Backcountry

The First Small Stream Fly Fishing Trip Of The Brand-New Season

May 3, 2013, by Tom Chandler 20 comments

The snowpack up here is so bad, Older Bro and I took the direct route into our normally-unreachable-until-June alpine stream.

Hard to see, but I’m hooked up to the biggest brown trout of the day.

On the way in, the Official Beater Fishing Vehicle of the Trout Underground (a 200,000 mile 1990 Ford Bronco that has seen most of California’s dirt roads and looks like it) got stuck in a snow drift, but we managed to dig it out, back it out, and then dig our way through the drift.

Ultimately, we got within a mile of the stream before the drifts acquired that “You think you’ll make it, but you’ll end up walking back to cell phone coverage” look.

I’ve seen that look. I know that look.

We stopped there.

When we got out of the truck, one thing struck us.

It didn’t look like spring. The snowfall has been so dismal in California that even the alpine landscape looked dried and dusty, like it was already summer.

If you’re a fan of wildfires this would be a good thing, but if your tastes run to fly fishing small streams — which are dependent on snowpack for much of their summer flow — you might be less thrilled.

The Fishing Part

We were there to fish, so we suited up, hiked in, and arrived at a stream that was in absolutely perfect shape. We even spooked a couple trout at the first pool.

Unfortunately, we spooked them from the bottoms of the runs, which means (you guessed it) our dry flies remained largely untouched for the first 45 minutes.

Apparently, just because we blew into this stream in spring is no reason for the trout to eat dries like it was summer.

They’ve got a lot of nerve.

Eventually, we hooked a few on the [cough]nymphs[cough] hanging eight inches behind our dry flies, and about 2:30 it warmed enough to get a few bugs flying, which got the trout interested in our dry flies.

It wasn’t a wide-open bite (I ended the day with five, Older Bro one or two less), but I thought I was the first to fish this stream this year.

Until I saw the footprints on the sandbar.

We saw tire tracks on the road, but didn’t figure them for a fly fisherman. Still, the season opened on Saturday and we showed up on Sunday, so it’s possible someone got in ahead of us.

On the way out, we learned the sad truth.

Not only had we beaten to the punch (now I’m consoled by the idea I was the first to fish at least some of those runs), but we’d been beaten by someone who was eating brown trout — alongside the road we found a gutted, cleaned brown trout which had likely slipped off a stringer.

Dang. Beaten by a fish killer.

The Gear

First, I wanted to take pictures of this trip so badly that I made absolutely sure the camera battery was fully charged.

Which is why I left both the camera and battery sitting on top of the charger. Not my finest moment, and it’s why the Undergrounders are viewing this trip through the lens of Older Bro’s smartphone.

Sorry.

I continued my test of an Orvis Helios 2 8’4″ 2wt, while the backcountry stream-loving Older Bro fished his Orvis Superfine 8’6″ 3wt. The Helios 2 is an impressive (and expensive) fly rod (it weighs nothing), but in a blow for thrifty people everywhere, we both found ourselves preferring the less-expensive Superfine.

The Superfine Touch bends a little deeper and tapers a little slower than the Helios 2, which admittedly offers a light tip and good close-in performance. It’s just a little faster than it needs to be for a small stream. Certainly, it’s not too fast for something bigger, which is where I hear some are fishing it.

This is why I dislike writing rod reviews; I could tell you I prefer the Superfine series but can’t break it down into anything approaching a pie chart, which means we’re straying awfully close to “because I said so” ground.

In the end, I can only speak to what I like, and anyone with $775 is free to disagree.

See you on a small stream, Tom Chandler.

Wolverines! (or, Fly Fishing The Opener)

April 28, 2013, by Tom Chandler 4 comments

“Wolverines!”

We drove, we dug, we got stuck, we dug more, we hiked, we fished.

Several brown trout were caught. Much celebrating was done. Report coming soon.

Hope Dies Hard On A Fishing Trip…

May 14, 2012, by Tom Chandler 11 comments

No matter how much we stared at them, the snow drifts covering the road refused to melt.

