I was selected as one of the Artists in Residence for The Bob Marshall Wilderness Area which gave me the opportunity to stay at Spruce Park Cabin along the Middlefork of the Flathead River for two weeks. Backcountry, off-the-grid, solo. I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity and honored that I was chosen. These two weeks gave me the space to finish my next poetry collection, start another, work on some essays, and gather. Gather. That was my goal and theme for this trip. I didn’t want to force myself to work on anything in particular. Instead, I just wanted to be present, to experience it, and to gather as much as I could (and to hopefully give back in some way). Below are just some diary-style entries along with some photos of my two weeks as a way to share some of the experience. Thank you to The Bob Marshall Wilderness Foundation, Hockaday Museum of Art, Swan Valley Connections, and the Flathead National Forest for giving me this amazing opportunity. Big thanks to Frank and his mules for carrying all my stuff to and from the cabin! Day One – Saturday I met Frank and Meg at the Bear Creek Trailhead around 9. Frank is a packer/mule skinner and is on The Bob Marshall Wilderness Foundation Board. Meg works for The BMWF managing their trail crews. She introduced me to the mules as Frank started weighing and balancing my gear – Saltese (gentle, but a troublemaker), Star, Honey, Penny, Rev, and Morley who’s blind in one eye. They packed my gear within an hour and we started hiking up the Big River Trail. I hiked behind the mule string, and since Morley was in the rear, we got to know each other pretty well. I forgot how good it is to hike in the rhythm of a mule string. They kept good pace. Every once in a while, Frank would turn and tell a story or point out some trees. We passed through some larch that were over 100 years old, survivors of the last burn. You could still see fire scars at their base. Imagine holding a scar that long, growing with it. It took us about two hours to get to Spruce Park, which is, in some ways, a bit like a compound. It’s got an outhouse, a fenced in yard for the mules, a workshop shed for trail work & tools, and the cabin. Frank and Meg unloaded my stuff, we had lunch on the porch, and they went on their way. I busied myself opening the windows, getting water, unpacking my food, settling in. Of course the first thing I did once I was settled was go to the river and fish the two big runs right below the cabin. It felt good wading in sandals. It felt good to be here. It felt good to catch whitefish and cutthroats on dry flies. Whitefish are incredible fighters, don’t ignore them. A group of paddlers showed up just as I started swimming and they camped behind the cabin. Another group of hikers showed up towards evening and they camped down at the beach. I sat on the Spruce Park Ledge and watched the day fade into night. It’s a good spot. Day Two - Sunday My first morning and I quickly fell in love with how the light first touches Java Mountain to the southwest and slowly crawls down its face until it hits the water and the trees behind me, which then cast these big tree-shadows across the river. I love watching the day unfold like this. Mornings and evenings. They are beautiful times in the day. I drank coffee and watched the sun crawl until I couldn’t stand it anymore and hiked downstream to the start of the Spruce Park Rapids. This is a slot canyon that once you enter, there is no getting out until you run it. I fished back up to the cabin and had my first afternoon alone. I was surprised at how easy it was to catch fish. Just throw anything with purple in it and the cutthroat would reach up from the clear water and take it. I had trouble getting my timing down because I wasn’t used to being able to see a fish reaching that far and that long for a fly. It was beautiful. The afternoons are the hardest – they are hot and the flies are relentless. I napped, I read, I convinced myself this was going to be all worth it. I went swimming at the hottest part of the day, made dinner, and watched the evening settle on my ledge. This ledge will be where I spend my mornings and evenings. It’s my anchor to the world. My timepiece. My home. Day Three - Monday Another morning, another beautiful sunrise. I left the cabin around ten after listening to the fire lookouts report in on the radio and made my way to Long Creek. I crossed the Middle Fork and scrambled around, making my way up Charlie Creek, until realizing I missed the trail. I bushwhacked up a pretty steep hillside until I found it and worked my way up Charlie Creek trail until its junction with Spruce Point. I quickly hit switch backs and gained quite a bit of elevation until finally reaching a knoll full of wildflowers and concrete abutments that used to hold a fire lookout. One false peak after another, but each one with a better view of the entire Great Bear Wilderness. The last three miles of the trail was along a ridge that ended with quite a long scramble to Spruce Point which looked out over Mt. Baptiste, Red Sky Mountain, Prospector Mountain, Mt. Bradley, Vinegar Mountain, and Hematite Peak. It was an incredible hike that kicked my ass. Well worth it. I got back to camp around 5 and went swimming and sat on the beach behind the cabin. The cold water felt good on my sore muscles. It felt good to finally gain some elevation and to see out across these mountains, to get my bearings a bit. To the west, Mt. Baptiste sat up high, cradling Cup Lake where its trees started to grow. I quickly fell in love with that mountain and how it sprawled across the horizon. Mt. Baptiste. A good guardian of this wilderness. Day Four – Tuesday I woke up a bit later than normal with my muscles sore from yesterday’s hike. The sun had yet to reach the river, so I quickly got my fishing stuff ready, brewed some coffee, and headed upstream. I started with a purple haze in the low light of dawn and had consistent hook-ups. Once the sun hit the water, right around 9, caddis started popping so I switched up flies and it was pretty much game-on for the next hour. Every other cast a nice cuttie to hand. I hooked a solid 18” at the head of a pool and was about to land him when he shook me off. Damn barbless hooks. I’ll go back this evening. I spent the afternoon lying in the hammock along the ledge, reading, letting the wind rock me back and forth. The wind was pretty fierce all day and it brought with it the smoky haze from fires out in Oregon and California. The closest thing I have to news out here, I guess. I went back to the river in the evening and had a solid time throwing caddis. I’m loving using my 7’6” 4 weight fiberglass rod. It covers just enough water and throws dries beautifully. I landed a solid 16” cutthroat right before the rain. They seem to be really keyed in on dark bodied caddis flies. I went back to camp and sat on the porch and wrote postcards and little poems until a young mule deer came into camp. She wasn’t sure of me at first, but quickly got used to me and we hung out for an hour or so, talking about the rain and the fires and the horseflies. It was a good evening. I fell asleep to the thrumming of grouse. Day Five – Wednesday “We must uncenter our minds from ourselves; We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident As the rock and ocean that we were made from.”
