Fishin' on the Mission: P-day in the Pyrenees

Back in June of 2016 I posted about catching rainbows at 13,000 feet while serving a mission with my wife in Peru. We are serving again, but this time in Spain. While the Pyrenees aren't as tall as the Andes, fly fishing for trout is just as possible in Europe as it was in South America. Since time is in short supply as a senior missionary (and my fishing gear is back at home), I hired a guide service who knew the terrain and could provide both the gear and the expertise to try to get me into some trout. The Pyrenees are home to two sub-species of brown trout--one native to the Mediterranean drainage and the other to the Atlantic drainage. Miguel, our guide, explained the morphological differences between the two strains and said he'd point them out once we caught some of each.

We took the train from Granada to Lleida, which would be our base of operation. The following morning a two-hour drive north nearly to the border with France put us in the heart of the Pyrenees Mountains, a beautiful range. While we had hoped to get some respite from the heat of southern Spain, the thermometer was pushing triple digits (Farenheit) while we were in the mountains as well. Wading was a welcome relief from the heat. The scenery was stupendous and we had a wonderful lunch in a small mountain village with a beautiful old church in the foreground.

We started upstream in small pocket water adjacent to and within a national park. A beautiful clear stream that had an abundnce of the Mediterranean variety (they call them zebra trout for the dark vertical stripes they develop at sexual maturity). These marks appear similar to parr marks found in other juvenile salmonids. We found more than a dozen who were more than willing to take a sparse mayfly dry.

We subsequently moved downriver to a larger section where the Atlantic variety was found. Since we are in a Mediterranean drainage, Miguel explained that the Atlantics had been stocked there at some time in the past and had established themselves. These fish were a little larger than the zebras we'd seen but were also very willing to take a dry fly.

The third location we fished was larger water still and we had fewer fish to the fly. We switched to a 13-foot leader with 8x tippet so I had to be more careful with hookset and fighting. I was impressed with how gently the fly landed on the water with the long leader and light tippet. Near the end of our time together, I had a large brown take the fly. It was a struggle to keep him from heading to the brush on the opposite bank, but exerting all the pressure I dared and putting a deep bend into the rod, I got him within a couple feet of us, but the water was swift and the fish was definetly not tired--we had simply managed to get it close quickly. Miguel feared if he tried to net it, it would likely result in a loss. We could see he was between 24-27" and a thick fish. As he headed again into the stronger current, I was unable to keep him close and he managed to work his way across the stream and found a single branch whose tip was immersed in the water. (The offending branch is illuminated by the sun in the middle of the photo.) He passed the line along it, and the 8x leader separated the fly and fish quickly and cleanly from the rod, which went limp, as did I. So close. But that's what memories are made of and I will forever have a yearning to return to the Pyrenees in search of another bruiser brown. Maybe I'll be back . . .

A Few Little Cutts

An early fall trip was planned with Reese Femreite, a friend who has just started getting into flyfishing. My original plan was to visit the Tucannon River, a nice sized stream with a good number of fish that has fished well for me in the past in late September, however, consulting the State of Washington's ever changing regulations, I found the section I normally fish now closes to fishing on August 15 (so the state allows fishing in this section for a whopping 2.5 months out of the year! I long for Utah and their mostly year-round regulations...). Made alternate plans to visit the South Fork Tieton River (above the 10 miles of stream closed year-round to protect bull trout). It's big enough to practice some casting, easy size for wading, and a past visit found some nice cutts here.

Six AM start with a stop for a #6 at McD's got us to the trailhead at about 8:30, with clear blue skies and a temp of 35°F. That brought the waders out of the bag, which was a good thing as the stream is also painfully cold even this late in the year. We made our way through a lot of pocket water and shallow riffles without a sign of any fish, either to the fly or darting for the shadows after being spooked. That was my memory of this stream from my past visit.

Pretty water, not a lot of fish

Finally we came to a deep hole with a couple current streams entering from the side. Reese was tossing an irresistible Wulff which disappeared on about the third drift down the edge of the first current stream. A quick set and he had a nice little cutthroat to hand, his first fish ever on a dry fly!

Reese hooked and landed the first fish he ever had rise to a dry!

We found a few more here, some hooked and to hand, some missed (including the largest fish we saw on the day, perhaps an 11 or 12 inchers that Reese couldn't get the hook into). After a good bit more walking through mostly fishless pocket water, we came to another deep hole where a half dozen fish were actively feeding on the surface. I had a renegade on by this time, and with a sideways cast to get around some logs dropped the fly in the path of the fish and watched as one slowly rose up from the bottom to sip the fly. A quick set and this beautiful cutt came to hand.  

Love the pink hues!

