The calendar proclaims summer. But snow is still on the peaks. Rain spits in fits of fury. Temperatures crawl toward seventy yet stop shy. Our never-ending spring continues. Rivers are high and turbid—I am low and torpid.

A potential break in the cloudiness presents itself and on pretenses of picking up sod to turf my yard, Dan and I make for Williams Creek. We visited the creek about three weeks ago on a little reconnaissance mission. There is a supposed population of browns and rainbows higher up the creek and potentially a few cutthroat—we’re looking for the cutts.

We found a good place to launch our fishing trek last time, so we planned on going to the same spot this time. Last time the water was still high and fast. In a normal water year the first several weeks of June would have significantly dropped it. But this is a record-breaking wet year with lots of rain. Almost daily rain for three weeks.

The access road to Williams Creek is an interesting little road that begins as a public road, but turns to a private road. For two miles the road is on private property but there is public access on the road—no leaving the road (the sign boldly declares). At the end of the two miles the road returns to national forest land.

Our first real intimation that the water might still be too high happens on our way up the road. Three weeks ago the road was smooth, in fact we commented on it then about what a nice road it was. But now the road is rutted. My 1986 Ford F-150 is a bit of a rust bucket. The tailgate has some rust issues which prevent the tailgate from latching shut. Since I usually have a shell on it it’s not a big deal because the shell keeps the tailgate closed. However, since we are loading the sod in the back of my truck, we’ve removed the shell. Bouncing, jouncing roads created by three weeks of rain cause problems. At the top of the rise Dan looks back and notices the tailgate is open and his work boots (for the sod) and his wading boots are missing.

I back down the road where we spot the first hiking boot (which I promptly run over).  The second isn’t far away. But the wading boots are nowhere in sight. Not trusting my backing skills, I immediately turn around. We discuss the fact that I don’t remember seeing Dan leave his house with two pair of boots, just one. The closer we get to the asphalt the surer I am that there are no wading boots to be found unless we return to Dan’s house. Dan agrees and we turn around again and resume the upward march.

The truck is in four-wheel drive. The road continues to ratchet up the chiropractor bill . We sally forth.

The road winds toward the Williams Creek Canyon until we are a couple of hundred feet higher than the creek. The trees on each side of the truck move closer and closer together. From our trip last time we know that when we get to our stopping place that the road turns into an ATV track, not a real road for full-sized pickups.

It hasn’t rained for almost 24 hours but there are standing puddles of water. We slosh through the first without a problem. The second puddle appears in front of us at a point where the road pinches together and the left side of the road slips precariously off to the river, a hundred feet below. I slowly enter the puddle and the front drops away, like hitting an air pocket in a plane. I’m afraid my front balding tires will not have enough traction to get out the other side 15 feet away so I gun it a little. The rear end drops and the bumper immediately jars. I gun it  a little more and we pass through the mud hole.

We are on a little hump of ground that gives a fairly decent view of the creek below on the driver’s side. I hop out but Dan is penned in by the shrubbery on his side. From here the water looks identical to last week: high. We make a decision to skip the creek and turn around for somewhere else. But to turn around we must drive forward another half mile or so.

I come to another puddle, this one much shorter than the last, only about seven feet long. The front tires slip into the puddle and the entire front end jerks to the left, toward the drop off to the creek below. This road is mostly clay and wet clay is slick. I yank the steering wheel to the right but that doesn’t seem to do any good. Luckily the puddle is short enough that our forward momentum has already carried the front onto the dry road beyond, the bald tires somehow gripping enough to yank us back on track.

Cardiac arrest isn’t my idea of fun, and that was just a little too close for comfort. And when we turn around in a few minutes, we have to do it again.

Our turn around is successful and I inch toward the puddle, at least knowing what to expect. But it doesn’t help. We’re again thrust toward the edge and at the last second escape to the other side. I’m so worried about that puddle that I’ve forgotten about the “drop off” puddle and do a repeat of the back-jarring events.

Safely past these obstacles we think of Plan B. There is a paved road that runs parallel to the lower creek where it empties into the Bear River. The creek is all fenced for about a mile until the road ends at a gate to a field. We decide to check with some landowners and try to get permission to enter. The gentleman we talk to is very nice. And minutes later Dan is opening gates as I drive through.

We get just into the trees at about the mouth of the canyon and decide to try that spot. There aren’t any recent vehicle tracks. In fact, the road had a fair amount of small branches and debris that leads us to believe this area hasn’t been accessed this year (always a good sign for the angler). Dan improvises and squeezes into his work boots since his were left at home. I’ve left mine home before too and once I had to use my sandals (luckily they were strap sandals so they stayed on my feet).

