One such “extinct” trout was the Pyramid Lake strain of the Lahontan cutthroat. Historically found in ancient Lake Lahontan and its tributaries, its territory shrunk as the lake receded. The fish were still found in Pyramid Lake and its tributaries into the early 20th century until the lake became a source of water for irrigation. When the lake levels dropped too far, the Pyramid Lake Lahontans could no longer reach their spawning tributaries. And the fish was thought extinct by the 1940′s.

In the 1970′s, a fish was found in the Pilot Peak range in Utah that didn’t belong in the Utah mountains. Don Duff sent information to Dr. Robert Behnke about this fish. Dr. Behnke identified the fish as the missing Pyramid Lake strain of the Lahontan cutthroat. (I hope to provide more of this story at a later time.) These fish have subsequently been restored to Pyramid Lake. A brood stock has been kept at Pilot Peak to help supplement the National Hatchery’s brood stock. The Pilot Peak project is on the property of Steve Doudy, who has been the caretaker of the population in the creek and in the brood stock (both of which are on his property).

This past Wednesday I had the privilege of spending the day with Dr. Behnke and some of the morning with Don Duff and Steve Doudy at the Pilot Peak brood ponds where we planned on helping spawn the Lahontan cutthroats. (More about the Pilot Peak project in another post later.)

Interestingly enough, Dr. Behnke, who was so instrumental in the identification of this strain of cutthroat, had never been to the Pilot Peak brood ponds. So my fishing buddy, Dan Line, decided to invite him. Since our trip seeking the extinct Alvord cutthroat a couple of years ago, we (actually Dan) have been in contact with Dr. Behnke as efforts have been made to try and keep at least a phenotypical remnant population of the Alvords alive. Dan invited Dr. Behnke to spend the morning with us at Pilot Peak and then help us give a presentation later that evening to our local TU chapter (Cache Anglers) about the Alvords.

My memory stinks—I’m lucky to remember details of what happened yesterday, let alone a year or more ago. Dr. Behnke’s got an incredible memory. The day was filled with his remembrances. Just ask him a question and he would fill us in with all the minutiae of dates, people, places and events. It was incredible to learn firsthand a few of the many things Dr. Behnke has been involved in with the conservation efforts of native fish and also with the furthering the world’s knowledge about fish.

I would imagine that someone as knowledgeable and experienced as Dr. Behnke could easily become snooty, arrogant or condescending, but he was extremely polite, patient and entertaining. And there is a fiery side to him as well, especially when it comes to tracking a fish’s ancestry through meristics versus genetics (Dr. Behnke is firmly in the meristic camp). (Hopefully some more about this topic in another post.)

I think I’ll write a couple other posts about this day and issues and conversations that surrounded it. I just needed to get a post up now while I had the time and inclination to write it. Hopefully I’ll become a bit more of a regular writer again.

Don Duff  is another instrumental and passionate man when it comes to fish. I’ll have a post dedicated to him later too.

PS The next issue of Rise Forms is nearing completion (Scott’s been a very busy man, and therefore very lazy about anything writing related, but things are getting better.)

They are touched, in some way, by the object of their passion—a wisp of ether; a mere glimpse of the past—but to them it is often enough.

A few months ago I spent a couple of days on my homewater away from home. It was more crowded than I’d ever seen it before, but Dan and I found a few stretches if open water. The fish seemed skittish. Or maybe hesitant. As if they had been fished over already. Or maybe they were toying with me—trying to get as close to my fly as they could without getting hooked.

Along the grassy bank I saw a sizeable fish repeatedly rise. I clambered up his side of the river a good forty feet below him, then cut a wide swath around his lie and made my way back to the water’s edge thirty feet above him. I was afraid I had mentally mismarked his location as I didn’t see any movement where I thought he was. I slowly worked my way downstream, letting my fly swing free below me in the current. I was 20 feet upriver from him when he rose again. I dragged the fly toward me then flipped a rolling cast, landing the fly half a dozen feet upriver of him in his feeding lane.

The fly reached the target area and the fish dutifully rose to meet the fly. He gave the CDC emerger a good nose bump as I set the hook into an expanse of blue Wyoming sky. In fact, twice in three minutes I tried lassoing the clouds with a sudden jerk of the rod. The second time put the fish down for good.

I know slow takes, and these were not them. This wasn’t a case of pulling flies past teeth. Nor was it a case of beginning-of-the-season-jitters. These were complete misses. Purposeful misses. On the part of the fish.

They were getting as close to the fly as they could without getting hooked. Tempting fate and a barb they came again and again. In eddies and chutes. Through slicks and riffles. A mile upriver and two miles down.

It was frustrating as the count grew: first just a couple fish, it quickly multiplied to what seemed like a score or more of them had snubbed me and nearly as many fly patterns. Eventually I came to recognize their point—to see their game for what it was.

I swear, these fish were counting coup.

I could play the game too. I began reaching out my coup stick with the same chutzpah the fish had shown. I reached into their element, and no matter how darting the peck, for just a moment, they reached into my element. I counted myself fortunate to touch without touching something I could not hold.

And on that day, the ethos of the coup was enough.

In my last post I posed a little challenge to determine the two places I stopped. I said it was a trick question, and Harry was pretty quick on the draw when he said “bike trip” and “foolishly didn’t take a fly rod with you.” The fly gear was left home on purpose. Foolish? Hmmmm…jury is still out. Where were the two stops? Red Lodge and home and for the same reason: saddle sore!

In looking at a map of our motorcycling trip, it would probably be hard for a diehard fly angler to comprehend how one could choose to leave the fly gear behind with so many tempting choices in the path. Not to sound boastful (if that’s the right word), but most of these places I’ve been to multiple times and are a 4 hour drive or less away—it doesn’t elicit a great pull on me to fish them. But it does leave me in awe of the amazing opportunities I have to fly fish within a relatively close distance of home. I’m truly fortunate.