I woke up to rain. A nice subtle steady rain. Which meant that my original plan of getting on the water early quickly changed to sitting on the porch and drinking coffee and watching the rain and just being here in this wildness. That’s one thing I love about being back here – my time is sculpted by the world around me – I wait to wake up until I see the sun touch the top of Java Mountain, I know I should be finishing my coffee by the time the light hits the river; if it rains, I sit on the porch; if it’s hot, I go down to the swimming hole and spend the hottest part of the day in the cold water – my life is shaped and sculpted by this wildness. I went to the river late morning while it was still raining, but once the sun hit the water, the cutties started looking up. They were on anything purple or caddis all day. I fished upstream until I hit a trib which I hiked up a bit until I found a nice set of plunge pools. There’s something intimate I love about small streams. I found some solid little cutthroats and then turned back when it got too brushy. I think I’m the weariest when I’m in thick brush in this landscape – if I can’t see around me in order to have an idea of what is out there, I’m quick to move on. There are only so many Warren Zevon songs I know that I can sing to keep the bears at a safe distance. I headed a bit further up the Middle Fork into another large, emerald pool. These pools are so deep and so clear that they seem best just for looking at and swimming in. A fish sees you long before your sight even reaches bottom. But Lord are they beautiful to watch. The last remnants of the ancient sea this landscape used to be. I’ve found that most of the fish hold up in the runs coming into these deep pools because of the low river levels. Since it was a bit later in the day, I tied on something big, foamy, and purple and within the first three casts I hooked a solid 16”-18" fish that took me downstream through almost the entire long pool. I finally worked it into the shallows and released it. I landed a few more in the 14”-16” range and decided that the day had been good, it was time to go back to camp for my daily swim. Day 6 – Thursday I hiked up the Big River Trail a good bit today to see more of this drainage. The trail stays pretty high up off the water so you get some really great views of the river, its tributaries, and the surrounding mountains. I had lunch at Lunch Creek and was hoping to see the infamous dead elk and to have a conversation with it; however, they had just floated it down to the next bend (there’s an outfitter that uses that place to take people back on horses and to have lunch for day trips). I was bummed about that, but it’s all good in the backcountry. I had lunch, fished for a bit, then headed back downstream to another tributary that I saw on the way up. I noticed some really sweet long deep riffles that I wanted to fish. I bushwhacked down to the stream from the trail, switched my hiking boots for sandals (I find that my Bedrock sandals are just as good for wading as my wading boots are), and tied on something purple. When in doubt, tie any fly that has some purple in it. I fished up through the deep riffles, landed multiple fish in the 12”-16” range all on a big purple foam fly. It was a blast. I’m finding that my 7’6” 4 weight fiberglass rod is the perfect rod for this river. Though it is pretty low right now so maybe with high flows I would need more rod. Who knows? I’m fishing what I have and having a blast. Fish what you have. Have a blast. (Someone should put that on a t-shirt). I made it up to the last run at the edge of a deep emerald pool (there are so many) at a bend in the river when I notice some dust and scurrying upstream and I see my first grizzly scampering down a scree slope about 50 yards upstream of me. The wind turns and is at my back and it finally notices me, stops, stares, then tucks itself behind a few white pines where we watch each other for a bit. We have a nice conversation about our favorite Tom Petty songs (he loves “Even the Losers” while I love “Walls” and we both agree that Echoes is an incredibly underrated gem of an album) and then he turns and saunters upstream and I stumble back downstream where I fish for a few more minutes before putting my rod away, lacing up my boots, and hiking back to camp. Guess what I did when I got back to camp? Yup. My daily ritual of swimming in the river behind camp. It’s cold, but damn does it feel good. I made some dinner, read for a little, then sat on my ledge looking over the river and wrote all through last light. First light and last light, they are sacred times. I’ve been catching them every day. This backcountry living is simple – tie something purple on, saunter up some streams, lose yourself in the deep woods, watch the light crawl its way over mountains, watch the mountains, cover yourself in river, repeat. Days 7 & 8 – Friday & Saturday The last couple days have been a blur, in a good way. They have just melted into each other. I’ve spent my time hiking, fishing, exploring around camp. I’ve caught some beautiful fish and have seen some beautiful mountains. I’m past the halfway point of this residency. It’s been wild. It’s been amazing. It’s been inspiring. It’s been hard. It’s been full of all the emotions – which I guess it should be for it to be a full experience – fear, self-doubt, contentment, wonder, gratitude, loneliness, sadness, joy. I’ve felt them all at various times and I will continue to do so. That’s life. To say I’m not looking forward to home would be a lie, but I’m trying to live deliberately here, now, while I can. I’m going to take the next few days to hike up a new mountain and explore some more water, and go back to some places I went the first week. I’m reminded of that A.R. Ammons line from Corsons Inlet – “…but enjoying the freedom that Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision, that I have perceived nothing completely, that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.” Each day I remind myself that this is all new – even the trail I’ve already hiked or the run I’ve already fished – there is just so much to see and notice and be part of it. I try to be present for as much of it as I can. I try. This place will forever be with me. Day 10 - Monday Ah our first real rainstorm! Deep thunder! Relentless rain! All socked in, nowhere to go. Yes! I was hoping for a couple of days like this. The rain settled in Sunday night and stayed pretty steady throughout the night. I sat on the porch Sunday night and wrote and listened to the water falling. Lucy, the whitetail deer, came back through the meadow at dusk. We discussed our shared love of rain and how it pounds down the horseflies. We both lamented the moment it would stop and the mosquitoes that would follow, but we didn’t hover on