Trout are rarely found in ugly places; most trout streams are beautiful - but some trouty places stick in memory more than others. The most beautiful trout stream in the world just might be Silver Creek, in the Snake River Plains close by the Little and Big Wood Rivers south of Hailey, Idaho. It flows through lush meadows and wood-fenced cattle ranches backed by amber rolling foothills and distant mountains. The water winds through this scenic valley past rustic ranch buildings, along the interface of the human and the sublimely not-human, defining the word picturesque. It flows at near-constant temperature. It flows at near-constant volume. Its glassy currents swirl almost imperceptibly above dense beds of lush, green vegetation. The insect hatches are profuse, its brown and rainbow trout both large and plentiful. In our family, it is remembered best for a "just one more cast" episode when my son, Daniel, was nine that lasted some four hours. It is a hard place to leave.

For some, supreme beauty is more rough-hewn and wild. For my money, and in my experience, two rivers vie for honors there - the Babine in interior British Columbia, and our own Gunnison River deep in the gorge below the water projects of the Currecanti.

The Babine can be fished on foot, but the hike is blocked quickly by virtually impassable tributaries. Better, to book a spot at a rustic lodge on the river, and jet-boat in. There, in dense northwoods conifer, surrounded by wilderness and grizzlies, you wade and roll cast into pushy water that holds the largest sea-run trout in the world. You might hook steelhead with regularity, more and bigger than on other steelhead rivers; or, you might go hours or even days without a tug. Steelhead rivers are moody. No matter, the rhythm of the casting, the stripping in of cast line, the step downstream to repeat the process is done with mist rising off morning water, tall timber framing the experience and the occasional loud chant of "Ho Bear!" just to let them know you're there.

You can float through or hike down to the Gunny in The Gorge. In either case, the trip is an adventure. The canyon is narrow and deep, and the sky a thin strip directly overhead. Ringtail and peregrine accompany you. The wading is often difficult, and all the while you are fishing, you hold in the back of your mind either the long, steep hike out, or the sometimes treacherous float - sort of like the tempered exultation of the mountaineer, who, having reached a magnificent summit begins to worry about the often more difficult climb down. But while you are there, while you are fishing, you are unlikely to see other humans and the company of the wild is all around. Large trout slash at stoneflies if your timing was good and your visit intersects the hatch. At other times, you cast diminutive dry flies to sipping fish, or football-shaped trout take your submerged nymph and run with a power that is astounding.

These well-known beauties are famous in the angling world. But if you were to ask a slightly different question, another trout stream might come to mind. Suppose you could fish only one beautiful stream for the rest of your life. It's a hypothetical. No angler would want to have to actually make such a choice. But if you did have to make that choice, could you answer?

I could. There is a small stream in the mountains north of Durango where I have fished for over 30 years. The first trout I caught there was taken with the rod held between my legs. I was searching a pocket for something, I've long since forgotten what, when a brookie slammed my wet fly (a Dark Cahill) that was trailing off my dry fly (a Light Cahill). I remember smiling and saying to my buddy, Hollis, "I kinda like this place." My son crawled about in the woods there when he was a toddler, looking in the dirt for living things, constructing minor excavations while I fished. He took his first fly-caught trout there, and when he grew to have children of his own, he took them there to teach them to skip stones.

The stream falls from tundra through aspen, fir and spruce down into ponderosa. Waterfalls plunge down cliffs in the canyons where it flows. In spring it roars. In summer it burbles. In fall its pools turn golden with fallen leaves from cottonwood and aspen. In winter it sleeps under feet of snow. The trout - brookies, rainbows, cutthroat through most of its course, with a handful of browns in its lower stretches - are mostly small, but healthy, fat and as colorful as any I've seen anywhere. In my experience, the most beautiful trout stream in the world.

Some are always looking for a more beautiful place to cast their line. Something more exotic, harder to reach, with bigger fish. Some become bored with the places near home. Not me. As much as I love to travel, as much as I love to sample the water elsewhere, I've never found myself jaded, numbed to the beauties of the little stream I've fished all my adult life.

The most beautiful stream in the world? Ask me after a beer or two, on the edge of this stream, when I've thrown both caution and qualifiers to the wind and I'll answer with a smile, "For me, today? By all means. Yes. This one, right here."

Steven J. Meyers is the author of On Seeing Nature, Lime Creek Odyssey, Streamside Reflections, The Nature of Flyfishing, Notes from the San Juans and San Juan River Chronicle.