So a friend, Paul, invited me to come along with him and a few other guys for an annual trip they started doing a few years ago to Red Lodge, Montana. I jumped at the chance. These aren’t anglers, strictly biking. In fact, Paul is a bit of a speed junky (snowmobiles, jet skies, motorcycles, etc.). My wife and I went with him and a few other couples for a five hour bike ride a few weeks ago. He liked my riding style (fast), and that’s why he invited me for the Red Lodge trip.

We took a circuitous route to Red Lodge, not the fastest route. In fact, my father-in-law asked how long it took us to get there and how far it was. When I told him it was about 460 miles, and it took us 12 hours. He said that we must have been going awfully slow since that would average out to about 40 miles per hour. For those of you who might be motorcycle riders, you’ll understand that frequent butt breaks are important. And, one of the guys needed to stop every 100 miles to refuel. Plus, there is The Park.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Yellowstone as much as the next person, but it can be a real trial for those of us with traffic patience issues. Many of us who visit it, or the surrounding area with any amount of regularity find it both funny, and irritating, that people will stop in the middle of the road to take pictures of deer, elk, moose or bison. Or flowers. Really. (If you haven’t been to the park before, just picture a narrow, two lane road with virtually no shoulders.)

So, there we are, putt-putting along at 7 1/2 MPH. Then some stop and go stuff. And what should we find? Some guy stopped (which automatically means that that lane is now blocked) taking pictures of flowers. Again, I love flowers, but, aw, come on people!

And then the construction. We happened to pull up to some stop-n-go traffic just in time to hit the tail end of a pilot car line. When we got to the traffic stopped going the other direction, Paul decided to count how many cars were waiting in line. 278, with a couple dozen more rolling up right behind them. Boy, I’m glad we got there when we did!

Just outside the very northeast corner of the park (probably the least visited area, but it does have Slough Creek and Soda Butte Creek) is Cooke City. That’s where the grizzly attacked the three campers, killing the one. It’s a fun little town, but more importantly, it’s the gateway to Beartooth Pass.

If you aren’t familiar with Beartooth Pass, you’re missing out on one of the most spectacular drives in the lower 48. The summit is nearly 11,000 feet (10, 947), making it one of the highest roads in the US. It is amazing to look down at snow in August. A large section of the road is brand new, making it an incredible ride for the motorcycle enthusiast (just make sure you aren’t stuck behind cars so you can really enjoy those corners).

This page has some great pictures and video of the road (none of it taken by me).

I tried taking some video (you’ll see it below), but ran into a couple of problems. For those of you who have ridden cruisers (that’s what the Harley-type bikes are called, as opposed to bullet bikes, etc.), you’ll know that these machines are a bit on the rough side—not very smooth. Your head can do a lot of bouncing around. At least, mine does. And just about everything else bounces around too. I took my Kodak Zi8 camcorder and taped it to the inside of my windshield in hopes of capturing our trip. Well, you can see some of the results in the little bit of video I put together. It’s a bouncy bugger! Also, I couldn’t see the screen, so I never knew if I got the thing turned on or off. At one point in time I didn’t get the thing turned off, and I ran out of battery before making it anywhere close to Beartooth.

Click here to view the embedded video.

On the other end of Beartooth is Red Lodge. This is the first time I have ever been there, and I can say that I’ll definitely be back. It’s a nice little town with some incredible background scenery. We decided to avoid traveling through the park again, so the next morning we left for Bozeman, crossing Yellowstone River (which I have never fished outside of the park) then rode south along the Gallatin River (another one I’ve never fished).

I must say, that for being a bike ride, I was looking at a lot of water as we rode past rivers. I did see a number of rises and quite a few anglers and wished I were on the river too. Maybe I’ll sneak a rod along with me next year.

Warning: This post contains no fishing, no fish and no fish byproducts: it is piscatorially and ichthyologically barren.

Wednesday morning dawned a bit foggy. But we were finished fishing, so weather wasn’t much of a worry. The morning plans were to swing by Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s spread. In my early life, I desired to be an architect and went to an architectural design and drafting school in Arizona. I still have an interest in architecture, and couple that with my interest in history, especially early US history, and Monticello was on my “Bucket List.” Somehow, on my two previous trips to the east, I didn’t make it there.

Monticello sits on a hill to the south of Charlottesville, and I can imagine it has a commanding view of the surrounding countryside. The fog limited our view to just teasing glimpses of what that view might be like. As with most historical sites, Monticello has been properly commercialized through exorbitant admission costs, a fancy museum, a large staff, guided tours, yada, yada, yada. It was nice to see that visitors have free rein to the grounds, which are fairly extensive. For those of you who like history, maybe you’re like me and you’ve grown weary of the sameness of tours and museums: once you’ve been to one Civil War museum, you’ve basically been to them all. Once you’ve been on a tour of one Revolutionary era house, you’ve been on them all. Sure, there are distinct differences from building to building, but I can find that information in a book or online. For me, I just like to bask in the ambiance of a place, try to imagine what it was like in its heyday, which is hard to do when surrounded by a bunch of tourists and a tour guide yacking away. Call me odd (wouldn’t be the first time), but that’s me.

The house structure itself was, at first glance for me, surprising in its size. I was expecting something much larger. Not that it’s puny or anything—the main floor is over 5700 sq. ft. It’s hard to explain, but the main portion of the house looked smaller to me than it actually is. It might have something to do with the “dependencies.” Or the trees. Something. There is plenty of information available online for those who are interested in the details of Monticello. We didn’t spend nearly enough time lounging around the grounds, but I don’t think Dan would have liked to just sit and look. In fact, I couldn’t do the kind of sitting, pondering, photographing, that I like to do unless I was alone.

We quickly wrapped up our visit and hit the road for Nashville, an eight hour drive. As we neared Nashville, Dan remembered that they have a minor league baseball team, Nashville Sounds. He called a couple of places and found out that the Sounds were playing a home game that night. We watched them spank their arch-rivals, Memphis Redbirds 9-0. It was a nice way to unwind after the long drive.

