The Big Wood River forms near Galena Summit and flows down the canyon, through Sun Valley, Ketchum and Hailey and out onto flatter ground. A freestone stream, it's not as wild or prehistoric as the Upper Sacramento, but instead offers a stately cobbled bottom that's uniformly green with life. There's little doubt that it's a bug factory.
I fished the river between the towns of Ketchum and Hailey, where residential development along its banks is rampant. The locals are trying to maintain fishing easements and preventing damage from occurring, but the river seems - in many places - to have been channelized and sterilized just a bit. For example, very little of the downed timber that gave the Big Wood its name remains in the river (removed by homeowners).
This is the Big Wood not far from its headwaters, near the very cold, 9,000' Galena Summit. Note the multiple layers of ice - a skin on top, and ice coatings on every rock below the surface. Here, the river is still liquid, but just barely. If I get back here in the summer, I'll check to see if this section holds trout. A groomed xc-ski trail runs along the river for many miles, and the Lovely & Talented Nancy and I skate skied ten miles of it. Drop dead gorgeous.
Through Ketchum, the altitude is closer to 6,000' and temperatures are often in the single digits. Ice shelves like this are common along the river edge. It can make for dicey footing.
Snow banks up to five feet deep made access difficult, and I think a lot of the river wasn't getting fished simply because there was no place to park a car. I got dropped off and walked a lot to find good water, though I did suffer the curse of the non-local; I fished and hiked past a lot of so-so water before finding the deeper, quieter runs that held trout in the winter.
With daytime temperatures often below freezing (it was 16 degrees the second day I fished), icy guides and frozen reels are common. This was taken a few seconds after I lost a good fish on day two; moisture from the line (or water splashing on the reel when wading) often turned the reel into a block of ice. While playing good fish off the reel is second nature to me, I learned pretty quickly to play everything by hand, and to hope that the guides didn't ice overmuch. When the temperature fell below the mid-20s, clearning ice from the guides was a constant problem.
Animal tracks were perfectly preserved by the cold snow and freezing temperatures.
I forgot my camera the first day I fished, and only took one fish picture the second day before I got too cold and walked home. This was a nice Big Wood rainbow, and I only got one frame off before my frozen, shaking hands dropped my water resistant digital camera in the river. At that point - with temperatures hovering in the mid-teens - I decided it was time to walk home under the rising moon.
