STORY BY KAREN BOSSICK

PHOTOS BY JOHN BOYDSTON

People come from around the world to fish Silver Creek, a world-famous trout stream south of Bellevue. Sun Valley photographer John Boydston fishes there with his camera.

He caught a beautiful photo of a fly fisherman casting his line as the sun set and the hatch erupted.

During a hatch, the trout loiter down below waiting for the perfect fly to float by. And every fisherman hopes it’s his. John Boydston got this on Silver Creek just downstream from the Picabo Angler.

“I have come to believe nobody enjoys these photos as much as I enjoy getting them, but it is rewarding to try and capture the millisecond of a moment before a fly’s last breath above water,” he said.

Boydston was on the Kilpatrick Bridge in May when he encountered a fisherman who’d come all the way from somewhere to see the famous Brown Drake Hatch.

“There were more Brown Drakes than you could shake a camera at, and I know because I did,” he said. “You could easily mistake these hatching drakes for small birds. I don’t know how the fishing was--it seems like with real flies in abundance it would be way harder for an angler to get a trout to bite. But why else would the hopeful turn out in such numbers?”

This was just one of hundreds of pictures Boydston captured of the year 2025 in the Wood River Valley.

The year 2025 brought several nights of Northern Lights, some pulsating with reds and pinks and others with the more traditional greens and blues. But it also brought some nighttime skies that were just plain pretty—like this one.

And he’s sharing a few of them in today’s Eye on Sun Valley as we look back on the year just past—ever so briefly because a new one is starting!

Former U.S. Olympic Ski Coach Michel Rudigoz, the longtime owner of Michel’s Christiana, retired this year. “It’s hard to get out the door without a lively conversation with the man himself,” said Boydston. “Did you know, for instance, that one of those huge trophies in the front area is an Emmy he won for the alpine ski broadcasting he did years ago after he hung up his skis?”

When John Boydston didn’t have his camera trained on the Brown Drake Hatch, he managed to catch some photos of fish waiting for the flies.