that too long for we wanted to enjoy the rain as much as possible. I fell asleep to it and woke to a morning full of fog and clouds lolling around the valley. I made some coffee and sat in my chair on the ledge at the end of the meadow and for four or five hours, simply watched the fog cling to the tops of pine and fir before lifting skyward. That evening the valley was still filled with fog so I did what I did earlier and sat on the ledge and watched as the river steamed and exhaled these long clouds that wrapped their way around the curves of the mountains. They seemed to linger much longer than the ones in the morning. Perhaps they didn’t want to go moonward, perhaps they liked it along the river, like I do. That was my day. Watching fog and clouds drift off the river, sitting in the cool misty breeze of the remnants of the rain storm. Yesterday, I found elk antlers cradled against a rock, crick water holding its tips submerged. Today, my world grew smaller, but denser, submerged in a wet cold front. Day 12 – Wednesday It smelled like smoke all day today. There must be fires somewhere, though I haven’t gotten any news in almost two weeks. I listen to the radio almost all the time while I’m at camp. It feels good to be part of conversations even when I don’t know any of the people and never say anything other than my daily check-in at noon. One of the best stanzas I’ve heard was just last night – “It just goes on and on and on with nothing getting done but a bunch of hard work” Yup. That’s life, isn’t it? Such a beautiful thing, this life we get to live. It just goes on and on and on with nothing getting done. Shit, that might be the epigraph for my next poetry collection. Today, my nothing-that-got-done was hiking up Vinegar Mountain, which sits right behind camp. I’ve been looking at it since I got here. The trail meanders up through a couple of little ravines before hitting one last switchback which draws you out across the long face of the mountain. At one point, you hit a slight ridge that lets you peak over to the other side of the mountain down into Elk Lake. The wildfire haze was pretty thick so I couldn’t get too far of a view. I passed a few fresh signs of bear scat, but I didn’t see any bear. The trail eventually hits a slight scree slop and you’ve got to watch your footing or else you’ll slip and slide for quite a while. The rock reminds me of shale – crumbling, breaking in long sheaths. I love when you get to the alpine point where trees start to get stouter and the flora changes. I wish I knew the names of all the plants and animals I see. There’s a Gary Snyder stanza about that… learning the plants… Anyway, there is no clear trail up to the actual peak of Vinegar, the main trail circles around it before venturing further south towards Mt. Bradley or you can hit a junction and drop down into Elk Lake. I found the longest, slightest grade up to the peak through a ridge of mountain grass (I’ll have to find the proper term for the plant, but it looked like grass to me!) and picked my way slowly up to the highest point. Someone built a little cairn at the top. The peak had lightning charred logs strewn about it and the remnants of still-standing-dead-fir blanketed the northern slope. God, I love being at the top of mountains. I become undone, completely open to possibility, stitches unstitch, routines dissipate into rituals. I ate a lunch (an everything bagel with almond butter and Nutella, an apple, some beef jerky) and leaned against my pack and dozed a bit as the smoke finally cleared and the flies found me. Since I was the only living thing up there, once the flies found me, they became relentless in their attachment. I decided to head back down, which I did. Going down was quicker, but I find that hiking down mountains is harder on my feet and knees than going up. Nothing that a nice long swim in the cold river couldn’t ease up. It did. Three more nights. I’m going to make some burritos, lay in the hammock, and watch the last light slowly come. Last night I woke to mice in the attic (it sounded like they were playing soccer) and went outside and saw a shooting start streak across The Milky Way. Day 14 – Friday I’ve spent the last two days fishing. It’s been spectacular. On Thursday, I took my 9’ 5 wt. upstream and fished a good few miles of the river, all the way up to a tributary near a dead elk carcass and back where I saw the first grizzly. All day I fished a purple hopper with a purple haze trailing it and all day I was picking up really nice Westlope Cutthroats. It was good, simple fishing. My favorite stretch was where the stream narrowed, with a bank of alders to my back and a giant piece of Belt Rock full of ripples and waves across the stream. How did this rock erode like this? Man, what a massive force of water and glacier and time it had to take to cut the stream like this. I stayed in the run for quite a long time – fishing, looking at the rock, trying to take it all in. I fished all the way up until I got hungry. I stopped and ate lunch and laid across a rock eddy for a bit and then put a streamer on to fish back down. My favorite lunchtime/afternoon rest time along the stream game is “pick a rock across the river and see how many times you can hit it with rocks.” I’ve spent many hot afternoons playing this game. You have to find various ways to entertain yourself when you are solo in the backcountry for two weeks… I haven’t been fishing the streamer much, but I felt like a change of pace and it felt like the right move with the wind coming up from downstream and me fishing back that way. There were also so incredibly deep pools I just had to gauge with it. Almost immediately I had cutthroat chase the streamer. I worked my way downstream like that - swinging the streamer, fighting cutthroats, the release. The simple motions of half circles and trout flicking out of your hand once unhooked. On Friday I took my morning nice and slow, drinking coffee, watching the river, writing. I hiked down to the start of the Spruce Gorge and fished my way back with my 7’6” 4 weight glass rod. I tied on a purple hopper and fished that all day. In the first run I fished, I had a Bull Trout take the hopper. A nice one at that. You aren’t allowed to target Bulls on this river, which I wasn’t. It seems like it’s inevitable you’ll get into one here and there just while you are fishing for cutthroats. I was blessed to have a few nice encounters. I am full. I am content. I am blessed and so incredibly grateful for this experience. I can’t even begin to fully know how much this has affected me. A few things I do know: I’m going away with no “I wish I had” statements – I fished, I wrote, I explored, I sunk in, I climbed mountains, I opened myself up to this wild place and let it shape me. I hope I can give back to it. I hope I can honor it.
