For All of You Suffering Through the Heat Wave...

Family Post: Ma Barker and Her Gang

Mark and I did indeed go up the mountain to fish, but we also went for Family Camp, an annual church event. Some years there are many, many extended family members here, but this year it was small and relaxed.

Fishing is woven into the culture here, and it's understood that if you fish and you come to Family Camp, you will fish. It was a treat to have a look in Ben's tackle box. He grew up here, hunts and fishes the area, and was happy to give Mark some advice and an old Rooster Tail he had. We hope he'll also be happy to take Mark and me back up the mountain this fall to a few of his secret spots to see if we can find a good buck or two.

More of the family--Kim and the boys, and Isaiah's girlfriend--came up Saturday night and Sunday. They were just in time for supper and a big community campfire--and dessert.

The boys did their bit Sunday morning by getting up at 6:15 to help cook breakfast for everybody. First chore was to fetch water--good, cold, sweet water--from the old pump. Jeremiah and I filled four buckets, and he wanted to drive the wheelbarrow to get his buckets back down the hill. He made it without spilling a drop.

Then he could rest and get warm by the fire--no heat wave here--while Isaiah filled a couple more buckets. Isaiah just strong-armed his buckets back downhill.

Breakfast was delicious and plentiful, as were all the meals.

The boys like it up on the mountain. Some years they have brought gangs of friends with them, and there have been other kids their age. This year--how things change--Isaiah had his girlfriend along, but Jeremiah hadn't been able to find a friend able to come. And the people there--well, they were mostly old. Thank goodness for I-pods.

The family left for home Sunday afternoon after Family Camp was over, and Mark and I stayed over through Monday. Before they left there was time for some mountain amusement. Jeremiah did a little fishing, something he and his buddies had excelled at with worms in years past. But this year we didn't have worms, only lures, and as I said in the fishing report, the fishing was tricky because of the high, fast water. One false move, and your lure is wedged irretrievably in the rocks. Jeremiah lost two lures and gave it up.

So then we broke out the guns. It wasn't as bad as it sounds. Just a couple of .22's, a handful of bullets, and a few chunks of wood on a stump to plink.

But it was fun.

One of the rifles is probably 35 years old, the other 25, and both are well-seasoned and have brought many rabbits, and especially squirrels, to the pot. Wish you could have tasted my squirrel stew back in the Midwest. It's good to have the boys learning how to use them. Isaiah has expressed interest in hunting. Around here it will be deer, not rabbits or squirrels. So we'll see.

So we had a good afternoon, Ma Barker and her gang.

Culture Watch: Trouting?

This is a bit of a departure, but I was intrigued to learn via CNN that there is a new internet "meme" called "Owling." I always thought owling was going into the woods to see and hear owls. But that's so fifty years ago. No, "owling" is photographing yourself in an owlish pose in some unlikely location and posting it on the internet. This is now quickly surpassing the vast popularity of "Planking" in which you photograph yourself posing like, yeah, a plank, and which someone said is now "so two months ago."

One person commented, "I hope he isn't about to begin 'pigeoning.'" And another: "This is part of that new, hip trend, 'stupiding.'"

It would be easy to see this as evidence of the decline of civilization as we know it. It would be easy to point out that this practice seems absurd and pointless in a world that is falling apart. But I suspect that's precisely why people are doing it. In my day, when the country was torn apart by the Vietnam War, we had Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies, and guerilla theater, using the weapon of absurdity to expose the truth of what was going on.

So I like absurdity. I'm amused by this trend. But, then again, I have to wonder what truth this trend is trying to expose. But, of course, absurdity can't be explained because it's...absurd.

But all this gave me an idea. Now, when challenges to access rights, and oil spills, and Pebble Mines, and a whole long list of ills threaten our sport and the fish we love, how about "trouting?" How about "Steelheading?" When Roderick Haig Brown went snorkeling in his beloved Vancouver Island rivers he didn't know that he was pioneering an internet meme that would sweep cyberspace in 2011.

Send me your pic and I'll post it. You could be the next person to get your picture on CNN.

Trout Lake Report: Who Knows What Tomorrow Will Bring?

I took some time to check out the lake Wednesday evening. This is my lake of preference, my true home waters, and it's a joy to be a part of its slow and profound changes over the course of a season.

Hopper time should be near, so I threw a hopper for awhile just to see. Nothing yet. It didn't help that a swirling wind was blowing, and that the thin strip of sheltered water against the bank was constantly being disturbed.

So I trolled. I hooked and lost a fish, then finally landed a nice one.

