Saturday the Rush flowed off-color, made so by snow melting upstream and the runoff it produced. Trout anglers would have had a tough go of it, making their flies seen in the unusually turbid and swift water. But no matter. The 150 or so people who assembled streamside just downriver from El Paso had a larger purpose in mind.

Though passed on now three years, Herbert P. Koch-"Uncle Bud" as he was known to his nieces and nephews-was the focal point of the gathering. Koch, of Hastings, had owned a mile of land alongside the Rush beginning not far downstream from El Paso, and when he died at age 79 in April 2005, his will directed four people, three of them relatives, to properly dispose of the riverine landscape.

By "properly," Koch meant in such a way that the land could be preserved forever and that as many people as possible could enjoy it.

Which portended a bonus for anglers. The Rush is perhaps the premier trout stream in this part of the country, a river used and revered as much by Minnesotans as by their Wisconsin counterparts. But access to the Rush has been a problem because much of the land alongside it is privately owned.

Enter then the bequest of Herbert Koch (pronounced "Cook"), that a nonprofit group be given his 141 acres alongside the Rush.

A successful businessman, Koch grew up on a farm near Loretto, Minn. He didn't graduate from high school, though years later he earned a general equivalency degree. Alternately described as quiet and adventurous, he was perhaps above all generous.

He never married, and left no children.

"Uncle Bud was raised in a small town, and his family had no money," said Jim Koch of Hastings, Minn.,who joined various of his relatives Saturday alongside the Rush for the transfer of Herbert Koch's property to the Eau Galle-Rush River Sportsman's Club.

"He became a very sharp financial person,"" Jim Koch added. "He always said to us, the nieces and nephews, `If you ever need anything, you come see Uncle Bud.' "

A niece, Pat Stoneberg recalled Saturday how she and her brother, Jim; a cousin, Herb Koch; and a family friend, David Trammell, who lives in Florida, carried out her uncle's final wish.

"In his will he gave us 15 years to find an appropriate nonprofit group to give the land to," Stoneberg said. "My uncle wanted to see the land preserved. But he also wanted to ensure it could be used by all kinds of people, in different ways. He wanted the land to be enjoyed."

Herbert Koch was a partner in Polka Dot Dairy and Tom Thumb stores in Hastings. When he eventually sold out and retired, he split his time between Hastings and Fort Myers Beach, Fla. A hunter and angler, Koch traveled widely to pursue his sport, angling in particular.

He originally purchased the Rush River property thinking he would build a home there for his mother. The idea never caught fire, and no home was built. But neither was the land posted against trespassing, and for years-generations-Rush River trout anglers have trampled across it.

Doubtless on days as splendid as Saturday they also rested upon its riverbanks, gratefully transfixed as the river flowed ever by.

"We didn't want to wait the 15 years to get the land transferred," said Herb Koch, the nephew from Loretto. "We wanted to get it done so people could use it."

That the Eau Galle-Rush River Sportsman's Club was chosen to receive the land is perhaps no surprise. Meeting monthly in the Martell (Wis.) Town Hall, the group is a kind of benevolent society to all things good. Saturday its members were everywhere, some wearing T-shirts bearing the club's name, others donning sweatshirts or jackets, still others, caps.

"We put all of the club's money into the Rush and Eau Galle rivers, and into the trout pond at the Shriner's Hospital in the Twin Cities," said Arby Linder, who has presided over the 150-member outfit for 30 of its 35 years. "This will be the first actual property we've owned."

As Linder spoke, the throng that gathered Saturday around a makeshift stage to dedicate the property's transfer had disassembled to picnic tables beneath a kind of circus tent.

The tent would have been necessary had it rained. But Saturday was peerless: the sky blue, the breeze warm, a hard winter seemingly committed to memory.

John Sours, a Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources habitat specialist, was part of the crowd. He said Rush River angler access would benefit greatly from Herbert Koch's generosity and that other easements and acquisitions along the Rush in recent months should also benefit the public for years to come.

Not far from the gathering, on two-lane blacktop warmed by the sun, a pair of motorcyclists banked their Harleys into a steep turn, snowless fields on either side.

Nearby, a father played catch with his young daughter, a softball arching between the two against a cobalt sky.

Everywhere it seemed amid the graceful undulations and peculiar geology of northwest Wisconsin, people were out-of-doors, living their lives in this season of renewal.

It wasn't much of a stretch to believe that Bud Koch was somewhere smiling over all of it, focused particularly on the small burg of El Paso and the stretch of the broad stream that sweeps and bends through it; the Rush River.