We explored a bit of this creek twice last summer. I don’t think I gave too may specifics on the creek dynamics before, so here is the official brief:

The creek is about 25 miles long. The headwaters were explored last summer. Dan caught a couple of small cutthroat. I caught one. The headwaters is typical small creek headwaters: small and brushy. The creek stays small and sometimes brushy as it runs through some cattle grazing allotments (we haven’t fully explored this 10 mile section).

Then it runs into some meadowy type areas. The water slows down quite a bit, has increased in volume, gets a little milky color to it and is warmer through here. We’ve caught a couple of fish in that section. That stretch is probably 5 miles or so long.

Then it starts to lose altitude and becomes a faster pocketwater creek. We’ve never caught anything in this stretch.  A little, unnamed tributary dumps in through this section adding a bit more volume.

Then, in summer at least, it disappears. The creekbed is still there, but the water has vanished. It looks like at some point in time a slide occurred and blocked off the water. But instead of pooling up, it percolated down. A mile or so downriver it bubbles back up. A couple of years ago this section also experienced a fire. Here’s a pic from last year where you can see the water is basically gone and the burnt trees (see picture to the right).

It’s this section and below where we usually fish. It runs for a couple of miles before entering private property. At that point it is diverted in the summer, making the remaining 4 or so miles down to the confluence with the Bear River dry during the summer.

Our quest last summer and this trip was to try and determine where the cutthroat are during the spring. We have only caught cutthroat in this creek (thank goodness for small miracles that this little tributary hasn’t been infiltrated by other species). We figure that some fish might move out of the Bear to spawn since there is water through the summer-dry lower section in the spring. We figure some of the fish might move past the rockslide area since there is water there during the spring.

As the water dries up in various spots, they must hide out somewhere. We figure they might drop down lower in the river and get cutoff both above (the rock slide) and below (the diversion). This leaves them in our section to fish.

On this trip we dropped down from above (we usually enter from the lower end) into the middle, a slow, meadowy type area:

We didn’t find any fish this time. I’m guessing they are probably higher up toward the headwaters for the spawn.

However, we did find some fish in the unnamed tributary in the pocketwater section just before the creek disappears at the rock slide. This is the mouth of that unnamed trib:

and here is another picture to give you an idea of the size of the “micro-creek” we’re talking about:

Dan moved upstream (while I was letting a branch snap off and slap back into my face piercing me about half an inch above my upper lip). I caught up with him a minute later as he was coming back down. He held his hands about a foot apart and pointed toward the creek. Sure enough, holding in the water was a nice trout (I’d say more like 9″). He spooked and we moved up river.

Dan saw another one a little higher up. “I thought it was a piece of moss or something flapping in the water, but then it really moved and I could tell it was a fish.” In this picture, if you look really close, you can see its darker dorsal fin with the head to the left and tail to the right:

For the size of the creek, it was a pretty nice sized fish:

Click here to view the embedded video.

We continued upstream. I had a shot at two, but couldn’t get them to come to my beetle before I spooked them. The second one was another nice size fish looking just a little chunkier than the one Dan caught.

We continued up and Dan spotted three fish spawning. OK, two fish spawning with the bigger male chasing the smaller male away.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We decided to leave the fish to their business and we headed back to the main creek instead of fishing up further. We’ll have to come back later in the year and see if they are resident trout, or only there for the spawn.

The main creek down in our usual spot was high and off color. We fished a little, but I wasn’t too into it doing more walking than fishing. Dan caught one and lost one.

It was great to see such nice fish for such a small tributary. Some of you might think, “That’s a puny fish, what’s the fuss?” Well, I got thinking that if all fish were of the same water-size to fish-size ratio, there would be 20′ browns cruising the Madison. Imagine pulling something the size of a great white from the Snake River? That’s basically what we saw in this micro-creek: fish that were the length of about 1/3 the creek width.

Micro-creek+a three weight+native cutthroats=happy man!

PS We checked out a new tributary as well, a place called Willaims Creek. It’s on a bunch of private property for quite a ways, but once you get high enough, it’s some pretty looking water:

It’s supposed to have wild rainbows, not cutts. We’ll have to get in there and see if we can find some remnant cutt population. It would be a great restoration project.