We couldn't fool any more in this hole, but it was sure fun to watch them feed. With the sparse fish, we were ready to call it a day on this stream. Then we rounded a bend in the stream and were greeted by this view of the Goat Rocks rising above the stream and Conrad Meadows. What an end to our visit!

We made a quick stop at the South Fork Tieton falls a couple miles downriver, a pretty little fall that would be quite impressive in the spring with high water. 

Then made a stop along the Naches River on the way home to see what we could find. A much bigger river, but the fish we found were about the same size, a few 6 to 8 inch rainbows brought an end to our fishing. Burgers and stuff at the Laredo Drive-In in Naches replenished our energy for the drive home. Crisp fall temps, a few pretty little cutts, amazing views, and great company. A good start to fall!

Start of the California Heritage Trout Challenge?

Driving home from San Francisco after helping my daughter and son-in-law with their move, I found myself with a choice - a quick 12-hour drive directly home, or a more leisurely 15-hour route through Lassen Volcanic National Park and then through some remote high desert country east of the Sierra/Cascade mountains. Once I discovered there's a tiny stream to visit in those remote high desert lands where trout can be found, the choice became obvious. What's three more hours of driving when you can fish for tiny trout in an isolated stream on the way? More precisely, the Goose Lake redband trout, a subspecies endemic to just a few streams in northeastern California/southeastern Oregon. So I rolled out of San Francisco shortly after 5 am heading for the hills.

First stop was a small stream in Lassen NP reported to have a population of brook trout. Fished a bit of a meadow section without seeing a fish to the fly or darting away as I walked up the stream. Finally, below the culvert passing under the highway, I saw a few small trout feeding in the tailout. Got a couple to rise to the fly, but didn't get the hook into any. With limited time and not a lot of action, I decided to accept the skunk and continue on my way (after trying a few more holes upstream). Although maybe no fish were brought to hand, but it's hard to call it a skunk when you get to fish in a place as beautiful as this!

Kings Creek in Lassen Volcanic National Park

A few more hours on the road brought me to Goose Lake, a large lake that is sometimes there, sometimes dried up. I could see water in the distance, but the lake was not the target. A few miles up a gravel road to the east, a small creek on public land was reported to have a population of Goose Lake redband trout. When the lake is full, some of these trout can migrate to the lake and grow large, but in the small tributary streams, a 12-inch fish would be a monster. 

I drove to where Google Maps had shown a section of the stream running through a meadow area and found a lovely little creek, a bit smaller than I expected, but plenty big to hold fish. And fish there were, in every long stretch of flat water with sufficient depth. From the first drop of my fly, I was getting strikes. After missing a few, I got the hook into this beautiful little Goose Lake redband. This subspecies is noted as being quite pale with a lemon-yellow body, especially below the lateral line. This one fit the description perfectly.

A Goose Lake redband

Hoppers, renegades, a wet caddis were all equally attacked, but the hooking ratio was really low. They were really fast or I was really slow. It was a little easier to get the fish on the hook with the smaller flies. All ranged from about 4 to 9 inches. After my allotted hour, I headed back to the car. Seven more hours to home, but the smile I was left with stayed with me all the way (I pulled in the garage at 1:30 am).

Beautiful little creek for my first California trout

I later discovered that California has a challenge similar to the Utah cutthroat slam, called the Heritage Trout Challenge. You have to catch six of the eleven species of trout native to California in their native waters. Since I now have the first one down, and my daughter and son-in-law will be in California for the next few years, it looks like a challenge that I will have to accept. So watch for a few more posts from California in the future!

An Unexpected Trip Back to Utah, Time to Finish My Cutthroat Slam

I just returned from Utah a couple of weeks ago, short the Bear River cutthroat to finish my third Utah Cutthroat Slam. I know where to find them, but figured it might be next year before I made it back to finish it off...or not. My youngest daughter is moving from Provo, Utah, to San Francisco. They were going to rent a truck, but ended up selling most of their stuff which made it so we could fit it all in my RAV4 and their Crosstrek. So I volunteered to drive, Washington to Utah to California and back home, 34 hours total of driving. Sure, it's to help my daughter and son-in-law, but also - a chance to finish my slam. The Logan River is mostly on the way, it only adds two more hours of driving...

Up at 4:30 am for a 5:00 am start, I figured I could make it on the river between 3 and 4 pm. And so I did. Being a Saturday, there were fisherman at nearly every pull-out in the lower canyon. I decided to head to a small tributary, where a short section near the gravel road had been good to me in the past. I was on the water about 4 pm. I'd loaded a Turcks tarantula on the line last night, so I was ready to go a minute or two after stopping. It was just as I remembered it, a typical Utah creek, not too brushy in this section running below a sagebrush covered hill. First hole, two casts, two swirls/looks, two misses (or rejections). Encouraging, but they didn't seem to love the Turcks. I switched to a Morrish hopper with a psycho prince caddis green dropper, and in a pocket above the head of the first hole, my fly again disappeared. I lifted and up came a beautiful Bear River cutt on the dropper, in the range of 13 to 14 inches, but before I could get the net off my back it was off the hook. I wasn't that worried, certain now that there would be more. And there were. In the next hole up, I saw the flash, the dry went down, and I got my Bear River cutthroat in the net. Mission accomplished, slam complete!

