(You may want to read the post, “Desert Natives – Preface” before reading this post.)

Dan and I started planning this trip last winter. We came across Gary M’s trip to find the Alvord cutthroat that Dr. Robert Behnke mentioned in an update in his book, About Trout. Gary located the trout in Guano Creek, Oregon in August 2008 and wrote about it on his blog. Dan and I like to find native trout in out-of-the-way locations and this sounded like something right up our alley. This search became our main objective for our planned five day desert native quest, with everything else incidental to it.

One issue in fishing for native species deals with designating subspecies and people are often divided into two camps: splitters and lumpers. Most lumpers recognize 12 subspecies of cutthroat trout (although there is some debate around some of these subspecies) and splitters further divide those subspecies into different strains, usually based on their geographic location.

The Great Basin holds Lahontan cutthroat trout. Within the Great Basin are many smaller basins, currently cutoff from other smaller basins. The Coyote Basin holds a strain of cutthroat named for the creeks they are found in, the Willow/Whitehorse cutthroat. These cutthroat are genetically closely related to the Humboldt cutthroat found in the Quinn River drainage. Some contend that there isn’t enough evidence to designate them as their own subspecies (such as the US Fish and Wildlife Service) whereas others do (such as Dr. Behnke).

Gary is a splitter and I believe he plans on catching every possible strain of each subspecies of native trout in North America. At only the age of 23, he is surprisingly well on his way. Me, I accept there are various strains, but for now I’m content with catching each subspecies and not as worried about the strains. Later, when looking for new trout to fish, I’ll probably resort to looking for various strains.

So for this trip we planned on focusing on four (five, depending on your designation of the Willow/Whitehorse) species/subspecies: Alvord cutthroat trout, Lahontan cutthroat trout (including the Willow/Whitehorse), redband trout and bull trout (Dolly Varden). We wanted to stick to the upper 1/4 of the Great Basin for this trip.

We wanted to leave early Monday morning and meet with Gary Monday night at a campsite a couple of miles north of Guano Creek so we could fish for the Alvords on Tuesday. That’s 660 miles to travel, or, about 12 hours, considering stops, unforeseen traffic, etc.. We figure a good fish day starts at 5:00 and ends at dark, or about 9:30, giving us around 16 1/2 hours minus the 12 hours of driving. So we could squeeze in 4 1/2 hours of fishing somewhere.

The route we planned on taking would put us about 30 miles from some of our favorite redband trout water, the South Fork Boise River. A couple of miles before the SF turnoff are two creeks that also host redbands: Bennett Creek and Dive Creek. They had been on the radar for a few months and we thought this would be the perfect opportunity to fish for them.

As mentioned in a previous post, there are many reasons to fish for natives. There are a few disappointments as well, one being the cattle catastrophe, wherein the angler successfully finds the target water, and expects pristine conditions, only to find the place denuded by bovine.

As we drove the three miles to Bennett Creek, we had to open and close two gates. This is always a possible good omen that the creek you are looking for is being protected from cattle. Or, a bad omen that the area you are in has a lot of cattle traffic.

We dropped over the final rise and there it was, winding itself among the hills, Bennett Creek. I felt that little rush I often get when successfully finding the sought after creek. But as we pulled a little closer, we saw the scarred ground around the water. The water color had that blue-green look. Everything said, “Cows.”

We’ve raised fish in some scary looking water, so a creek is never ruled out until it’s fished. But after 15 minutes of waving the wand, no fish magically appeared and we put away the rods. We think further upstream might prove a bit more conducive to fish, but we’re on a tight schedule. If the creek held a supposedly important strain of redband, we’d explore it further. But the South Fork Boise, a couple of miles away, holds the same strain.

Bennett Creek Video:http://scarles.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/bennett_creek.flv

Dan’s truck setup:http://scarles.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/dans_truck.flv

A few minutes later and we were on the South Fork. What a difference a dam makes! This tailwater has some great conditions for trout. The flows were at a higher level than I’m used to, but Dan has fished it so  much that he knows where the back channels usually form. (And yet the dam creates an artificial fishery that often didn’t exist before. Luckily the redbands were here previous to the dam, but the dam has altered the conditions. I wonder if the dam were removed, would it be the same fishery—would the size and quantity of the fish be the same?)

Our goal was to leave no later than 2:00 to give us seven hours to make it the final 360 miles to Rock Creek. We used up the first two hours trying a couple of different spots that were unproductive. We finally moved down below Cursed Hole to a side channel, Ice Box. We saw a couple of risers we fished to, but no luck. At the head of Ice Box is the tail of Cursed Hole where Dan pulled a nice redband out.

We fished up through Cursed Hole without any luck. We don’t carry watches, but we knew it must be getting close to, or past, 2:00. We figured this was our last stretch of water. I got to the top of Cursed Hole and was at my exit point. Just above me was a small hole with some rocks and branches forming a chute at the bottom and an overhanging tree bisecting it at the top, leaving about a 4’ x 4’ section of water to fish.