These wild places, they are sacred. They are necessary. They are beautiful. They are intrinsic to our humanity. Without them, we lose all sense of our ecological past, present, and future.
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Winter I've always loved fishing in the winter. It may be harder to catch anything, but there are far fewer people and with all the undergrowth dormant, you can really see the riverine landscape you're exploring. I started the year with a pretty beautiful brown trout and then began to fall in love with exploring post-industrial watersheds. Spring I took advantage of the high water we had throughout the spring and fished smaller streams for large brown trout. I also continued exploring streams throughout the Pennsylvania anthracite region that are in acid-mine recovery. Some of these streams have brookies and browns returning and thriving in their orange waters. I also landed what was probably my personal best wild brown trout while casting a black woolly bugger upstream and stripping it down through a riffle into a deep hole under a sycamore tree. The Summer Summer was fun. I started it off up in Potter County for the annual #POCO trip and ended up finding some beautiful brook trout elders in small streams. Then, we took a few days in the Catskills before I ventured up to the West Branch of the Penobscot in Maine for a week of fishing. Maine was, as always, beautiful and inspiring. But this time the fishing was tough due to their long, wet spring and the black flies were mind-bogglingly torturous. Finally, I ended the summer with a ten day trip out to Yellowstone and the Bighorns with a good friend I hadn't seen in years. I ended up camping 4 out of the 12 weeks I had off. The only downside to this summer was the lack of good bass fishing on the Susquehanna River. Something is up with that waterway. Fall After my epic summer of traveling and camping, I slowed down quite a bit in the fall. I went back to work and fell into that routine. I didn't catch a ton of fish, but I did manage to land a few really nice ones. I was really hoping to finally get into some bass on the Susquehanna River, but the river never really seemed to wake up. I did manage to get into two of the most beautiful trout I've ever landed. I just got back from ten days of traveling through Yellowstone, the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, and the Big Horns. It was an incredible trip with an old college buddy (the winds of North Dakota nearly swept us up across the border) with too many highlights to discuss. Each place, each alpine lake, each nook below a peak offered some sort of unique beauty that I'll hold till I can't anymore. One day in particular will shape my days for a long time to come. The day before, we woke at 4 a.m. and took the hour drive to be first in line at Slough Creek Campground. Well worth it as we got the best site, right along the river, with a great view. We fished a lot of the big waters in the park - Soda, Lamar, Slough. All were really cool in their own way. But it was the freestone creek that required a long hike into the backcountry that provided us with the best memories and fish. Within about a half mile of the trailhead, the valley keeps opening and Jesus it's beautiful and you forget who you are and why you are there because all you can do is just try to take it all in Within a mile, there were no other people on the trail. The more dirt we put under our wading boots, the wilder it became. We both had bear spray and were both convinced we'd run into one. Just the night before, two black bears were rummaging about twenty yards from our tent. We kept coming across scorched bones of bison. Had these bones been washed down in the spring run-off? Had they been taken down by something right where we stood? Yellowstone has such interesting and diverse landscapes. The juxtaposition of seemingly foreign elements is jarringly beautiful. Femuroles next to spring creeks with brook trout, bones next to wild sage, high peaks next to deep ravines. The trail kept descending until, finally, it reached the Yellowstone. It was day 5, we had no showers, and there was this long eddy and beach. What else is there to do but swim for an hour? Big salmon flies and stone flies were hatching and fluttering in the air. I had some massive cutthroats nudge my flies, landed a few small ones. It was already mid day so we started to work up the stream we hiked down. Soon, we found this pool. Soon, we couldn't stop catching beautiful Yellowstone Cutthroats on big dry flies. The water was so clear, the cutties so bright, that you could see them streak up from the bottom or from the far banks for these flies. We kept fishing until we got hungry and had a great lunch of peanut butter and bacon sandwiches next to some antler sheds... We kept fishing and working our way upstream and catching cutthroats in ever pool and riffle Then regular afternoon storm clouds came through and we decided to make the trek back out. It was exactly the day I covet - backcountry exploring for wild trout in wild places. Yellowstone is pretty awesome... especially if you get off the road and away from the popular spots. "The greatest warriors are those who dangle a human for hours on a string, break sacred water for the profanity of air, then snap fiercely back into pearly molecules that describe fishness" - Joy Harjo Every few years, I find myself returning to the north Maine woods to exist, even just for a few days, in the shadows of Katahdin and the murmur of the Penobscot. It is this mountain and this river that I seem to owe so much to. They have shaped my life's path more than most anything else. I was first taken in by these woods and waters while I was working on the trail crew at Baxter State Park. I didn't do much fishing then; instead, I spent my time relentlessly exploring, expending all that 21-year-old energy into rafting down the class 5 rapids of the Crib Works and reaching every peak I could over our three day weekends after working four-tens building rock staircases up Katahdin and clearing twenty miles of blow-downs in a day. My knees never hurt, my skin grew immune to the hordes of black flies, my eyes were always looking beyond each false peak and around each river bend. I didn't take much time to study what I was rafting or hiking - too much to see up ahead. Now I make a pilgrimage every couple of years not to push myself into deep unknowns, but to revisit certain trails and pools and to find those tiny mysteries that exist right in front of us. And to hopefully land some beautiful landlocked salmon and brook trout. I found myself this year questioning this idea of "revisiting." Has it just become a pattern that I've fallen into that, in some ways, constricts my experience down to a simple reliving instead of living something "new?" Over the week, as I fished my favorite eddies and runs, I realized that a pilgrimage is a different type of "revisiting." It isn't a reliving, it's a going-back-to-in-order-to-find-something-new. The salmon here in this water revisit it every year as they spawn, yet they are experiencing something completely new. Some may pool up in the same eddy every year, but they are reaching for different caddis during those last nights of June when they flood the air. I may fish this same run I did last year, but when I look up, the clouds clipping across Katahdin have a notion I've never seen before and the salmon that just attacked my emerger takes me for a ride downstream that I'll never forget, his last jump over my head a fine farewell until I come back. A pilgrimage is about honoring the steps already taken while also experiencing and discovering something new.
A day after school let out, I found myself rambling up hollows of Potter County. It is here, where rock tightens its grip to water, that everything grows more full. Color, life, sound, smell, the way deadwood lays across rock - patterns stitched by the quick wind that slices down these drafts. Patterns of the elders It is a good way to start the summer - sitting on the tailgate with mountains in the windows, looking at maps, tracing hyphenated courses and blue lines, waiting for the sulfurs to hatch. One night, after we caught brook trout on little bright yellow flies, I made burritos. We sat around the fire and ate them. The thin moon showed us the movement of night. The next morning we sat on the porch and drank coffee for a few hours, watching the valley and the clouds slowly shake by. During the day we bushwhacked through thick brush and found plunge pools. The long thin red marks across my shins, those are good scars, tattoos of exploring.
Inevitably, I find myself walking the tracks back home, humming some Charlie Parr song about rivers and cedar. I tend to be drawn towards rivers that run parallel to rail lines. It is here, in these crevasses that wildness and industry collide and, hopefully, coexist, that I find so much beauty. Oftentimes we think of nature and wildness as some idyllic, far-away "thing" or "place" when it's really right in front of us. If we aren't able to find the wildness in the spaces where we live, we'll never truly be able to appreciate any sort of wildness. Maybe it's because I fall asleep every night to the calls of trains running the Susquehanna River a few hundred yards through the woods. Maybe it's my early love of Stand By Me and the journey of walking the rails and that boyhood bond that shapes life. Maybe it's the music I obsessively listen to that connects me to place and time- Dylan, Parr, Jerry, Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane, Gunn. But there is it, frozen backwater full of sycamore and young maple that holds my attention, that buries itself in the palm of my hand like a pebble I rub with my thumb. The skulking creek branches towards sunrise with orange creamsicle stained rock, covered in the spittle of mine spill striking through the Appalachian mountains that have folded into ridges and valleys, Worn thin from the erosion of age. There's beauty in its coarse recovery into a watershed that holds thriving wild brown trout. This stream was killed, years ago, by acid mine drainage. Now, thanks to remediation, brown trout have found a niche among stained rock and rhododendron. It's a wildness of recovery, of the melding of steel and water. We decided to take a long weekend up in the Finger Lakes since work has been pretty consuming for both of us over the past few months. It was time to disengage from the routines of home life, to shake off a bit of the dust from all the sawing and shaping we've been doing. We left early Saturday morning and took a straight shot up 11/15 into New York. We got to camp around 1 and by the time we were set up, a torrential rain came through. We stayed dry in the camper - this seems to be a "thing" that happens to us - getting to camp right before a rain sets in (Rock Creek in Montana, Big Eddy in Maine...). It's good, though. It forces us to settle into a place. After the rain tapered off a bit we went for a hike up a ravine and found some waterfalls. It rained again on our way back, but we stayed dry under a thick canopy of fir and pine. By dusk, the rain turned into sleet. Temps dropped. No chance for a fire, so we ate dinner and hung out in a warm camper. A pretty great Saturday night. There was frost the next morning. We had one of our camping staples for breakfast - Heuvos rancheros. Insanely great, one of the best foods to start the day. The sleet and snow finally stopped around lunch, so I decided to sneak out for a few hours to explore some water. I found a blue line on a map - a tributary to the lake - and decided to take a look. It had a cool name and it looked like a decent place to possibly find lake run brown trout and landlocked salmon. I found a public parking spot near the mouth - no cars. Possibly a great sign, possibly a sign that the run hadn't started yet. I hadn't be able to find any information online about fishing conditions which I kind of loved. The locals here don't advertise their water. I respect that. I worked my way upstream, hitting the deeper runs. I was hoping for more water in the stream, but there were still some deep troughs that looked like great holding water. I didn't see any fish until I moved a really big lake run brown trout on a black woolly bugger. He sniffed at it, then turned away. I reached a really long, deep pool with a maple tree that had fallen in about halfway through. It was there, under those branches, that laid the darkest water. I drifted an egg through it once, twice, three times. On that last drift my line went tight and my Winston 6 weight bent down in praise of some holy idol lurking deep in the bottom of the pool. It knelt like that for a solid ten minutes as I fought this fish. At first I thought it was a sturgeon as it stayed hovered along the bottom. It fought like a catfish as it kept trying to get lower and lower in the water. I couldn't coax it up at all. The only other landlockeds I've landed were in Maine and they'd leap out of the water every chance they got. This one was different. She wanted to stay low. It ran upstream a bit, then settled back down in its original spot. Finally, she started making runs downstream. With each run I tried to nose her down into the shallow part of the pool. On the fourth run, I finally got her to oblige as I literally ran downstream with her. I netted her with my little trout net and luckily a dude showed up right then who had a bigger net. I slid her over to it and removed the egg pattern and the big black conehead bugger that she had ripped off someone else's line. He took a few quick pictures and she swam away. This is by far one of the best wild fish I've ever landed. The entire experience was the culmination of a on a ton of hours put on the water and on exploring. There's nothing quite like finding water and wild fish on your own.
