It was about 5:30 p.m. on a Friday in Riverfront Park. A food truck served diners on the orange bridge over the Spokane River. People cruised by on bikes and scooters. The cowboy boots and denim crowd had started filling up the Spokane Pavilion for a country concert.

At the Great Northern Clock Tower, Marc Fryt stood in front of about a dozen people holding fishing rods.

“Raise your hand if you’ve never fished in the park before,” Fryt said.

All but a couple of hands went up. Fryt ran through the rules – no bait, no treble hooks, no barbed hooks, no getting in the water – and listed off the native species they might hook – redband trout, largescale sucker, northern pikeminnow.

He warned them to watch their backcasts and to have a plan for how they’d land a fish if they hooked it.

Then

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