The days after the Fourth of July are a good time to reflect on what makes life in the Inland Northwest worth living. The high point of my weekend was being part of a grandson’s first “real lake” fishing trip.

Brandon is a 6-year-old Seattle kid. So fishing previously meant a suburban pay-to-catch pond next to a freeway. This time we did the real thing, in the real woods.

On the drive between Spokane and Priest Lake, I thought about the outdoor Inland Northwest a half century ago, when I was the little boy sitting in the back seat of the family station wagon, imagining what adventure lay at the end of an (eternal) ride down a dusty gravel road somewhere in North Idaho.

I also thought about what our countryside will be like a generation from now, when other “old” men (time to get used to the term) want to pass the excitement of the real outdoors to new minds and bodies.

What makes the outdoors real?

For me, it’s the sense of adventure and discovery. At a certain age, we realize somebody has done almost everything before, figured out almost everything before and been almost everywhere before. Mercifully, many of us are blessed with years of physical and intellectual adventure before that dreadful wisdom descends on us.

When Dwight Eisenhower was president, the Spokane River was still fed by rivulets of cool irrigation water. During hot summers, the book trout gathered in those rivulets, especially upstream of the Sullivan Bridge. If you caught grasshoppers for bait and snuck up quietly, you could catch a couple before the others spooked. Nobody knew that, except for me — or so I thought.

You can’t use grasshoppers anymore on that stretch of the river (fishing regulations say artificial lures only), and the cool rivulets disappeared with the irrigation farming that fed them. Wal-Mart, Valley Mall and all the rest. You know the story.

I smiled while reading in this newspaper about how the last shreds of Lake Coeur d’Alene shoreline are being gobbled up at fantastic prices. It is getting harder to enjoy a solitary beach walk — if you insist on taking it after golf at Mr. Hagadone’s floating course and before “fine dining” at his hotel.

I shouldn’t tell this secret in the newspaper, but the good old days are not gone. They just went to where the RVs can’t park, the cell phones don’t work and (ultimate horror of horrors) there are no shiny ceramic toilets when that need arises.

There is still a hilltop in Idaho where you can see half of Lake Coeur d’Alene and many miles of the St. Joe River Valley, while buzzards look you over for dinner. If anyone has been there since the farmer who set the now rotting fence posts, they left no more evidence than I did this spring.

Don’t look for it in the handy “Hikes of” books they sell at REI. Hint, the Spokane Public Library has a wonderful collection of topographic maps of the Inland Northwest, and the Idaho Panhandle National Forest has aerial photos of much of North Idaho.

Beyond that you are on your own. That’s what makes it fun.

There is also a stretch of water nearby where native west slope cutthroat trout are big, abundant and voracious. That’s not because you have to pay a fortune for access or because game managers impose special fishing regulations. It’s because people can’t find them or won’t do the work required to get to them.

If you are curious, don’t bother with the familiar list of designer fly fishing lakes and rivers, where the float tubes, tents and fishing hats all match. It’s back to the topographic maps and aerial photos, a lot of shoe leather and maybe even some distinctly “unfine” dining, depending on how much you are willing to carry several miles on your back.

Maybe I will see you there, as soon as I finish this column — or maybe not.

Either way, have a nice summer.