Thursday was a day of waiting. If you didn’t read Day 1, the main purpose behind the trip was for Dan to help his brother, Xxxxx*, transport some guns across country from Williamsburg, VA to Logan, UT. Dan thought it would be a good idea to get to Virginia early and do some brookie fishing. And he invited me along. Xxxxx was catching up with us in Nashville Thursday to complete the trip.

We did some laundry, ate at a Waffle House (about every three blocks is a Waffle House in the southeast—more prevalent than McDonalds) and got a bit of a nap in. As it got closer to departure time, we thought we should head to downtown Nashville since neither of us had visited there before. As we were driving in, a massive thunderstorm dumped on us, and the radio reports were saying that the freeways were clogging up with traffic. We needed to have the rental back to the airport and meet Xxxxx there, so we skipped downtown and headed toward the airport.

We met Xxxxx, loaded our gear into his SUV rental, and headed out of Nashville around 5:00. Our plan was to drive straight home to northern Utah, 1,700 miles away. We planned on taking turns driving, each one of us driving 2-4 hour shifts.

I must admit that driving a load of guns made me feel like a bit of a gun runner. The last thing we wanted was to get pulled over and have to explain what we were doing in a rental vehicle with Florida plates. We had Utah drivers licenses and Xxxxx probably still had his Mexico license since he had just returned to the country from Mexico City.

Somewhere near Salina Kansas, during one of my driving stretches, the wind had picked up a bit. With the weight in the back of the SUV, the front end was a bit squirrely and the wind caused me to sway a bit. It was nearing 3:00AM with hardly a soul on the freeway except for the gun runners, swaying down the freeway at 77 MPH.

And the Highway Patrolman.

He pulled out of the center median as I passed and followed us for a mile before throwing on his light. I woke up Dan and Xxxxx and eased the SUV to the shoulder.

“Can I see your license?”

I handed Mr. Tan Polyester Pants my license.

“Are you awake? You seemed to be weaving all over,” he said as he glanced at my license and looked through the windows at the boxes lining the rear of the SUV and stacked on the folded-down half of the rear seat. He seemed to step back and notice the sag of the rear end of the vehicle and debating with himself what the relationship was between the sag and the boxes.

“Could you tell me what’s in these boxes?”

“Uh…guns?”

At about that time, Xxxxx, from the rear seat, leaned across some of the boxes next to him, and handed him an identification wallet with a badge in it.

“I’m with ICE. And just so you know, I’m armed,” said Xxxxx, as he gestured toward the handgun near him on the back seat.

The KHP looked at the ID, then handed it back to Xxxxx, and returned my driver’s license to me.

“How many guns do you have in here?”

“27,” Xxxxx replied. “I collect them. I just moved to Utah and I’m transporting my collection to my new house.”

The KHP and Xxxxx chatted for a few minutes about guns.

“Make sure you’re awake,” he said as he strode back to his patrol car, still eying the SUV. I watched in the side mirror as he paused, about five paces behind the SUV, still looking at the vehicle. Then he came back to the Driver’s window.

“Could I see what’s in the back?” he asked.

We all piled out of the SUV and opened the back of it.

He glanced inside and saw a number of smaller boxes. “What’s in those?” pointing toward the smaller boxes.

“Ammo,” Xxxxx said.

“Uh-huh.” The mental chin-stroking was clearly evident as he processed this new information. He hemmed and hawed a few more minutes.

“Well, you boys have a safe trip,” he said. And left.

“So Xxxxx, how much ammo do you have in here?” Dan asked, after the patrolman closed his door.

“About 50,000 rounds,” he said.

And we did have a safe and quiet ride the remainder of the way home.

* I could disclose Agent Xxxxx’s name to you, but then I’d have to…well, you know.

Day 2 of the brook trout fishing escapade – see Day 1 report: Sin, Salvation and Stacks (and Something Fishy).

I typically don’t sleep so well when I’m not sleeping in my own bed, but at the end of Day 1, in  a motel in Roanoke, VA, I slept very well. And I was thankful I wasn’t camping. Camping in the east…I didn’t notice a lot of travel trailers and RVs as we traveled Appalachia. Here in the west it seems like every other vehicle is a pickup truck, every fourth vehicle is an SUV and 30% of either vehicle is pulling a camp trailer. And then there are the behemoth motorhomes careening down the freeway.

I came to the conclusion that it’s just too uncomfortable for many people to camp in humidity like there is in the east. Sure, lots of people camp, but maybe just not in the numbers they do around here, where not only the air is drier, but half the land is federal and camping is as easy as driving a dozen miles and pulling off nearly anywhere in the national forest. My personal experience tells me it’s probably the humidity though: a few years ago my family spent 28 days straight camping east of the Mississippi. No motels. No air-conditioning. It was miserable.

Tuesday morning came and we rousted ourselves from bed to get moving on. This was the day I was most worried about in the planning stages. We were looking for the northern Appalachian brook trout that day and we wanted to fish the Rapidan River to do it. The Rapidan has great historicity when it comes to fly fishing and it’s supposed to have  a good population of brook trout.

However, when I started doing some research about fishing the Rapidan for brookies, most of what I read mentioned that accessibility might be an issue—3 to 4 miles of vigorous hiking just to get to the stretches with the fish, then the actual fishing mileage, followed by a 3 mile hike back to the vehicle, uphill. I emailed a couple of folks and got pretty much the same response. Apparently the most popular method is to take Skyline Drive along the ridge of the Shenandoahs, park above Hoover Camp, then hike down below Hoover Camp and fish back up.

We wanted to avoid a lot of hiking (see Day 1 for more on that) and had plans to meet Justin in Charlottesville at 4:00 for some evening smallmouth fishing. We wouldn’t arrive at the Rapidan until about 11:00. 8 miles of hiking and fishing was out of the question.

