"Sit down and have an appetizer," Jorge ordered as he sliced homemade hard salami and French bread with a bowie knife. We followed that with grilled pork, salad, freshly picked vegetables, fruit, and cheese. Despite the great start, we were in no particular hurry to leave our table.

Butch and Sundance rode here

Two bottles of Argentina's finest later we were about ready to return to the water when, almost as an afterthought, Jorge said:

"See those big black rocks over there? Just behind them was the original homestead. A Welshman had made a cattle ranch out of the place, but in 1903 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid got into some sort of argument with him and shot him dead."

"Butch and Sundance? Right over there?"

"Yep, right there. They used to live in Cholila, you know. If you want to go look for artifacts we could probably find something. Nobody's messed with it much."

Across the arroyo a small troop of gauchos in full regalia — flat-topped black hats, colorful bandanas, woolen chaps, and handlebar mustaches — were rounding up a herd of Herefords. Except for the power lines on the horizon, the picture was right out of an old Western movie.

Fishy Immigrants

Trout were a late arrival to Arroyo Pescado. In the 1930s, brook trout were introduced followed by McCloud rainbows in the 1940s and 1950s. Although we didn't catch any, Jorge said the upstream reaches contain some browns as well. As in most of Patagonia, the trout have taken a shine to the place.

A netted foreigner

We heard none the jargon U.S. fly fishers are bombarded with, like numbers of trout per mile, holdover rates, biomass density, and the like, but take my word for it; there are a lot of fish here, they are doing well, and they like the place.

The Arroyo Pescado springs from an underground source within the volcanic rocks that dominate the landscape and quickly forms itself into a sizable flowing body. We did not have time to visit the source or explore all six miles of its length, but the arroyo contains a variety of waters.

Some stretches are channeled, stair-stepping, pocket-type waters flowing in riffles and runs reminiscent of a meadow freestone stream, but then it begins to flatten and broaden into something more akin to a flowing lagoon. Parts of it are not unlike Silver Creek in Idaho.