One January morning after we scraped ice off the windshield in 27-degree weather and drove to the Aucilla River boat landing, our guide said, “Today I’m going to show you the mountains of North Florida.”

Fish become concentrated in narrow channels on ebb tides.

Knowing this fellow never tells tall tales if he can help it, Doug and I stuck our rods in his boat and climbed aboard. “With lots of mountain trout I suppose.”

“Call ’em what you like. Fish’ll be waiting,” he grinned.

True to his word, a half-hour later we stood on the bank at a creek bend fishing in four to six feet of water catching fish on every other cast. “You were right about the fish, but where’s those mountains?” I asked.

“Over there.” He pointed.

Rimming the horizon toward the Gulf to our south were the unmistakable jagged up-thrust black peaks of a long rocky range.

“Isn’t that the Rocky Mountains Florida Range?” asked Doug.

“Not many people ever see those like that,” grinned Lester Walker Jr., best known around the Aucilla River as JR. “Only reason we do is there’s a minus tide a good foot below sea-level. Those rocks are sticking up from these flats we’re fishing! Usually they’re underwater.”

The almost waterless sand-and-rock flats stretching for miles in all directions looked as empty as a moonscape. Not a tree, not a bush, nothing green. Nothing but miles of glistening wet mud or sand flats, with scattered patches of black rock looking exactly like mountains in miniature.

We were deep into the remote backcountry flood plain of the Pinhook River and creeks area of the St. Marks Wildlife Preserve, stretching for miles just west of the Aucilla River. The combination of a strong north wind and a minus low tide contributed to this almost lunar landscape. Few people see it under these conditions because the area is largely inaccessible. We were miles from a decent waterway, looking at a flood plain usually seen only by birds and airboaters. Prop-driven airboats are the only contraptions capable of skimming into this waterless wilderness and coming out again.

We were about to sample something that has been growing in popularity along these extensive tidal flats for some years now. Anglers found they had only two ways to get into this remote area to fish it on these minus tides. Either you drop out of the sky or you hire an airboat guide to take you there. The latter is the easiest. Once there, you fish isolated deepwater pools and creek bends that trap fish when the tide was full.

On these prairie-like Pinhook flats, fish have one of two choices. They could leave with the falling tide and swim several miles to deeper water, then return with the next rising tide. Or they could simply drop back to a staging area of deep water and hold fast until the tide returns. Which would you choose? Personally I’d hold tight, rather than swim all those miles. That’s what these fish had done. On this icy morning we came in to see if any of these fellows were hungry enough yet to eat breakfast.

All this began for us in what North Floridians call “a cool snap.” Icy weather isn’t the most comfortable time to go winging off perched on the nose of an airplane motor but JR had himself this new play-pretty and was anxious to show it off.

Normally, this was prime trout-fishing time. January temperatures usually run the fish far up the rivers into the warmer spring waters. But sometimes a sudden northern blast topples temperatures overnight, inducing a severe case of lockjaw or worse in these river fish. If the intense cold persists, the fish leave the spring-fed river waters for deep, warm Gulf waters. The question now was, had our weather turned so cold it turned off the fish, or were they already gone from these backcountry potholes and creek bends?

On this particular morning a dozen boats fanned out down the Aucilla River, casting everything from plugs to popping floats with fresh shrimp. As we eased past with idling motor, JR asked about the action.