A beautiful Bear River cutthroat to complete my slam

So with the slam complete after ten minutes on the water, I could head for my daughter's house in SLC...or I could keep fishing. Yup, good choice. I was driving 36 hours, over the next few days, I should at least fish an hour! I did, and was able to get about eight more fish to hand, also missing about that many.

Found a couple browns along with the cutts, about half on the dropper, half on the dry. So fun to watch the cutts rise slowly up from the bottom to take down the hopper!

I was committed to seeing my granddaughter before she went to bed, so I held myself to mostly an hour (OK, it was an hour and 15 minutes), but I did make it to SLC with plenty of time to see her. 

Wish I had more than a day to drive to San Francisco, or from San Francisco home. There's some thin blue lines running of small mountain ranges along the way that I'm sure are uniquely beautiful places in the otherwise barren landscape. And my investigating found some held trout, but they will have to wait for another day.

 

Sarah finds her Bear River cutthroat, Rick finds a...grayling?

The monsoon moisture moved on just in time for a Saturday hike with Sarah and Melinda in the Uintas off the Mirror Lake highway. We did a 5.5 mile loop that started at an elevation of about 10,000 feet and took us by more than a dozen lakes. Beautiful country, but this is a fishing, not a hiking blog. I did pull out the fly rod at one of the lakes that had brook trout. Had a number of strikes on a dry, but couldn't get the hook in one. That was just to pass time. The real target of the day was the Bear River cutthroat, which could be found, where else, in the headwaters of the Bear River!

We met Jessica's family for a picnic lunch when we returned to the trailhead, then headed north over the crest of the Uintas to drop into the upper reaches of the Bear River drainage where the highway parallels Hayden Creek. 

It was pretty busy with it being labor day weekend. Found a pullout and walked down to the stream. I didn't know what to expect with this stream. In some areas the satellite images showed the creek to be just beaver ponds spread out through brushy meadows. In the area we stopped, it was running through forest, a fairly small stream in an oversized, rocky riverbed (I'm sure it roars during runoff). Fish did not seem to be abundant, nor present in the shallower pockets. You had to find a deeper shot, and they were few and far between. And every 50 ft or so a dead pine tree had been felled across the creek. There's lots of beetle kill in the Uintas, and they might be dropping them across the creek to try to improve river structure for fish. It made walking and fishing a mess.

Sarah managed to catch a brookie, lost a couple that were likely cutthroat, but it was kind of slow and hard to get around, so we decided to try a different section where a little side creek came in and I had seen beaver ponds on the satellite images. On the bushwacking back to the car, Melinda cried out that something had stung her. Sure enough, a bumblebee somehow got into her pants and stung her below her cheek. When she dropped her overpants, there was the big bumble on the waistband. I brushed it away, then turned to Sarah who was comforting Mel and asked if she was going to cast into this little beaver pond we were near. Needless to say, Melinda did not feel very cared for, and my response will surely enter our family lore as further evidence of my excessive attachment to fishing.

But back to fishing. We drove upriver a little ways and parked at the Whiskey Creek trailhead where I took a quick walk to survey fishing potential. Found my way to a small beaver pond, saw a fish rise, and came back for Sarah and the rods (Mel didn't want to chance more bushwacking or another bee so she waited in the car). Casting into the small pond, Sarah promptly missed a fish, caught a brookie, and then continued with some catches and some misses. Only brooks came to hand, until finally, she pulled one up that was a little more silvery. I quickly got my net under it and sure enough, she got a small Bear River cutthroat. Third leg of her slam completed!

Size doesn't matter for the slam

Now it was finally my turn to try and complete the slam (I already had my Yellowstone cutthroat from the trip down). We mucked around in a mess of beaver trackways and muddy swampy brush to fish different arms of the pond, and another nice pond just upstream (more uphill, there really wasn't a discernable stream). It was fun catching brookies, but I was really looking for a cutt to complete the slam. Finally, a small, silvery fish found its way to my fly. I was certain I had my cutt, until I looked more closely at the fish in the net. It was definitely not a cutthroat, but not a brook trout either. It was trout-like, but not right. Some faint troutlike spots, pale parr marks, scales were larger and more prominent, mouth wasn't quite right - a trout, but not quite a trout. That's when I remembered there were some lakes in the Uintas with grayling. The identification was confirmed when we got back in cell service, and a search found that grayling were found in a lake in the Whiskey Creek drainage.