I wasn’t really surprised; in this part of the world, the snow level is currently around 5500 feet. But you know, this road and this pass were going to be different. Then we rolled around the corner just past 5400′ and the dream of being the first into a small alpine stream died.

The moment hope died...

Every time this happens I go through the usual stages; denial, anger, bargaining, depression over the lack of realtime satellite intel and finally, acceptance.

Usually, I don’t reach acceptance quickly. For a minute, I knew — despite the old tires — the Bronco could blow through the drifts, but even my fevered brain couldn’t ignore another set of *deeper* drifts waiting up ahead, and many more after that.

I pointed at the medium-sized streams of water running down the road and said “two weeks” and Older Bro nodded, though we both know it’s still just an attempt at grownup behavior.

That’s still too early to expect to make it into this stream, even given the light snow year.

Fortunately, our backup stream fished beautifully, and:

We caught pretty brown trout on dry flies
We tested a new fly rod against an old favorite (and arrived at opposite conclusions)
I firmed up a wader review (coming soon)
The “new” water I first fished last trip fished nicely again

Unfortunately, because were a little reluctant to walk away from catchable fish, we got to our Highly Experimental Stretch Of A Creek That Should Fish Great But Hasn’t a little late. This is the water that we’ve now fished (admittedly briefly) three times, yet despite looking absolutely perfect, it has yet to give up a single fish.

Or even a take.

We’ve crafted a whole series of worthwhile excuses for it — and I’ll be back again sometime soon — but after a while, you start to wonder about the nature of reality.

If a damned trout would just eat a dry fly, the universe would snap right back into its proper place.

Until then, everything feels just a tiny bit out of true, and I suspect it will remain so until I go back and invest a couple hours in the place, figuring it out or writing it off.

More to come as I get things written for my clients, Tom Chandler.

Fly Fishing As An Intelligence Gathering Exercise

February 23, 2012, by Tom Chandler 10 comments

“I love Google Earth. It saves us during the winter.” (Older Bro, Blueliner)

At the L&T’s recent birthday party (39, and leave it at that), I found myself talking to an avid hiker — one of those people who wander all over the backcountry, but don’t think to bring along a fly rod.

Sure, I don’t understand people like that, but they’re a great source of information, so when he spoke knowingly about a nearby trail that happened to cross a stream, I leaned in and casually asked about an upstream section of that stream — a stretch that might just contain a few trout.

“Oh sure,” he said. “I know the place. You can hike there, or you can drive a 4-wheel drive road to [redacted] and walk over the ridge.”

At moments like that, I try to act casual, and he was only confirming what I’d already guessed, but the urge remained: I wanted to celebrate like I just scored a World Cup goal.

Which isn’t the best course of action for overweight, balding guys.

The small stream fly fisher as intelligence operative

Older Bro found this stretch of stream last winter...

Every legitimate blueliner has an intelligence-gathering persona — the side of his personality that perks up whenever backcountry streams or lakes are mentioned.

At that moment, you become a sort of hybrid James Bond/potted plant, hoping someone will voluntarily part with a useful piece of intel, which you’ll happily soak up.

If they don’t, you’re willing to employ your James Bond-esque charm and brazenly ask. (What, you thought I was going to pull a gun?)

Just as in real intelligence work, you’re often evaluating the oddly shaped white spaces around the information as much as the information itself. And the best you can usually do is create a loose theory about what’s waiting (though in this case, getting it wrong usually just means the waste of a day).

It’s like assembling a big jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing, and the best operations are those where you get in, get the information you need, and get out without raising any suspicions (at the party, I found out about the stream’s headwaters, but never uttered the word “trout”).

The High Tech Blueliner

Of course, today’s bluelining spook enjoys access to powerful intelligence gathering technology — including satellite imaging, which isn’t the silver bullet it might seem.

Google Earth doesn’t resolve enough to tell me what a stream actually looks like, but with a little work, it can tell me where a certain Forest Service road comes to within a mile of an otherwise inaccessible stretch of stream, and if that doesn’t make your fly fishing pulse quicken just a bit, then you probably don’t have one.

