something to talk about. Unfortunately due to ice melt the day before, water visibility was about 8 inches and the water flow was high. Then the wind kicked up. I had no idea what the wind chill was. After a few hours of standing waste deep in glacial gray water, it was apparent this wasn't happening. We worked back to shore and Bill commented on the ice on the back of my waders. I turned and I saw a fine glaze of ice all over him. Wow, we might not have great big frozen beards, and black frost bitten fingers, but gee whizz, we kinda looked like we had been in an extreme out door adventure! While we might not have been handing on the side of a mountain at 25.000 feet this kind of stream fishing this was pretty extreme! I said to Bill "What a great catalog shot!" Then realized, even if we had gotten a picture I doubt that we would have made the catalog. We were just a tad too old and too plump. Instead of extreme outdoor enthusiast, we looked more like a couple of glazed donuts, or at least two glazed fishing nuts! After an early lunch I was mentally scrambling for our next option. I came up with an idea that had more IF/THEN statements than a graduate level philosophy text book. We headed to a large pool on one of the smaller tribs. I broke off shelf ice and pushed it downstream and opened enough water for Bill to fish the belly of the pool. Everything was going "swimmingly" until I lost my footing breaking the ice and soaked my left hand and lower arm. (note to self, when wringing out a wet glove in cold temperatures it is important that you remove the dry glove first). As ludicrous as this seems, it worked. Bill hooked and landed several fish. And it was all so effortless! Ah symmetry! While releasing one of Bill's fish, the eye of my wading shoe caught on my net. I fell in this time soaking my right arm. But a lesson learned! I took my left glove off before I wrung out the right