Rick's small grayling

I continued to search for a cutt before we had to leave, but all we found were more small brookies. Sadly, my slam will have to wait until my next trip to Utah, when I'll hit a familiar stream where catching a Bear River cutthroat is almost a certainty. My third slam will have to wait until then, but now I have a good reason to find my way back to the Utah streams...

A Few Minutes with Dover

Anytime I'm in Utah, it's a pleasure to fish with my nephew-in-law, Mike Dover, if we can make our schedules work out. In between moving my Mom into a new facility closer to my sister (and providentially closer to a couple of our favorite streams in the area) and getting together with siblings, I had a few hours free. A quick call to Dover, and he was more than willing, having just sent his oldest son and fishing partner off on a church mission for two years. Stay at home and cry, or go fishing and drown your sorrows along with a fly. Not a hard choice! We figured with the drive time there and back, we'd have about 60 minutes to fish, not enough, but better than not fishing!

He picked me up and we headed to a small creek that had been completely killed off a few years ago by a major fire that burned most of the watershed. I had read reports that Fish and Wildlife took the opportunity of the fish kill to try and restore the native Bonneville cutts into the stream. It had been about four years since the fire, so chances seemed good we'd find some fish. And that we did!

They were a little more picky than the cutts I had found the other day on the way to meet Sarah, often rising to look at the Turks but not taking it. I tied on a dropper and found enough action to keep me happy, some on the dry, some on the dropper. 

Mike switched to our normal go-to fly, the trusty renegade, and started hauling them in. The fish of the day had flashed on my dry but wouldn't come back. It was more than willing to take Mike's renegade. This 13-14 incher was probably from the first plant after the fire, an incredible fish from this little stream.

Well, we both had things to do, so after an hour of fishing we reached quitting time, then continued for about fifteen minutes through several "just one more" holes. Luckily, we came to a long stretch of fast water and so were able to bring ourselves to leave this lovely stream. And I wasn't even late for the sibling dinner! I could have fished one more hole...

Cutts for Sarah

Southern Utah's very dry summer came to an abrupt end with the arrival of monsoonal moisture, just in time for my scheduled day to be with Sarah to start her cutthroat slam. Two streams were on tap for today, the first a headwaters creek above Panguitch Lake that surveys showed had a good population of Bonneville cutthroat. Sarah met me at my hotel, and an hour later we pulled up to a high meadow with a beautiful little stream running through it. And we were met with the arrival of some solid, drenching rain, but Sarah wasn't about to let a little downpour interfere with her slam.

After a short hike down to the stream, we probed the waters of the small stream. After a few holes and no sign of fish, we were beginning to wonder if the surveys from a few years ago that found 200 Bonneville's per km were still accurate. Then Sarah found a nice fish, but it was a tiger.

A nice tiger trout to start us off

Soon thereafter, the cutts began to flow. After a few misses, she got her mojo back and completed the first leg of her slam with this pretty little Bonneville.

A beautiful Bonneville cutt

With the Bonneville in the books, we could have headed to our second stream three hours away in dryer country, but Sarah made me proud and wanted to keep fishing despite the downpour. We took turns and found quite a few more pretty cutts as we worked our way up the stream. Hard to leave such a pretty stream, even in the rain, but we needed to find Sarah a Colorado River cutthroat from a tiny stream that runs off Boulder Mountain. So we bade farewell to this great little stream and headed for the Fremont Valley. 

After three hours of driving we just made it out of the rain, and arrived at a creek that is little more than a ditch beside the forest service road. I have fond memories of a quick stop here with Jessica years ago on one of our many hiking trips through Southern Utah. I remember driving wildly on gravel roads to get to the stream before dark, pulling up and seeing the tiny stream and almost turning around and heading back to the hotel. Luckily, I thought better of it and decided to drop a fly in the stream, and Jessica and I caught about 30 cutts in 45 minutes. The stream looked just like it does in my memories, only running a bit higher from rains the previous days. 

Still fishing the Turks tarantula, it didn't take long for Sarah to connect with a beautiful Colorado River cutthroat to finish the second leg of her slam!

Sarah and her slam smile - halfway there

Shortly thereafter, I found a little cutt for my slam.

Once that was accomplished we began our normal turn taking, each of us finding a good number of fish despite the high water and abundant deadfall in the stream from streamside junipers burned in a fire some years past. These Colorado River cutthroat are really pretty, many with a bit of an orangish coloring and a very dark orange slash.

We even had a double at the end of the day when we came to a stretch of water that was a little more open.

Is it a brace of trout?

This little creek will remain in my dreams, a long drive from anywhere, but a solid spot to find a Colorado River cutthroat, or just someplace for a not so quick stop when you are on the way...