I looked at Google Maps and really checked out the Hoover Camp area closely. I saw a road from Skyline Dr., past the camp, then continuing downriver. It hooked into some public roads just west of Criglersville. I figured the road to and past the camp were probably forest service access roads, and not accessible to the public. But since it connected down below to public roads, I thought it was worth looking at more carefully. I did some searches and found that coming from Criglersville we could follow a road up to a fire gate about a mile below Camp Hoover. Four wheel drive suggested. Sounded like the perfect spot.

We arrived in Charlotesville about 10:00 and looked for a fly shop, Albemarle Angler, Justin told me about. We talked to Tom(?) at the shop and he was extremely helpful. We wanted a couple of warm water flies for the evening and he hooked us up. We also wanted info about my access road idea. So I asked if he knew a good way to get to the Rapidan to fish for brookies. He outlined the very route we mapped out! Things weren’t looking so gray after all.

Except in the sky. As we pulled out of Cosby Creek Campground the day before, we were pounded with some of the hardest rain we westerners had ever experienced. We pulled to the side of the freeway because we couldn’t see the road. The skies had dogged us the remainder of the evening. As we pulled away from the fly shop, looking to the northwest, toward the Shenandoah Mountains, we could see clouds hovering.

We passed through the quaint towns of Madison and Banco. Traveling through such countryside, it was hard not to think of how Virginia is steeped in history, a history we memorialize so often because of tragedy. After driving through Tennessee and southern Virginia the day before, it was nice to have more open fields around the roads instead of just tree upon tree upon tree. It gave a nice pastoral setting to our morning. But the dark clouds looming ever nearer put a bit of a damper on how much we could enjoy it.

We only missed one turn, and backtracked a couple of miles before getting the right road. It seems that someone, after spending a couple of hours making really nice, detailed maps for the whole trip, left the maps on his desk as he was packing everything else. At least he didn’t forget any fishing gear this time. The road crossed the Rapidan and turned into a dirt road.

We rented a 4×4 for just this route. As we quickly moved along the road we realized that a high-clearance vehicle would have been just as good. Heck, my brother-in-law Danny would have been able to easily made that road in his Toyota Corolla (he’s taken that many miles over some incredibly rocky/dirty/chuckholey terrain). But, it was nice to know we had the extra capabilities if needed.

We moved from public road into the Shenandoah National Park as the clouds started to spit and spatter at us. After a couple of miles we left the Park and were on National Forest land for a few more miles. We saw one vehicle parked along that section, presumably an angler. The rain came down in earnest as we approached the fire gate at the beginning of Shenandoah Park property again. There was enough room for a couple of vehicles to park, but we were the only ones.

I was willing to wait out the rain for 10 or 20 minutes, but Dan said , “Let’s go!” Our plan was to wet wade, but it was cool enough and wet enough that we donned the waders, slipped into light rain jackets and went.

We were told at the fly shop that the water was down, and “hopefully you’ll be able to find the fish.” At the point where we entered the water, the Rapidan is a pretty little creek. We could see that a good volume of water could possibly move through the bed, but right then, it looked perfect for us, with mostly pocket water and a few plunge pools here and there—we could have easily been at home on a local creek.

The river was about 70 feet from where we parked, and before I even got to the water, Dan had a fish on. A rainbow. Dang! In addition to the rain, things got just a bit bleaker at that moment. But it was short-lived.

The rain began to ease and Dan was in to another fish. A brookie! In fact, from that point onward we caught nothing but brook trout. A good dozen or so brought to hand with an equal number off the hook or missed. And the weather cleared nicely, warming up quite a bit. We fished a good three quarters of a mile upstream. By the time we made it back to the vehicle, we were soaked with sweat, but we were happy with the fishing results—it was a lot easier done than some said it would be.

We rolled back to Charlottesville about 3:00. We were to meet with Justin at 4:00. I met Justin online through Goodreads’ Fly Fish Literati group. We then started up Rise Forms: Fly Fishing’s Literary Voice, our new angling magazine (first issue due this fall). Since we had a bit of time, and we were hungry, we stopped at Five Guys Burgers. Neither of us had been to one (although they do have a couple here in Utah), and since Virginia was basically their home territory, we decided to give it a try (also highly recommended by Dan’s brother, Chris). It was a huge burger. It was good eating.

We dropped by our motel, checked in, and unloaded a few things to make a little mre room for Justin, since we were driving him to our smallmouth appointment. We then zipped downtown to meet up with Justin. The old part of town is just on the outskirts of the University of Virginia (started by Thomas Jefferson), and seems to have a great atmosphere—someplace I’d really like to spend some time getting to know. But we didn’t have time right then. We pulled on to Water Street, headed toward 2nd Street, and it was pretty easy to spot Justin: the guy with a fly rod case standing on the street corner of a downtown always sticks out. We made introductions, then headed toward the Rivanna River.

I’ve never been smallmouth fishing before, and I was probably looking forward to that fishing as much as the brook trout fishing. The Rivanna River is a large river (relatively speaking—large for someone who lives in the desert) flowing through Charlottesville. As the river came into view, it seemed to be just what I imagined a warm-water fishery would look like.

We stopped at a parking area along the river where Justin has had success before. Not another angler in sight. In fact, Justin said that he rarely has seen people fishing there. We geared up and I realized I’d left my reel at the motel in a bag I took into the room. Three anglers, two rods. Dan, being the ever-gracious fishing companion, agreed to baseball it with me (three strikes and you’re out, next guy uses the rod and fishes).

Dan was up first. He fished the bottom of a nice chute with some decent flows through it and some still water depths on either side. Justin worked the slack water above the chute. There was no surface action, but we had on some poppers, trying to get the fish to rise. Justin was the first one with a fish on. A bluegill.

My first experience with bluegill was about 12 years earlier at a campground in Iowa. Or Oklahoma. Or…someplace…I don’t know. It was on the earlier-mentioned trip to the east coast. We stayed at a campground that had a little pond in it. My seven year old son and my two nieces (eight and eleven) went down to the pond. They came back a short time later, very excited. They said there were fish in the pond rising to anything, like pieces of grass thrown in. Or spit. They asked if they could have some bread. They took it back and fed the fish. Then they got the idea to tie some string on a stick, and put a doughball on the end of the string. They began lifting bluegill several feet out of the water before the fish would let go and plop back. It was a riot to watch.