We walk downriver and hear the water gushing. When we visited higher up a few weeks ago it didn’t sound like there was this much water. We bushwhack looking for a place to enter the water (this is a good sign—any place there are trails beaten to the river=fishermen). There is a slight clearing and rise a little further ahead and the sound of the creek increases exponentially.

The slight rise is a narrow dolomite ridge. The creek to the left is placid, but to the right it plunges away. The dolomite ridge is a natural footpath over the creek with the water cutting a cascading waterfall of 40 feet or so, creating the dramatic sound. (You can see in the picture below the whitewater working itself away from us toward the top of the picture.) Since Dan left something home I had to follow suit—I forgot my camera. Luckily, for maybe the second time ever, Dan brought his!

We work ourselves over the bridge and into the creek above the falls. I put on a size 6, ugly, tan, foam bodied, red rubber legged fly (one of my former students gave it to me and I really don’t know if it has a name).  On my third cast a fish smacks it hard. A pale 9″ rainbow. I decline the photo op figuring that with such quick success we were bound to get into plenty more—a creek section rarely (if ever) fished was sure to have gullible residents.

A couple of more small fish scatter as we work our way upstream around the first small bend to the right. The next bend to the left brings another cascading waterfall into view. This one only about ten feet tall. We’ve been at it for about 15 minutes since the first fish, but not another shows itself.

I peak up the falls which has too much vegetation and slick rocks to try and scramble up. Dan works his way back downstream a little looking for an exit point. He finally beats his way through the bushes and I follow. We skirt around the falls then look for an entry point. We each take separate paths but enter the creek again.

A couple more small fish scatter as we work the creek another five minutes. We round a bend to the left and run into this little beauty. We’ve fished for maybe 20 minutes and have covered about 50 yards of creek and have encountered three waterfalls. I can count on one hand the waterfalls I know of that are this close to our home location of Cache Valley, and it (that’s right, one) is a wimp compared to anything we’ve seen so far.

I take a few shots of the waterfall and in a little grotto to the left is an aluminum handled fishing net. Uh-oh, not good.

We skirt around this waterfall a little easier on the far side of the creek. There are more nice stretches that look fishable and a couple of small, skittery fish, but nothing rises to our flies. We come to a little section of plunge pools and our second sign of humans. There is a lot of debris left from a fish testing site: mesh, piping, tanks, tarps, etc. It looks like it has been here for several years. This wasn’t some rinky-dink operation, but pretty large scale. (I wish we had a picture.)

Why they abandoned everything is hard to understand. Did they figure that since nobody uses the area it’s no big deal to just dump it? Was it a project that lost it’s funding or had a change in personnel and the new people didn’t know about it? Whatever the reason, it’s disconcerting.

We don’t feel like working through the plunge pools and decide to head back to the road and see if we can walk upriver a bit to some more accessible fishing. The vegetation is still thick as we ascend a fairly steep section of road for a couple hundred yards. Then the canopy clears and we are standing in a man-made clearing. A man-made embankment in front of us traps water and diverts it through a large corrugated pipe to a contraption that looks like it might be a large debris filter.

This whole thing looks like it was done within the last year. Off to the side of the road we came up was a newly plowed road. Actually, more like a pathway for the piping coming from this setup we see. We figure it’s some sort of culinary water filtration system. (If this looks familiar to anybody, let me know what you think.)

Dan fishes the impoundment and I wander toward the edge of the clearing. We’re about 100′ above the section of creek we just fished and I hear some thunderous sounds. The vegetation is still fairly thick, but peeking about I can see at least four waterfalls plunging from this area. Unfortunately, there isn’t any clear visual shot of them for a photo opportunity.

We have some sod to pick up (we pick up the scraps for a hugely discounted rate—it costs me about $60 to sod almost my entire front yard), so we decide to call it quits for now. We pack up and roll out, wondering why there were so few fish and so small for the large pools we saw. We figure that with so many waterfalls the fish are trapped in short stretches. They really can’t go anywhere unless they get flushed downriver.

There is no way for fish to access these stretches from below. We hope that above these last falls things calm down a bit and the creek becomes more fish friendly. However, by being cut off from any foreign influences from below, the upper creek would be a perfect spot for some cutthroat restoration work!

I know why Frank Lloyd Wright built his Fallingwater. And if I owned this land it would be extremely hard not to put a house on it. Luckily for us, someone else hasn’t done that either. Such a beautiful out-of-the-way place definitely fits into the category of one of those fishing days where it doesn’t matter that we didn’t catch many fish because the surroundings were so incredible.

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