"I know no good way to live and I can't stop getting lost in my thoughts, my ancient forests... You ask - how does a man rise or fall in this life? The fisherman's song flows deep under the river." - Wang Wei I work my way downstream stripping a black woolly bugger through riffles and pools. Leaves release from their branches. Water swirls cold. Clouds pile onto each other. Trout chase flash through pebble and sand. Sediment settles in the first low water of the season. I have nowhere to be except to make pizza for dinner in a few hours. "Ask me how it is I've come to perch in these blue-green hills, and I'll smile with no answer; I'm happiest with heart-and-mind just so, may be... Peach blossoms float by here, gone into the quite definite shadows. There is another world, other than this one we choose to live in." - Li Po Here's the tell - I still get swarmed by mosquitoes when I sit out on my porch at night. It's September. It's been raining since the end of July. There have only been a few days without rain, even fewer with dry air. It feels as if this area is slowly turning into a tropical floodplain. The Susquehanna has stayed high all summer. No zostera. No hyacinths. Only a handful of bass brought to hand. Wading has been difficult, so I've been floating it with the kayak. Each time there are different eddies and currents. The river changes with every flood. It's bulging. The canopy and water are growing closer. The one upside to all this rain is that, once the sediment settles, the trout streams around here are fishing well. There's a spring creek a few minutes from my house that normally runs pretty low by this time of year. Developments keep being built and the water table gets sucked dry. I fished it for a few hours this evening and was pleasantly surprised at how high the water was. The recent floods have pushed a ton of sediment downstream, leaving some nice, long deep channels. The water was that perfect chalky limestone color. The trout chased the woolly bugger with abandon. There's a stretch I love to fish that is lined with quite a few old Osage Orange trees. They aren't too common around this area, especially this size. Their bark is unique - strained, thick, topographic, deep grooves that wind their way up and down the tree. Their canopies are large and filter the light in this shallow ravine. They seemed to survive the last few floods. Still standing. Whereas some gigantic sycamore have fallen. They line the banks and as the dirt is dragged downstream, their cedar red roots create great notches to stand in to cast. These, along with the catalpa that line the river by my house, are my favorite stretches of trees in the county. In the fall when I walk this stretch I'll find dozens of their burled lime-green hedge apples.
The heat of the summer was getting too much. Coupled with the continuous rain, I was feeling cooped up with the river blown out. No bass fishing. No kayaking. Every bike ride ending in a rainstorm. I woke up last Sunday knowing I had to leave for a few days, shed some of this summer skin. I decided to head down to West Virginia to check out some water. I camped near Seneca Rocks and took a few days to roam around the Monongahela National Forest. It's beautiful rugged country. Steep wooded hills flooded with rhododendron.I got into some wild rainbows, which was super cool. I met an old lady whose job it was to park at an intersection of two gravel roads six miles deep in the forest just to tell people not to turn left. Pipeline Construction. She warned me about the rattlesnakes. I kept an eye out for them the entire day. We talked about the storm coming over from Elkins. I came across the Green Bank Observatory. A surreal place tucked deep in West Virginia. They listen to the universe there. Afterwards, I caught brook trout in the middle of a thunderstorm on big dry flies. This is the summer of rain. I drove down countless ravines. I drove up miles of mountain. It was a good week. I ended it in western Maryland after stopping for some of the best burritos I've ever had at Hellbenders in Davis, WV. I caught brook trout. I had a fire. I fell asleep to the stream, the throaty call of the frogs, and the sharp gossip of crickets. It's been a good summer.