Justin released his bluegill while I worked the slightly faster water on the far shore above the chute. But nothing reacted to my popper. So we moved upstream several hundred yards where there was a long ledge of rocks from one side of the river to the other. I had a strike, but missed it, so it was Dan’s turn with the rod again. Dan and Justin both worked the ledge pretty hard, but came up blank.

We again moved upstream a couple of hundred yards. There was a deep pool, and the water pinched in a little, with a little island toward the far bank. I began working the water above the island and in relatively short time I reeled in a 11″ smallmouth bass—mission accomplished!

Dan fished for a while, but didn’t seem to have his heart in it and turned the rod back over to me a short time later. I worked all around the island pretty hard, then started moving below the island 20 feet or so. I had another strike. This time it was a bluegill. For some reason they remind me of the triggerfish I caught in the ocean behind my house when I lived on Guam. Triggerfish are much more colorful, but I think it’s the blue around the mouth that triggers the memory for me.

I offered the rod back to Dan, but he declined. I continued fishing the area below the island and had a couple more hits. I finally connected with a little silvery creek chub.

It was time to call it good for the day as far as fishing went, and to head over to Justin’s house for some dessert. Well, it turned out to be dinner and dessert.

Justin has a great family with three active children under the age of six (Justin, correct me if I’m wrong on the age thing). While Nicole, Justin’s wife, put the finishing touches on dinner, the kids kept us occupied. In the previous 60 hours we had traveled 2200 miles and had less than 10 hours of sleep. Our trip had started to take on the surreal quality you get after being on an extended trip (we hadn’t been gone long, but lack of sleep and the previous day’s trip through Gatlinburg was adding to the weirdness). It was nice to sit back and relax with Justin’s family, to bring a little normalcy to our trip. That might seem odd, but Dan and I are both family men, and we’re used to having kids around.

So we had a great food and stimulating conversation. It was an excellent end to an excellent day.

Enjoy!

[To get the best results from the gallery below, select the first picture. When the picture pops up, use the little blue arrows at the bottom of the picture to advance to the next picture. The little green angled arrow (when available) will enlarge a picture.]

My absolute favorite fly fishing contains at least one of the following elements: native cutthroat, a nice hatch (especially mayflies), surface-feeding fish, dry flies, moving water, and finesse casting.

Today, all six of these elements coalesced into an couple of hours of fishing.

A little bonus was the fact that I got to fish with one of the genuinely nice guys in the world. And we rode our motorcycles to the river. And the weather was perfect.

Every now and again, we all deserve one of these days, especially when it follows on the heels of just the opposite.

I anticipated Friday evening with a little bit of giddiness since I was heading to my favorite little stretch of homewater. I typically reserve that place for a time when it feels right to fish there. However, my wife’s family has a yearly camp that lasts for four days. This year my wife’s immediate family (parents and five sisters and their families) were in charge, and they chose my creek. There’s a different theme every year, and they decided to have this year’s camp centered on movies.

I try to avoid the whole thing like the plague. My wife used to be disappointed when I bowed out, but she’s getting to the point of talking about skipping it as well. They needed someone to play King Kong, and I thought I would offer my services. Kind of. In a sneaky, not really offering kind of way. You see, Dan and I had planned on fishing in Idaho on Friday, not too far away from his in-laws’ family reunion he would attend. I told my in-laws that if something happened and I wasn’t fishing that day, I’d love to help them out (knowing full well I was going fishing). Heh-heh-heh! Well, something happened and Dan pushed the fishing back a day to Saturday. And I had to eat my words.

Of course, I would go up a couple of hours early get in some good fishing, do my part, then head home. No problem, I could do that. The first part of the plan worked out pretty well—I got there early. It went down hill from there.

You can’t get 100 people (50 of them kids) camped on a pretty creek without all the little buggers relatives destroying utilizing the riparian zone on a hot day. My brother-in-law Danny (I know, I know, too many Dans to keep track of) and I walked a ways up river to get away from the mayhem wreaked on the water. I hooked into a nice 12″ Bonneville cutthroat, but lost him going over a small waterfall. After that the fish were quiet. Too quiet. Dan’s friend (and a cousin-in-law) Justin happened by around that time and mentioned that he saw a couple of guys with a shocker working a small feeder tributary earlier. I figured they were probably in the mainstem too, but I pressed on.

The hike was enjoyable, and it was nice to see the restoration work that had gone into closing down a road that paralleled the creek for a couple of miles. The riparian cover created from the work looked great, but the fish just weren’t showing themselves. I moved on leaving Danny behind. Which, in retrospect, was too bad, since he would have appreciated what happened shortly after we parted.

I rapidly moved upstream a half mile or so, looking for any trace of fish. While navigating the far bank, I stepped out of the creek to bypass a couple of rocks and sunk my right foot about 16″ into some mud that was part of a sloughing bank. It sucked me down pretty solidly, so I looked for a firm place to put my left foot to get the leverage I’d need to pull my right one free. I was about two feet above the water, which was only six inches deep and covering what looked like gravel—the perfect spot. I put my left foot toward the gravel, shifting my mass in that downward angle, preparing to meet something solid. It wasn’t. It was gravel, but it was covering a layer of the same mud my right foot was in.

I was already experiencing Newton’s First Law of Motion, and it was too late to change the vector. My right foot pulled free with a slurp as my left foot continued to sink. There was enough viscosity that I seemed to be in slow motion, aware of every riffle and seam in the water my face was moving toward. My right foot, free of the muck, seemed to provide enough momentum to speed up the process at the last second.

This creek is about eight feet wide and ten inches deep at the point of impact. I wasn’t worried about drowning. But I was worried about (and for those who have taken a dip a time or two, they know this thought) my fly rod. I flung it away from me, and forward. Into the fastest part of the water. Even though the creek isn’t big, it was still in spring spate, so it was moving at a pretty good clip.

There I was, face down in ten inches of water, muddy boots flung up and over my back in another successful replication of Newton’s First Law as my rod slipped away from me. I had no choice but to to crawl after the rod. Which I did and succeeded in capturing after a couple of feet, just on the brink of dropping over a lip of rocks. Actually, I grabbed the float line coming out of the reel. And pulled. Releasing a couple of feet of line as the rod in fact slipped over the edge. I flung myself one last time and gripped the butt of the reel seat at the last second.

While still in that preposterous position, my first thought was, Did anybody see me? I quickly glanced to see if Danny had made it up, or if some hikers were walking along the path. I was in the clear, so I extracted myself and laughed. That must have been a sight—a one-man Three Stooges routine.

I made my way to a large rock bathed in direct sunlight. I stripped off my shirt and spread it out to dry, then settled my butt into a nice groove in the rock and faced the sun. I shifted my hat over my eyes and relived the humiliation, but laughed again. I really didn’t need to worry about Danny seeing that, as I had seen him take a tumble in the water several times over the 20 years we’ve known each other. In fact, it probably would have done him good to see someone else take it in the shorts for a change.

As the sun inched closer to the ridge, I decided to head back for my movie star debut, where I would get a second helping of humiliation.

My King Kong gig was for the “Universal Studios Tour” put on at dusk, in which the clan would wander around the camp area to view some prearranged movie sets and movie stars. I was to be in a “cage” (cardboard) where the tourists could only see my hairy hands and hear me grunting and rattling the cage. As they progressed on the tour I would make my “escape” only to jump out at the tourists when they came back past the wrecked cage at the end of the tour.

Arriving back at camp from my little water escapade with wet shorts and underwear, I needed to change. Luckily I brought an extra pair of pants, which I planned on changing into anyhow since after the sun drops the temps quickly follow. But I wasn’t planning on getting wet, so I didn’t bring any underwear. No big deal, I’d wear pants sans Hanes.

The King Kong costume was hot and made of some itchy material. In my role I needed to jump around and scare the kids in a gorilla-like fashion. Which I did with gusto. I failed to take a belt with me, and the gorilla-like activity worked the pants down to an uncomfortable position with regards to the nether regions and the chaffing material of the costume. At which point I was reduced to a half-gorilla stoop holding up pants no one else could see lest I give the little kiddies something even more frightening to behold. I returned to my house about midnight, a skunked and humbled man.

At 7:00 the next morning I met with Ken at his house. We fished together last year on Cinnamon Creek, and I remembered what a great time he seemed to have and how eager he was to learn, so I was excited to get on the river with him again. Reports of the river we were going to (herein dubbed “Chalkstream”) had been favorable, so I was doubly excited to go. Top it off with the fact that Ken has a motorcycle and he wanted to ride his bike to the river, and I was bursting at the seams because I was ready for a ride (with the cruddy weather we’d had, there hadn’t been much riding).

It’s approximately 100 miles from my house to Chalkstream. The ride was incredible, with temps in the low 50′s and a rolling countryside bursting with green. The sun, slanting low in the early morning hours, gave it that golden glow photographers love. We planned on meeting Dan and Coach at the river at 8:30, but we didn’t make it until 9:10, enjoying every minute of the ride. Since by the time we got there Dan and Coach had already taken off for some fishing, Ken and I headed across country downriver.

I wish I had my camera, but my wife took the point and shoot with her camping and my dSLR would have taken too much space in my saddlebags, already stuffed with fishing gear. The sun, bright blue skies with puffy clouds, green meadows, clear water with river grass snaking through it…it begged for a pastoral composition or three.

As we readied to cross the river, I saw a rise-ring: it was an excellent sign. I cast to it a couple of times, but nothing came to my #16 PMD. We crossed, headed over a hill (only to find out later that Dan and Coach were just then heading upriver along the bank, out of our sight on top of the hill), then to the water. An angler was downstream and around the bend, so I figured we’d head to an area I’d almost always had success at.

As we stepped into the river, I saw the air above the water thick with mayflies. Not the midwest kind of thick that is picked up by radar, but the Idaho kind of thick that is plenty enough for me. I heard the splashy rises of several fish and looked over the water at rise-rings floating past. The apex of fly fishing for me: rising trout and a slurry of bugs.

I eased toward the center of a river that is atypical for this part of the country. Our usual rivers and creeks are rough and tumble with lots of elevation loss, plunge pools, pockets, riffles—water far fro its destination but eager to get there anyhow. This river is what I picture the chalkstreams of the UK and the spring creeks of the upper Midwest, Pennsylvania and New York must be like.

There is very little structure from rocks. The riverbed is mostly gravel, with some silt thrown in. The gravel gets channeled, and weed beds get thick and ropey. A few riffles and ripples form here and there, most of that hydrology caused by the gravel channels and weeds, but it has hot springs in several places too, adding bubbles and current. But the majority of the surface is smooth.

Except on days when the river is pocked with rises from hungry fish gorging themselves on a thick mayfly hatch.

There were splashy rises from smaller fish, head-dorsal-tail rises from medium fish and pucker rises from the big ones. This wasn’t a Henry’s Fork phenomenon, with hundreds of fish marring the surface, but there were a good twenty or so I could see a hundred feet in either direction of us. It had been a long time since I experienced a good hatch. It got to the point that Dan and I made a special trip to Silver Creek last year just to catch the Green Drake hatch, but ended up missing them by about 20 hours.

My PMD flicked back and forth over the surface and fluttered upriver. It drifted down toward a steady sipper, then carried past him. The next cast did the same. The third cast sent the float line over the fish’s head, and he disappeared. I targeted another riser. And then noticed that Ken wasn’t around. (I tend to get a little focused while fishing, and hadn’t really picked up on the fact that he wasn’t near me in the water.) I looked back toward the shore and there he was, fiddling with his rod.