I cast my last cast into the hole. A branch angled up in the center of the chute and my float line was sucked toward it and about to tangle. I lifted the rod tip which simultaneously pulled the fly across the water, and right out of the jaws of a decent sized fish. The first fish anywhere near my fly all day.

Luckily there was no contact between fish and fly. I quickly reloaded the rod and cast a couple of feet above him, but about a foot too wide of his lie. The next cast seemed to be placed within his feeding lane. The fly drifted a couple of feet, but my rod tip was held high, keeping the line from tangling with the projecting branch. Another second and the fish engulfed my fly. I brought a beautiful 15” redband to hand.

This was the angler’s realization of all those self-deceptions and rationalizations when he knows his spouse wanted him home 30 minutes ago but he’s been skunked all day: “I’ll just fish this one last hole—I’ve got to catch something from this one—then I’ll go home.” Which then becomes, “just one more hole…” ad infinitum. But occasionally one experiences the Holy Grail of angledom: TRF²HF (the reward of the first “final” hole fish).

It was 2:30, 30 minutes past our self-imposed deadline. 360 miles to go, the last 50 on a gravel road of unknown quality (on Google maps satellite it appeared to be a nice gravel road, with the possible exception of the last 5 miles) that we didn’t want to travel on in the dark. And we still needed to stop somewhere to pick up groceries for the next four days. It was time to hightail it out of there if we were to make it before nightfall.

With six hours of road time, there wasn’t a lot to do, except tie flies (which we didn’t need), sleep (which was a bit too soon for since we were still running on beginning-of-the-trip adrenaline) or talk about something, like one of those taboo topics that can ruin a friendship, like politics (which we differ on slightly, but often discuss anyhow—although I put my foot down if the radio is blaring Hannity or Limbaugh or such). Or we could talk about another no-no topic: religion (which is actually fairly safe for us since we did originally meet at a church, and therefore have the closely aligned beliefs).

The world at large (and Stalker readership in particular) will be happy to know that we chose to discuss this latter topic and have married scientific, philosophical and theological belief systems into one grand whole. We have closed all loopholes. Solved all dilemmas. Answered all of the big questions. Yes, indeed, in *less* than our allotted time, we did what no others have come even close to, what has perplexed and vexed the greatest minds in history: we found the answer to life, the universe, and everything (Ok, Ok, Douglas Adams did beat us to it, but his answer, “42,” was incorrect). The answer is…Fruit Loops! (“Bucket o’ Chains” is a second line of reasoning that came close, but there were a few discrepancies that couldn’t be resolved.)

Other than the stimulating discussion, the drive took us through some beautiful country. This leg of our trip etched the northern most edge of one of the least inhabited, unroaded places in the lower 48: The Great Basin, also known as Basin and Range. This dry, desolate area just so happened to have experienced one of the wettest three weeks they’ve ever had.

As we rose over each range it gave a view of the next lush basin, most uninhabited. Some with a single farm or field. Some a small creek. All of them green: dusty muted greens of rabbitbrush and sagebrush, light green bitterbrush, darker greens of cinquefoil; dotted with blues of penstemon, blue flax and larkspur.

In Harney County, Oregon (10,226 square miles—population 7,600), the land becomes more basins and mesas and buttes with basalt volcanism being the major cause. We stopped at Buena Vista Overlook that scaled one mesa, giving a panoramic view of the Harney Basin.

Hopping out of the truck to take pictures we were immediately bombarded by swarms of mosquitoes. We were both wearing shorts and sandals and within seconds we were doing the skeeter hop: slapping arms, stomping legs, bending over slapping legs, straightening up to slap neck and arms, then back down to the legs. We took a couple of quick photos then dashed back to the truck. We quickly stripped down and put on pants and a long-sleeved shirt. We put on some socks then slipped our feet back into our sandals (that’s right ladies: socks and sandals—a mainstay of the wader brigade because it’s easy to get in and out of the sandals when you have to get in and out of the waders and believe me, you do not want to catch a whiff of the aroma wafting from a pair of unsocked wader-wearers).

The sun was just slipping over the mountains when we turned onto Rock Creek Road—the dirt road that would take us the remaining 48 miles. The road accesses the 278,000 acre Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge, where we were camping for the night and home to Guano Creek, our main destination.

The dirt road teemed with wildlife: cottontail, jackrabbit, sage grouse, owls and quail. But only one antelope. We didn’t take a lot of time to admire or photograph the critters because light was fading fast and we didn’t want to search for Gary in the dark.

We finally (after driving through the first part of the campground, not relizing there was a second part) found Gary at the campground along Rock Creek about 10:00. I talked fishing with him for an hour or so while Dan set up the sleeping arrangement in the bed of the truck. We made plans to fish Rock Creek for redbands early the next morning before hitting Guano Creek, then called it a day.

[go to Day 2]

 Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment