Ice fishing in South Dakota a magical experience | Great Outdoors

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The fly shop settles down a bit in the winter, so Hans has a few more opportunities for time on — or, more accurately, in — the water, sometimes alone and sometimes with friends or family. The other day it was family — his 2 1/2-year-old daughter, Irene, and his brother, Karl.

“I got to fish for an hour or so with Irene in the backpack, before we sort of transitioned up to the park,” Hans says. “And to be able to just leave the house and wander down to the creek to have an outdoor experience like that is really priceless.”

Priceless indeed. Pretty amazing, too, when you stop to think about it.

Rapid Creek is an extraordinary resource, for aesthetics and municipal water and irrigation. Not being a numbers guy, I just can’t imagine how you would put a value on all that. Add in the wild trout fishery that avails itself all year round and it does seem priceless.

It’s also accessible in a way that few natural resources of its quality and nature are. From my front door, I’m five minutes from the nearest wild brown trout, and basically 10 minutes from any productive pool or riffle in town.

Unlike some of the moodier varieties of fish — largemouth bass, you know who you are — that get sluggish in the winter or suffer anxiety attacks with every change in the barometer, stream brown trout are more psychologically stable. And they can be ready to hit when the spirit moves them, any time of the year under a variety of conditions.

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