Dark clouds still hover around the peaks, a startling counterpoint to the sunbreaks streaming through the clouds to the west. This promise of sun pushes me onward. Driving nearly an hour of rutted roads through dense forest, I pause to throw my old bicycle into the bushes. Further upstream, I park and wander through the ferns and towering cedars to the river’s edge, worried that last night’s rains have muddied the water. Overlooking the deep green pool, my eye catches a hint of movement, a ghostly shadow that glides upstream into the emerald gloom. The game is afoot.

If your car ever breaks down in the woods or you have an emergency and you need help, I recommend the following advice: take off your pants. Somebody will drive past. In these parts, you often don’t see a car all day, but as soon as you are half-naked and trying to squeeze into a wetsuit on the side of the road it’s as if a distant traffic signal has changed and a stream of vehicles pass. Today is no exception. As I struggle to pull my wetsuit on a Forest Service pickup truck rolls around the corner. “Whatchya doing?” the Ranger queries with a mix of curiosity and amusement.

An honest question. I’m river snorkelling of course.

People have enjoyed river snorkelling for years, but it was almost always an afterthought – a mask for the kids to play with or a last-ditch effort to find lost sunglasses or car keys. Maybe a few shadowy fish are sighted, but this is no coral reef. Cold waters discourage serious ventures and visibility in many rivers is often poor. For most, the novelty of taking a mask and snorkel to your local swimming hole is just that – a novelty. River snorkelling, for most, remains a passing fancy.

“What are you, a biologist for the state or something?” the Forest Ranger asks. I’m not a biologist, but the majority of people who enjoy river snorkelling are. Fisheries biologists have snorkelled for decades, often gathering population and distribution data or documenting presence and absence of fish. Field techs swim for miles counting fish, often in the dead of night with lights. Other times they use snerding, a mix of snorkelling and herding fish into seine nets. Here they gently insert tiny tracking tags, collect fish scale or DNA samples among a host of other measurables. This data is taken back to the office and contributes to countless scientific studies and reports that guide natural resource management decision making. But river snorkelling is not only a tool for understanding the natural world, it provides non-scientists a highly engaging, visceral educational experience. This is where I come into the story.