So I went back to dries. The wind conveniently backed off, and a few fish were rising. I tied on the black ant and managed to put it right on the nose of a toothy riser.

I hooked and lost another, but it wasn't long before the ant stopped getting attention. There was a heavy hatch going on of size 22 white midges. The fish were on them. Enthusiastically.

I witnessed a phenomenon I hadn't seen before. The wind had raked up a lot of cottonwood fluff and other debris, and it festooned the lake in long swaths. The fish were concentrating on the edges and the interior of those swaths. The challenging part of that scenario was that a light breeze continued to swirl, and the swaths--and the fish--were constantly slipping away from me and my fly.

On top of that, I couldn't find the right fly. Usually some of the fish, often the bigger ones, will be opportunistic and take any reasonable fly in their eagerness to fill their stomachs. Not this time. I haven't suffered so much rejection in a long time.

Still, it was absorbing fishing, and I forgot everything except the fish and the fly until the bats and the stars came out.

So another day on the lake, unlike any that came before, came to a close. And who knows what tomorrow will bring?

Mountain Trout

My brother Mark and I went up the mountain to fish.


The creek was high and fast--and beautiful. The sky was overcast most of the time, and showers sifted through the pines now and again; but then, without warning, the sun would break through the clouds and dazzle the world.

The fishing was short-lining seams and soft water. Most hits were on flies or lures hanging in the current, or rolling in the upwells, or slowly drawn back upstream. I seldom had more than six feet of my long lake leader out of the guides, but I did catch a nice fish by spot casting across the creek, and mending--that's a quick mend--to allow the fly to hang just long enough.

I tried many flies--that's half the fun--but found that small, drab flies were ignored. Big, bright flies, easily seen, worked best. This foam-bodied whatsit, fished wet (even foam like this was easily sucked under by the tumbling current) was the fly that got most of the attention. We also used lures--Rooster Tails for Mark and a little Colorado spinner for me, and caught some fish on them. But we also gave a few lures up to the creek.

The fish are Columbia River Redband Trout, native and wild. Most are this size; a ten incher is a lunker. I think I lost one of those big boys. I was letting the fly roll around in a boil, and a fish kept coming up and hitting it and missing, his sides flashing. I finally hooked it, and it gave me the strongest pull of the trip straight downstream into a rushing chute between two boulders and was gone.

We camped close to the creek, and it sang us to sleep each night with its roar and rumble of snow water and tumbling rocks.

There's no better alarm clock than the crackle of a fire early in the morning. Mark, for whom camp fires are a religious experience, was usually up first feeding the coals from the day before until he had a roaring fire to match the roaring creek.

So we fished and we caught fish. We caught fifteen between the two of us. In a normal year you can catch fifteen in an hour, but this isn't a normal year. Each fish took persistence and concentration, and was all the sweeter a reward because of it.

I bushwhacked my way downstream away from the campground one afternoon. There were signs still of the even higher water of spring, a second channel now going down.

The fish in that downstream stretch were hungry, but the fishing was more difficult. The stream was narrower, the current faster, and there were more snags and deadfalls in the water.

As I was trying to hook a fish that kept hitting my orange fly way back under that log in the lower left of the photo, I snagged the fly on the end of the log. I broke it off, tied on another fly, and couldn't get a hit. So I studied the log. The end with the fly was inaccessible, but it wasn't very big around even if it was a whole aspen tree, twenty or twenty five feet long. So I was able to lift it and snake it back until I could reach the fly. It wasn't the first time, and it won't be the last, that I do what's required to rescue a good fly.

I found this deer jawbone one morning, washed up onto the rocks in the spring spate, I would guess, and now exposed to view. This is a country of prey and predators. I had already been scanning the banks and peering deep into the forest as I fished, hoping for a lucky glimpse of a cougar. It was along this stretch of creek a few years ago that we saw a cougar as we sat in the campground. It was on our side of the creek, meandering along a mere fifty feet away from us. When it saw us, it slipped behind a tree, peeked around and studied us for a moment, then melted into the forest on the other side of the creek.

For Mark, this was another chance to get to know more about the hidden treasures of his new home, and to polish up his skills as a fisherman. There are plans to hit the Henry's Fork late in August. He'll be ready.

As we packed up on the last afternoon, Mark said how much he hates to break camp. It means the fun is over. I used to feel that intensely when we'd break camp at the Henry's Fork and I'd hit the road back to Chicago knowing that I wouldn't be back for a year.

As I told Mark, we can go back to the creek tomorrow if we want to. He didn't seem so bummed after that.