Rodney Wolfe shows off one of his trademark dry flies, a St. Joe Hopper. Photo by Ralph Bartholdt

Anyone who has waded the St. Joe River of Idaho's Panhandle casting caddis imitations into run-outs to entice cutthroat trout has probably heard of Rodney Wolfe. And if the unfortunate angler cast nymphs or streamers -- or some other sinking variation of fake trout food -- he or she may have heard from Wolfe as well.

You see, the 80-year-old Wolfe, a former logger and mill worker, who grew up in St. Maries, Idaho, is a dry-fly purist. He has worked flies on the surface film of the more than 100 miles of fishable trout waters of the St. Joe River, one of the Panhandle's premier trout rivers, since he was a child. Aside from a stint in the Army during World War II -- he joined as a 17-year-old -- Wolfe has spent all his years in St. Maries, a small logging town (population 2,600) that serves as the gateway to St. Joe River Country.

The country itself is a rugged expanse of timber and rock, with peaks that climb to 7,000 feet in the Bitterroot Mountains where the St. Joe begins. The size of the mountains gradually decreases the farther west the river flows. The mountains turn to hills that render into the rises and draws of the rolling Palouse in the far western reaches of Idaho's Panhandle, but the river runs itself out long before that, draining into glacially carved Coeur d' Alene Lake about 40 miles northeast of Palouse farmlands.

Before releasing its pristine water -- the St. Joe River is one of the cleanest in the nation -- into the third largest lake in the Gem State, the river runs swift and cold through rock valleys, and flushes through undercuts and ribbons of ripples and swift run-outs where cutthroat trout live and thrive.

Wolfe knows where to find them. He first dropped a homemade fly in this blue ribbon cutthroat stream more than 75 years ago.

He laughs at it now, but Wolfe learned how to tie fly patterns from a girl. Her name was Lilian, he says, and she was ahead of her time. "She tied flies and seined shiners and took them into the fish docks in St. Maries to sell them," he recalls.

As a boy, Mr. Wolfe sold his first flies for a nickel apiece.

He's been tying flies and fishing the river for so long now that many of his favorite holes have given way to the maw of progress or just the irascible push of the river.

Take a trip upriver with him and there's no end to the learning experience.

"It's an education," said St. Maries flyfisherman Derek Darst, who learned to tie the many variations of dry flies used on the river from Wolfe, his mentor. "He has a story for about every hole you drive past."

The biggest cutthroat Wolfe caught was at the mouth of a creek in a pool that he had to climb down to. "It was darn near 100 feet straight up and down," he says. "I had that hole pretty much to myself." He caught a 25-inch cutthroat there years ago, he says. "He took off downriver and I bailed in and swam down to an island before I could land him."