I rest easy when I'm in the north woods. The deepness of the green and the water and the night are a comfort for me. We spent the last week camping in northern New Hampshire and western Maine. I spent a lot of time exploring water - the Rapid River, the Magalloway, the Upper Connecticut. Many wild fish were caught, some big ones lost. A thunderstorm came in over two hours one night. We sat by the fire and listened as it worked its way south out of Canada and finally fell asleep as torrential rain rolled its fingers across the roof of our camper. It was a good, hard sleep that night. The humidity hit later in the week, slowing us a down a bit. Another storm came early Friday morning - 4 a.m. - and pushed in a cold front. The breeze stuck with us for a few days. We woke up late, ate a hearty breakfast at the local diner, hiked Magalloway Mountain, and in the evening caught landlocked salmon, brook trout, brown trout, and rainbow trout on a high floating caddis.
"Yeah, it's pretty good. I've got about 15 and I've been here since 6." I was laying in bed listening to the owl when I got the text. 6:20. I promised myself one morning this week of not waking up to an alarm but woke up early anyway. Pushing the skunking I took last time I tried for shad out of my mind, I roll out of bed, throw on some clothes, and head out towards the Conowingo Dam. Google Maps said it'd take an hour and three minutes, I get there in 50. I usually use my 8 wt. for the river, but I've been taking out my Winston 6 wt. I inherited from my neighbor as of late. It's a fantastically responsive rod and fishing it feels like fishing. Sometimes, with my 8 wt., I feel like I'm just chucking heavy hooks full of feathers through the air and muscling fish back in. It's great for my kayak, but this season, when I'm wading warm waters, I'm taking the Winston. Rob gave me a flashy little fly with a pink bead head to use and on my second cast, I finally land my first Hickory Shad. Using a sinking leader helped get the fly down to where the shad where. Sling it out, let it drift down the current and swing it. Slow strips - strip, strip, pause, set. This is how it went for the first few hours. 15 minutes of catching shad on every other cast, then, a lull. But you keep casting, because you don't know when that next bite will start again. They released water late in the morning. Sirens sound, red lights flash and within minutes my boots are sunk and water is up to my knees. I put on a few split shot to get down. Roll cast out, let it swing, and with the first strip my line stopped. Caught on a rock. No, it's moving, but it's not like any other shad I caught that day. It stays low like a catfish and doesn't shoot straight upstream but out and back and then takes me on the reel as it breaks downstream back towards the bay. I slide my rod down, side pressure and turn it, slowly working it back towards me. Finally, a flicker of light in the murky water. An American Shad. 3 pounds? I've never seen scales so iridescent, flushed purple and blue by thousands of miles of salt water hitting the freshwater of the Susquehanna. It's beautiful. Heavy with muscle, a forked tail of a rudder, enough to finish out its journey.
Yesterday I drove up switchbacks through the Tuscarora Mountains - these that create a a few fertile valleys in central Pennsylvania- to a small stream with native brook trout and wild brown trout. Most people wouldn't consider driving this far just to fish a small stream. Destinations are different for those of us who like to spend their days in large swaths of public forests on water with wild trout and no people. It was still cold in the morning, April has been a long March, and a black woolly bugger jigged through the deep pools worked until noon. The sun stretched itself out over the valley by early afternoon. Bugs - caddis, midges, a few black stoneflies - little puffs of bug smoke in the warm spots. There was a pool that, with every cast of my caddis, a trout would strike it. This, that little ten foot pool and those hungry fish, is always worth the drive. I love driving down dirt rods. The ones that go through public lands and arch their way around mountains and into ravines. That follow streams up into their headwaters. The road splits when a tributary enters, where the mountains fold into each other and you have a choice. Right, Left. I'll pull off when there's space and search the water for wild trout. I fill my days with their dirt and their mysterious bends as much as possible. That plunge pool is at least fifteen feet deep. I was hoping to see some brown trout rising, but the water this far north is still cold, still in its early spring mode. No bugs to be seen, still ice in the north side hollows. This bend mirrored the roads I drove around this weekend. Long slices of rock curving, cutting deep into the dirt, hiding dark runs still waking up from winter.
You can find a new poem of mine, "Frozen Antlers," in the Fly Fishing Edition of Gray's Sporting Journal.
I had more time to explore on Sunday, so I decided to check out a new section of a larger limestone creek that I had fished a few times previously. This stream is often overlooked; though there is one particular spot that seems to get the most attention. I didn't see anyone else on the water. Since this was new water to me and the levels were a bit up, I slowly worked my way out to a long mellow run tight line nymphing. On the set as I was lifting the rod to cast, I felt what I thought was a rock when it rolled over and shot downstream. I kept working him back over closer to the bank, trying to get upstream of him as we coasted down under a bridge. After about 50 yards, I finally, kind of, netted this beautiful rainbow. Though stocked, this dude had definitely been in the water for a few years. Beautiful colors. I've never hit the 20" mark this early in the year. I love the back and forth of a good right. There is a metaphor here that I'm going to keep working on. After the rainbow and the adrenaline, I realized that my left boot was leaking. I kept fishing, but after another hour or so, my foot was completely numb so I got in the truck and drove upstream to warm up a bit. I fished one last section as rain starting gathering through the valley and landed a handful of wild browns. They all took big tungsten nymphs on the bottom. I'm ok if January freezes up again. I'll be waiting for the next thaw.