Especially if that stream fishes pretty well in the parts you can reach.

In the same vein, I’ve been meaning to try one local stream for a couple years, but until I poked around on the satellite images, I didn’t know a logging road approached it from the opposite side of the ridge.

Oy.

The Tech Trap

Technology has its downsides; an Undergrounder once wrote to tell me pictures posted directly from your cell phone sometimes contain GPS data in the metadata.

I haven’t checked that out, but it remains a useful warning about the proliferation of social media, which actually encourages you to give up more than you realize.

You wouldn’t want to reveal the location of your favorite small stream by posting an update to social media that pinpoints your location using the GPS on your smartphone.

It’s either a warning to turn off your phone’s GPS, or simply a lesson in the dangers of social media.

Either way, if you don’t go overboard, technology offers you access to yet another piece of the puzzle, which is what Older Bro and I are assembling right now.

Planning highly speculative trips in the dead of winter is the best antidote there is for not going fishing, and we’ve got four post-opening-day trips in the hopper.

Only one potentially involves trout bigger than 12 inches, but then, Lewis and Clark didn’t wander all over the west because they were looking for a Boone & Crockett elk.

Turning a few small scraps of information into a pool of flowing water filled with colorful trout — one that may not have been fished in decades — is what blueliners are really looking for, so if you see a middle-aged guy doing what soccer players do when they score goals, well, don’t ask.

I mean seriously, don’t ask. I won’t tell.

Let’s Be Careful Out There: The Lyme Disease Risk Map

February 15, 2012, by Tom Chandler 10 comments

You contract Lyme disease from ticks, and it’s a nasty little disease — something fly fishermen should watch for when they’re not too drunk to notice.

A group Yale researchers ran a multi-year study to find the high risk areas in the eastern United States:

See you going tick, tick, tick…. Tom Chandler.

(Hat tip to Chile Underground).

Guess Fall Is Over

November 6, 2011, by Tom Chandler 6 comments

It’s a week before the general trout season closer here in California, but I’d guess my backcountry streams (note the “my”) are already out of reach until next year.

A couple inches here means closed roads higher up...

I was planning to stage a last-minute alpine commando raid sometime this week, but with a new garage door to install and a couple of teaching gigs on the calendar, a last trip to the high country was probably an illusion anyway.

One stream will remain accessible and I probably will hit that before closing day, though without a lot of hope; this stream originates in some mountains, where all this snowfall is accumulating.

With a couple warmer days ahead, a lot of that snow will melt and dump into the stream, and it’s not the higher flows that necessarily get you, it’s the sudden drop in water temperature (to just above freezing).

In fact, I might have just talked myself out of it.

Especially with the BWOs apparently underway on the bigger rivers.

See how confusing fall is for us outdoorsman types?

On Saturday we held Little M’s third birthday party at the house, and rather than watch Wally the Wonderdog steal a metric ton of birthday cake off the kid’s plates on the low tables (I’ve seen it before, and it’s not pretty), I took him for a walk in the snowstorm.

There might be only one or two things better than hiking through the woods during a snowstorm, and it occurred to me that this is probably why I’ve developed an itch to go squirrel hunting in the fall.

Not for the squirrels (which I hear are pretty tasty), but as an excuse to throw a .22 over my shoulder and wander around in the woods for a couple hours with the Wonderdog.

It’s similar to my reasons for fly fishing for smallish trout in remote places; it’s gorgeous, it’s contemplative, and for all you know you’re the last person on the planet.

Fish and game might even be optional.

See you on the river, Tom Chandler.

How To Be Thin & Happy (All You Have To Do Is Fish Every Day)

November 1, 2011, by Tom Chandler 12 comments

The half life of a fishing report is probably only a couple days, so rather than ramble on about the last three fishing trips I didn’t have time to write about, I’ll make an observation.

When I’m at the tail end of hike into the backcountry or heading home after a day spent laboring up and down the boulders and bluffs of a remote stream, the same thought occurs.

