Mondays are hard. Maybe a little harder than they used to be because so much of Saturday and Sunday are spent wrangling the Underground's 4.5 and 3 year-old tax deductions instead of wrangling trout.

It is what it is, but nowadays, I tend to sit down and relax for a few minutes before diving into work.

In the interest of helping you do the same -- and bringing to light a few nuggets which could probably become standalone blog posts but won't -- we're going to escape the main current and eddy out for a minute. Enjoy.

Older Bro Cheats Death On 111 Mile Hike

Sure, "Cheats Death..." is a hugely alarmist and sensational headline, but if you feel bound by the truth, what's the point of blogging?

Older Bro recently took a pretty serious, '15 miles-per-day average' backpacking trip along the John Muir trail, the post for which generated some discussion about the uses of modern technology in the backcountry.

In the interest of completeness, here's his very short summary of the trip:

I learned a couple of things on my trip.

1. If you’re going to be ambitious and try to hike 15 miles a day, it’s best to simply leave the fly rod at home — it saves you a pound in weight. Over 111 miles that adds up.


2. I made the right choice in taking the 6wt. Winds in the canyons and lakes require that extra horsepower. [ED: Note how he clings to his 6wt fiction even in the face of his much smarter, better-looking younger brother's wholly correct assertion the 3wt would have been better.]

I ended up walking so much that little time was left for any serious fishing. A couple of Brookies were quickly caught in Bear Creek while cooling my feet, and I educated some Golden Trout in Evolution Valley on the dangers of artificial flies, but the crazy fish are at Rae Lakes.

Rae Lakes ended up being at the end of “only” a nine mile day, so I had time to set up camp, relax and figure out the game plan. The wind was blowing pretty good so I had to wait until late evening for it to die down enough to fish. I found a sheltered portion of the lake and cast out. The crazy fish there come clear out of the water on nearly anything you cast, so it was open season on fun. Unfortunately I only had about 45 minutes until my bedtime (8:15) so I only caught 45 trout.

Next trip will have a much lower daily mileage setting, so more time can be spent fishing instead of crawling into the sleeping bag, exhausted.

Here's a helpful hint for all those who didn't grow up alongside Older Bro: He says he'll take it easy next time, but he won't. He's just not genetically capable of it.

There you have it. Hopefully, the truth shall set him free...

CalTrout Goes All Kickstarter

A few of the slacker/trout bum types video folks at CalTrout are launching a Kickstarter campaign to finance a film about California's state fish -- the Golden Trout.

For the record, at least several of the names listed on the team roster harbor borderline pyschotic personalities, so I think it's in everyone's best interest to pony up for the Kickstarter fund, thereby removing those individuals from society for a minimum of several weeks.

(Once again, the Underground's uniquely insightful take on everyday events makes your life better. Please tip accordingly.)



Liquid Gold Film from Keith Brauneis on Vimeo.

More CalTrout: This Time They're Giving Away An Abel Reel

CalTrout's launching a photo contest, which should interest you because I'm not allowed to enter, and this despite the simple fact I'd win all the prizes if I was. This leaves the door open for you lesser visually oriented mortals.

Grand Prize is a CalTrout-branded Abel fly reel ($625), and nine others will receive Patagonia clothing, so unlike all the social media sites that are making our tech overlords rich while returning nothing to us, this time you might actually get something.

In other words, if you're handy with a camera, it's worth a shot.

Click here for more info.

More Fun Facts! Steelhead Are Just Rainbow Trout... And They're Invasive Pests!

America's class wars are ramping up in a way not seen since the Great Depression, so while it's tempting to set this story neatly in a "Bazillionaire Tech Overlord vs the People's Fish," it's probably best to view it as a simple case of a self-centered guy's willingness to transform one piece of information into an entire, wildly off-center reality.

Let me set the scene; a tech bazillionaire wants to hold a multi-million dollar fantasy wedding in California's Redwood forest. The Coastal Commission -- already at war with the hotel acting as the host of the wedding -- fears damage has been done to its Redwood forest, and negotiations ensue.

Fines are paid, and the wedding moves forward. Unfortunately for the happy couple, the husband is Sean Parker, who invented Napster and became ungodly rich on tech companies (he was the president of Facebook for a while).

In other words, he's rich, so in the eyes of the media, his wedding became a symbol of Silicon Valley excess. I didn't read the original coverage of his wedding (why the hell would I), but Parker pushed back at the media with a several-thousand word essay, essentially castigating the media and online world for not being very nice to him.

At one point, he noted that almost no one who wrote about the event had bothered to do the barest amount of research, including contacting him for comment.

His point would have more impact if Parker hadn't turned around and done almost exactly the same thing himself. Witness his fact-defying dive into the "pest" nature of California's Steelhead:

Then there was this question of a certain fish, the “steelhead trout,” that was purportedly threatened by our wedding preparation. The media reported that this fish was an “endangered” species whose spawning ground was a creek near our wedding site. Yet a simple Google query of “steelhead trout” reveals that this fish is not, as the media had reported, a truly “endangered” species, but rather a fancy variant of the common “rainbow trout” that is abundant across North America — so abundant, in fact, that it is sometimes considered a pest species. (The steelhead, like salmon, travels upstream and spends its life in the ocean. This variant of the rainbow trout has seen its populations fall in some areas of California where it is protected, but it’s hardly the endangered species the press made it out to be. In fact, the National Wildlife Federation reports that rainbow trout is “not at risk of extinction.”)

The California Coastal Commission’s own publicly available report on the matter refers to a stream, called the Post Creek, that apparently runs through the property, although they were noncommittal about whether or not the trout was actually present in the stream, or even if the stream contained enough water for the trout to spawn. There was a chance, the report stated, that our construction “could” have led to sedimentation of this stream, which in turn “could” have prevented fish from getting on with their business. In the days leading up to the wedding, multiple biologists visited the site and their reports confirmed “no increased turbidity” in the stream, meaning no “sedimentation” had occurred. Even more ridiculous, the part of the creek where these fish, if they existed in the creek at all, would have been spawning, was not on the part of the property where the wedding construction had taken place.

Wow. A "simple" Google query reveals what literally hundreds of actual scientists were simply too clueless to figure out: steelhead and rainbow trout are exactly the same, and rainbow trout are actually invasive pests, so what's the fuss?

It would be easy to beat up Parker for being a spoiled, entitled Masters of the Universe kind of guy (apparently that was the focus of much of the media coverage).

Still, I defer to uber-thinker Nicholas Carr, who is much smarter than I am (and probably nicer too), who in a typically thoughtful post notes that this is a "...perfect example of the dangers of constructing one's worldview from snippets of factual material googled out of the web."

(I digress: If you're interested in the effects of the modern digital age on your brain and the society you live in -- and you don't read the Pulitzer-nominated Nicholas Carr -- then you're blowing it. Plus, he's a fly fisherman.)

A lot of people -- who haven't made literally a billion dollars doing very little -- are working hard to protect and restore California's fading steelhead populations. Maybe Parker could throw a spare million or two at CalTrout. Consider it a sin tax for doing something stupid online.

See you on the river, Tom Chandler.