A couple of weeks ago I traced out a blue line into a state forest, took a drive, and fished for brookies and browns. It was nice not to have anyone around; so much so that I almost ignored the No Trespassing signs in order to hit one really deep hole under a hemlock. I reached the downstream border and knew I had to turn around. I did swing a bugger out, across, and down into the water a couple of times before I left. I doubt you could fine a fly caught in a current for trespassing. Especially after a few days of heavy rain. I went back to the deep pool a bit past the bridge and quickly hooked into a pretty nice sized brown trout super low on a hare's ear. I lost him at the tail end of the pool, never getting the hook set well enough. Upstream, after the downed oak made for an interesting redirection - a plunge pool only about a foot long, seven feet long, into a quick run before hanging left again - a nice long slow pool and a dead raccoon. No fish rising. I fished the whole afternoon, but only covered about 3/4 of a mile of water. It was one of those beautifully intricate mountain freestone streams - every few feet a new piece of water to be read. The trout were in their late fall colors. The brookies were getting bright and ready to spawn and the browns had the yellows melting off their red spots. I don't fish for numbers. Once you start down that road the only places you have to go are down or up. I don't get it. Calculating my fishing experience based on how many caught or lost or missed or just didn't see seems archaic and too much like a competition. I'd rather catch one wild trout on a stream without anyone around than 20 stocked fished sharing the water with others. Anyway, I went antiquing with the wife last week and, tucked behind a small counter in a corner of a basement shop was an old fiberglass fly rod in great shape. It's a 7' 5 wt AFTMA (?) with 10 guides. 20 bucks. I figure it'll be a great small stream rod for throwing some streamers and heavier nymphs. I can't wait to take it out, not to see how many trout I can catch on it, but to see how the rod will change my approach, my cast, the flies I use. Maybe it'll help me to see the water in different ways. Maybe it'll teach me something I didn't even think about learning. If I'm always going out to catch the most amount of fish, I'll be less likely to be surprised. I'll just high-stick nymph with the same three comfort flies over and over again. Sure, that's a blast at times, but it's also good to cast a rod you found for 20 bucks with a new fly pattern you tried to tie last night while it rained.
The fire red underbelly of ferns yellowed by low water and late fall greet us as we step out of maple and oak into swept old rolling Appalachian mountains. The green is leaving the canopy along with us, a trail cut bank along the slide. Red blazes on pine. The dirt roads of Pennsylvania are a good breakfast for a day in the woods. I swear, some day I’ll just pull off to the side of one and rest, watch the suns and moons of its days and nights turn into each other. Some clouds. A rain. Cross Forks to Windfall to Red Ridge. There’re your directions. Up this high, the ground is soft. Not like most of Pennsylvania. Didn’t turn my ankle on a rock once. The trail curves, gaining a few feet of elevation, slowly as it wraps itself up into the Hammersley Ravine. No deer. No bear. Just a few chipmunks. This morning trout were snatching my woolly bugger as it dipped and streaked through their water. From up here I see no water. Just endless wooded crescents and ridgelines folding into each other tired from the shift of the plates of years ago. Tonight we’ll eat fajitas around a fire, but right now it’s just you, me, our dog standing in the middle of this old burn - 1964 - small birch stained yellow by October, groves of ferns, teaberry, dark streaks on rock nestled among little thorns. We stop and stand before leaving, eyes closed, a wind comes up out of the deep sweeps across our mouths, chilling the sweat, the hair at the edge of our ears. It’s gone. The taste of this settles in my tonsils. Shade mountain, Jacks Mountain, Penn's Creek. A Bobcat in the rear view mirror with still a few gulps of coffee left in the parking lot. I got pissed at the big water by noon. A morning of slight takes and spitting flies ended with two dudes dropping into the middle of the run I was fishing. I cut up the bank, crossed into the meadow and threw some hoppers. It was lunch, I was hungry. I had eaten my last granola bar an hour ago. I walked back to my truck and drove up the mountain until I found a pull off and the stream winding itself out and away into the rhododendron and mountain laurel. I took one fly and my 6'10" rod. Hiked into the woods following the only path the water cut. A few deep plunges, some shallow riffles, a cut bank that bled into a hill of ferns, some small brook trout and I was fishing. Eventually I reached the road, walked back to my truck and off to find lunch. Washington felt like home. Maybe it was the two days of driving through 100 degree Idaho and eastern Oregon dry landscapes. Maybe it was insanely good burrito we got at the food truck in Olympia. Maybe it was finally reaching the end of the swing, sliding into the last stretch of the boomerang arc, heading north along the coast, slowly making steps towards the east, our house. Mostly I think it was the trees, the blues, the grays, the ocean and its driftwood. Our first night was spent on the Pacific Ocean. We walked along fields of driftwood laying like fallen totems between the sand and the thick interior forest. There was a ceaseless breeze that kept the ocean in our camper and burned our fire quickly. After dinner sat and watched the sun set on the ocean. The sand skittered towards me and I would close my eyes but not for too long. I didn't want to miss the last bit of sun. I wanted to see the lightness of the dry wood begin to meld into the dark spruce as day left. I'm still processing this place. It's fingerprints have been tattooed on me. There are only a few places I've been in my life that have completely altered my perspective. Northern Maine in late October. The saddle between the Upper and Lower Devil Peaks in the Siskyous Mountains. Predawn late August on the Susquehanna River. The Hoh Rainforest. It's primordial colors of blue and gray serve as a thick backdrop to the large Sitka Spruce and fields of fern that cover the soft forest floor. I want to go back with my fly rod, a backpack, some food and hike deep into it until I'm lost. 15 elk crossed the river right below our campsite as the sun set. Our last few days were spent in the Cascades. I found some water full of Westslope Cutthroat trout eager to take a hopper on top. We stayed away from the crowds and camped in forest service land surrounding the National Park. We were reluctant to go, but knew we had to eventually start making it home or else we'd never leave.
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