“I broke the cap off the reel seat last year when I fell in. I thought I glued it back together, but I can’t keep the reel on,” he said.

I offered to trade him rods or switch off my rod so he could get in on the action. “Nah, you fish, I’ll be okay,” he said. (I should have been a little more aggressive at switching rods, but I’ve learned you don’t press too hard with a guy who’s 6′-3″ and 250 lbs.) He worked his way into the water and tried to hold on to the reel and rod with his right hand and cast. It was a bit clumsy, especially for someone who was new to such wide open casting (last year’s excursion was in tight quarters with no room to get full casts in). I suggested he hold the reel in the left hand and work the rod with the right. And again suggested to exchange with him. But he insisted he was okay.

By then I had made it into position to work a seam against the far bank that had 5 or six risers. I decided to switch to a smaller #20 BWO parachute pattern. Knowing the fish on the river tend to duck and run when the fly line spooks them, I decided to fish from as close as parallel to the fish as I thought I could get. I put the fly above the riser a good six feet and let it drift back to him several times, but as before, it put the fish down. I moved tot he next fish and repeated the procedure, but with a slightly bigger, #18, sparser BWO pattern.

One of the things I like about fishing to risers is that they’re usually looking for a specific fly. And it’s my job to find the right pattern. That process of elimination and mental work is one of the aspects I enjoy in fly fishing (until, of course, the point comes where I’ve tried every pattern in my possession with no success—but there is even a certain kind of pleasure in that type of frustration).

The new pattern seemed to do the trick, as I shortly hooked into two fish. Both of them seemed to be solid takes and the fish felt heavy. I saw them and they both looked like they would easily be over 16″, but they both were off within several seconds.

It tells a lot about a person when things aren’t going well but they persevere without complaint or cussing. Ken was dealing with his awkward setup when I saw him reach into the water well past his shoulder. Up came the reel. Later he said, “It’s OK I tightened the tension down so I could easily retrieve the reel when it fell again.”

He was ready to head back to Dan’s truck and see if there was duct tape or something he could use to fix the problem. Then it came to me: tippet. We could take some tippet and tie the reel to the rod. Which we did. It worked for a wile, then had to be retied, but it kept Ken on the river a bit longer.

We had moved upriver to an area that has some lava rock on the bed and a few poking out of the water. This place gives a bit of holding water and I think I’ve always caught a fish from there. Sure enough, there were more risers working this section. We had been fishing for about an hour and the hatch had died down considerably. I had been working my eyes and brain in trying to figure out which stage the fish were taking the flies in, since emergers, duns, spinners and spent flies littered the water. As I watched the rises more closely, I could never see a full-wing profile mayfly in the rise. I tied on a #16 BWO emerger pattern (blue-gray forward tilting CDC post, green dubbed body and trailing Antron shuck) and immediately hooked and landed a fish. I had another hook-up with a bigger fish, but couldn’t bring him in.

Watching the big fish work the hatch was great fun. And casting to them was exciting too. Knowing that some of the fish were native Yellowstone cutthroat was unbelievable. Most of the cutthroat I end up fishing for are in the 12″ range, with the biggest pushing 18″. When I fish the Greys River for fine-spotted cutts, the average jumps up a few inches. But Coach had caught a 24″ cuttie just a couple of days before, and I had hooked into and seen a fair number of fish that big working the water.

Casting to rising, native cutthroat of that size just doesn’t happen too often around here, and I was having a great time. But I was ready to land one too. I had spotted a decent-sized fish working the edge of a weed bed on the far side of the river. I had thrown my previous fly his direction several times. The first time he rose to it, drifted down with it a couple of feet, then swam back to his feeding lie. The same thing happened with the next cast. The following five or so casts were then ignored.

With the emerger pattern tied on, I figured it was time to try for him again. My first cast drifted past him, six inches too far to his right. I gathered the line for another cast and put the fly four feet ahead of him in what looked to be a perfect cast. Apparently the fish thought so too as he took the fly, then took off. Fishing weed beds means fighting a hooked fish in the weeds, so it’s a double battle. I had on 6x tippet since the water was so still. I was concerned about keeping the fish on without horsing him too much against the light line.

I soon brought him toward me and Ken scooped him up in his net. I’m trying to get to the point where I don’t feel the need to capture the fish I catch on film (exploitive, and all that). And he was big. I’m also trying to get over the size thing, so I won’t report his size. Okay, that was a lie, he was a good 20″. I can do this. He was the biggest Yellowstone cutthroat I have ever caught. I have given up the “hero shot” some time ago, and my need for reporting its size, but I still like the occasional picture for purely aesthetic reasons. And this one was gorgeous. Some of the fish in Chalkstream are rainbow and a few cuttbow, but this was all cutthroat. Dark, greenish back. Golden, buttery, pinkish belly. Slash of orange-pink on his throat.

It really doesn’t get much better than that. Except catching another one nearly as big a short time later from nearly the same spot. But that one was a rainbow. It was still a nice fish, but not the beloved cutthroat.

It’s amazing how one’s fortunes can shift so rapidly within a 15 hour time span. I plan on fishing Chalkstream again on Wednesday. Or am I better off leaving it alone with the memory of this one perfect day?

I enjoy history and visiting historical sites. I don’t necessarily like seeing all of the museum type pieces (once you’ve seen one Civil War era gun, or button, or fork, you’ve seen them all), but rather soaking in the ambiance of the period—it may sound odd, but I like to put myself in the time and place of the event, trying to “channel” the original experience. It’s a bit naive, but there it is.

One year my wife, our two children, and I traveled to the east coast with my parents and two nieces. My father is also a history buff, so on this trip we had a fair number of historical sites on the docket. After visiting several of them I became a bit disillusioned because some of the places had become Niagara Fallen. (If you’ve been to Niagara Falls on the Canada side, I think you’ll know what I mean. The gaudy commercialization of so many places flummoxes me.) Visiting these historic sites where I expected to be swept back in time so I could relive the event in a 200 year later afterglow. Instead I saw plastic trinkets and bobbleheads of famous people heads. The same thing has happened when I’ve visited a natural feature where I expect to “commune with nature” but get diesel fumes, cheap shirts with tacky iron-on depictions and too many people.

