I found this old picture of me. I was with a fishing buddy named Dave Stamborsky. Dave passed away about a year ago. I miss him. 

  He was a demon fisherman and we were fishing for steelhead one winter day on the Stillaguamish River. I take heart in the tragedy of the recent landslide there. I fished not far from that very area and remember the sheer cliff faces cut through by the river. I am not surprised there are landslides. It is a dangerous area.
This day was icy cold and the crust on the  snowy river bank was pretty firm so we headed upstream. We had gotten about a quarter mile and Dave, who was 30 pounds heavier than I, kept  breaking through the crust and pulling his entrapped leg out of the crust. He was fast running out of breath and suggested we forget it and go back down to the car. I said okay even though I was lighter, there was no way I could carry him. I suggested he just sit down and I would just push him back down to the car on his bottom. 

   So he sat down, pointed both legs down river and I slid him feet first and bottom down. Once in a while his butt broke through but I managed to extricate him each time and with him shouting cusswords and threatening to pound me to a pulp for talking him into a fishing trip. I told him he had a lot of crust but just not enough. If that wasn't enough, we stopped further downstream, near State Rt 530, where the "Stilly" intersects the road. It was an easy, flat walk to the river's edge.

    Dave had on his wide brimmed, leather hat as he stood next to me. On one of my casts I hooked his hat and knocked it in the  river. We watched it go merrily along. He was shouting at me and running like mad downriver where he finally caught up with it. It was wet but salvageable. He'd had enough. We quit and headed home where he could tell friends he went fishing and all we caught was his hat.