Snow Falling on River: The Trout Underground Freezes His Butt Off

There’s no business like snow business, at least not when you’re expecting the cosmic BWO hatch and driving the fishing Bronco through a lot of the slippery white stuff to fish.

Cagey fly fisher or frozen human splash test dummy? You decide.

Getting on the river on a day like today isn’t so much a test of perseverance as a stunning lack of survival instinct. It was snowing hard on the freeway, which quickly became clogged with icy slush.

Outside of black ice, it’s probably the slickest stuff you’ll find on a roadway, though apparently that wasn’t an attitude shared by the cars zipping by me on the way downcanyon.

Snow fall in Mount Shasta. It got a lot worse.

I arrived a few minutes too late to see a small SUV bloody its own nose on a guardrail, but I did have a ringside seat to a much more expensive show: a new Porsche Cayenne smacked the concrete center divider only a few seconds after it blasted by me.

That’s gotta hurt the pocketbook.

The Fishing. The Freezing.

I was wearing all the usual cold weather gear, but foolishly left my fleecy, earflapped “gomer” hat behind, thereby dooming myself to excessive heat loss through my neck and head.

It’s an amateur’s mistake, and though I ended up shivering pretty hard on the water, I managed to stick around through the whole hatch. More whining later.

Ready. Set. Nymph?

With no bugs appearing for my first 1.75 hours on the river, I was even forced to nymph to stay warm. That resulted in only a single grab, but salvation finally appeared in the form of a handful of BWOs.

With the snow falling in waves (heavy and light), I expected a pretty good hatch, but was disappointed by mother nature.

Instead, a light hatch brought up few risers. I got takes from the six fish I was able to target, but only landed three.

Apparently they were being pretty easygoing about presentation and flies (a #20 South Platte Quigley Cripple), but real hard-asses about staying hooked.

Cold, but still gorgeous. 12″ of Upper Sac fishcicle.

Still, my hook-to-land ratio mirrored that of Wayne, Steven Bertrand and Dave Edmondson, who were smart enough to fish upriver, where they found about the same number of working fish but spared themselves the danger of driving on a slippery freeway with a bunch of holiday-addled speedsters.

Today’s gear was my 8′ Steffen 5wt (though it was the 8.5′ Steffen), which handled hooked fish beautifully, and even cast wonderfully provided the angler stopped shivering.

We’re looking at more snow on Monday, perhaps a little more on Tuesday, and partly cloudy skies the rest of the week. Flows have spiked a little but everything’s still fishable.

For those of us bent on fishing to risers, the bugs remain the most vexing question. When will we see the strong hatches from two years ago?

See you behind the snow shovel, Tom Chandler

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