Dan and I flew in to Nashville, Tennessee and drove straight to the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. Or tried to. We had to make our way through Pigeon Ford and Gatlinburg first.

I remember reading Harry Middleton’s book, On the Spine of Time, where he describes these towns in the following way: “Gatlinburg’s sudden unorchestrated splatter of neon hype and glitz, the cheap and the tacky…” I had to look up that quote right now, and interestingly enough, I came up with my thoughts about the place, as noted in the title of this post, well before finding that quote. The towns are further described by Middleton: “It was all here: God and the mountains plus indoor skydiving…something for everyone—beer, pancakes, even God. The sign said so. CHRISTUS GARDENS. AMERICA’S NO. 1 RELIGIOUS ATTRACTION. …I saw another sign advertising something called HILLBILLY GOLF…”

Since Middleton wrote this, there have been some changes, or maybe he was too polite to mention it, but there is now a preponderance of shops selling sex novelties and apparel. Pairing these shops with the neighboring religious centers makes for an interesting juxtaposition. Throw in Dollywood (a mere 17 miles from Pigeon Ford), and you can make a great mental picture of the place.

However, it might be the pancakes I’m most fascinated by. What exactly is the attraction to the pancake? For an area with a population of 6000-10,000 (some estimates put the number up to 50,000 during tourist season), they seem to have a high number of pancake restaurants per capita. Here are some: International House of Pancakes – IHOP (2 of them), Little House of Pancakes, Log Cabin Pancake House, Red Rooster Pancake House, Flapjacks Pancake Cabin, Smoky Mountain Pancake House, Parkway Pancake House, Lucy’s Pancake Grill, Pancake Pantry, Pancake Cabin, Aunt B’s Pancake House and Grill, River Road Pancake House, Atrium Pancakes and All American Pancake House.

The entire mix created a carnival-like atmosphere—the worst kind of traveling carnival that stalks America with the worldly pleasures only carnies can provide small towns. For Dan and I, this was the gateway to our worldly pleasure too: Salvelinus fontinalis, the brook trout. Specifically, the southern Appalachian strain.

Our goal was relatively straightforward: drive 80 miles from Logan to Salt Lake City. Fly 1500 miles from SLC to Nashville. Drive 230 miles to Great Smoky Mountains National Park and catch some southern Appalachian brook trout. Drive 420 miles to the Rapidan River in Virginia and catch some northern Appalachian brook trout. Drive 580 miles back to Nashville to meet up with Dan’s brother (an ICE agent who was transporting his private gun collection from Virginia to Utah). And finally, successfully transport the guns the remaining 1660 miles from Nashville, Tennessee to Logan, Utah nonstop.

When things work out as planned it is both satisfying and a little surprising. In planning for this trip our main concern was the amount of walking we might have to do to reach our targeted fish. Walking in and of itself wasn’t necessarily the problem (we’ve put in plenty of miles for fish), but rather the ratio of driving to walking to sleeping. More walking meant less sleeping. Less sleep meant that our already scary presence on the freeways would increase in danger.

To help reduce the amount of walking we would do, I sought out help from Chris Shockey, an expert on finding brookies in Appalachia. When asked, he immediately replied that he could put us into brookies 15 minutes from Gatlinburg with minimal walking. And he delivered. (Traffic being what it was, it was more like 30 minutes.)

This was a wet wading stop, so it was only minutes after parking that we were on the trail. Within a few hundred yards we were at the bridge Chris told us about. In we went and within a couple of minutes I pulled in a little rainbow. A couple more followed. Within a few pools we began taking brookies. We fished for about an hour, pulling in mostly brook trout with the occasional stocked rainbow.

The next creek was about an hour north. We pulled in to a trailhead parking lot at a campground, walked less than 100 feet, entered the creek, and Dan immediately pulled out a brook trout (a feat he repeated on the next river as well). He caught a few more before I caught my first one. We caught a dozen more between the two of us before moving on.

Even with the help of pinpointing the trout creeks, and hardly any walking, Day One proved a long, sleepless day. We left Logan Sunday night at 10:00PM, flew out of SLC at 12:50AM Monday morning, arriving in Nashville at 7:30AM Monday morning. In theory we had three hours of sleeping time from SLC to Atlanta (then a connecting flight to Nashville). As with most theories, reality didn’t meet its end of the bargain and I garnered about 20 minutes of sleep, and I’m sure Dan got about the same. We wouldn’t get any substantial sleep for another 15 hours.

days 2 – 5 to follow

Over the past couple of years I have been looking for a place where I can consistently read good fly fishing literature. I have many literary angling books, but those get pricey and sometimes I just want to read something short. As I have been reading blogs lately, I decided there were enough people out there who might have a similar desire and ambition. I started contacting folks, and, well, here we are.

Our website is under development but you can get a flavor of it from the About Us page and learn about the editorial board and more on both the general philosophy of the magazine as well as the specific topics we hope to cover.

We are in the process of soliciting articles from a wide range of authors covering an array of topics. If you would like to be considered for publication, please read the Submission Guidelines.

If you have any questions or comments about Rise Forms, please use the contact page.

We anticipate launching in the fall of 2010. We look forward to reading your submissions.

Scott Carles,
Editor-in-Chief
Rise Forms: Fly fishing’s literary voice

Leave a thoughtful comment to this post addressing one of the following issues:

1. Do fish suffer when they are caught using typical fly fishing techniques? (you’ll have to supply your own definition of “suffer”)
2. What type of person would be interested in a book with this title?
3. Is the typical fly fisher cruel? (you’ll have to supply your own definition of “cruel”)

In your comment, please number it 1, 2 or 3 based on which of these three topics you are addressing.

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