If I did this every day of the week, I’d be one thin, healthy, grinning, stress-free son of a bitch.

Why do we find ourselves in places like this?

Life intrudes on that vision almost the second it occurs; mortgages, kids and clients are never all that far from the front of my mind.

And lacking a winning lottery ticket (I don’t buy them, so my odds of winning are only marginally less than those who do), I won’t be fishing five times a week anytime soon.

And despite the weight loss, fishing every day would probably become a chore.

My fishing horizon has shortened dramatically the last couple years, and I think that’s why I’ve been on a backcountry/small stream kick.

At the end of the day, immersing myself in something wild (which means largely devoid of other people) feels pure — like I engineered a clean getaway instead of a trip to the grocery store.

A mountain rainbow trout (colors turned up because it's beautiful)

That’s hardly the whole picture, but then, there isn’t a “whole” picture. Which is why the “why I fly fish” essays never seem to work; most of us aren’t really clear about why we fly fish.

I know I’m not.

In fact, it’s a damned mystery.

We trot out all the usual poetic mechanisms (solitude, escape, nature, challenge, drunkenness, rebirth, etc), but in the end, we do it for the same reasons we eat certain foods and drink wine and hang around with certain people.

Because we like it and we don’t break any laws doing it.

What else is there?

See you on the river, Tom Chandler.

Small stream

Look What I Found

October 16, 2011, by Tom Chandler 10 comments

I’m amazed by the things I find on streams I thought I knew.

Fly Fishing The Small Stream In Fall (or, It’s Not Over Yet…)

October 14, 2011, by Tom Chandler 8 comments

It seems I only have so many words in me, and this week, they’ve all been wasted invested in client work.

That means I’m two fishing reports behind, and while it’s better that way instead of the opposite, the smart blogger might just invoke blogging bankruptcy, where I declare all writing debts void and move on with a fresh slate.

But I’m not (so much for native intelligence).

Last one of these until next year? Probably not

The Small Stream In Fall

Small stream fly fishing in the fall is not the same game it is in the summer; normally predictable streams can turn deeply mysterious, and last Sunday I didn’t get a single grab on Stream X until 1:15 — after which it fished beautifully.

(I don’t know who throws that switch or where, but I’d like to see if I can get a schedule.)

I’ve taken a couple of fall trips where I couldn’t even intentionally spook a trout — and that on a stream where simply raising a fly rod would normally send trout scattering to every corner of the pool.

The good news is that I only played the fool for half of last Sunday, though the afternoon swagger was tempered by the realization that even though I was catching nice brown trout from a small stream, I regularly flushed much bigger brown trout when I hooked the “good” ones.

For that matter, the whole “small stream guru” conceit I sometimes experience on the stream is typically the victim of episodes like this:

I threw a cast directly into a clump of overhanging weeds, then yanked the fly out of the grass and into an overhanging tree, pulled it down into the water — where the current wrapped the fly line on a half-submereged branch — before I tidied it all up and then thew the next cast directly into the same clump of weeds.

I’m never sure if I’m the only guy who does that stuff or I’m the only one foolish enough to write about it, but either way, it puts all that “Death From Above” posturing right to sleep.Â Which — for a guy with a “highly directive” three year-old daughter — is probably a good thing (though probably unnecessary).

Pretty, but a little too shallow to hold bigger trout.

It’s still early enough in the fall that each trip doesn’t have to be the last, but it’s possible I won’t make it back to Stream X before enough snow flies to make the dirt roads impassable.

You can take intellectual shelter in the whole cycle of life thing, or — like me — you can reason there are plenty of grass clumps to cast into on the Upper Sacramento, which is open all winter.

See you fishing, Tom Chandler.

This Small Stream Adventure Brought To You By Powerful Anti-Inflammatory Drugs…

September 18, 2011, by Tom Chandler 11 comments

Stay tuned for a small stream adventure, brought to you courtesy of Ibuprofen (the Underground needs a sponsor, and it might as well be someone whose product I use every time I go fly fishing…)