At least Stream Y had only been denuded of its greenery; Singlebarbed’s now-famous “Little Stinkin’” river has been stripped of its water(courtesy an irrigation district), and yesterday he visited it again in the hopes of finding a little wet stuff in the streambed.

What he found instead would make any fishermen throw back his head and howl at the moon:

Dead and desiccated beaver were scattered near their burrows. While agile underwater they’re clumsy prey on dry land, easy pickings for coyotes or someone’s Rottweiler.

The pelts were too far gone for my road kill honed reflexes, and I left them for the buzzards.

Even the deep stretches were dry, at best with a bit of dampened mud at the bottom. No fish carcasses were evident but they would’ve been picked clean and skeletal.

It’s a complete wipe. Bugs dead, fish dead, and the wildlife in the area foraging for water as best they can. I found a couple muddy traces that had an inch of water remaining, and the volume of animal tracks nearby were moot testimony to the deer, coyotes, and birds having to make do.

It’s a riveting post, thought not a manifestly happy one. It’s tempting to shrug it off as an isolated incident, but it’s not.

In fact, it’s potentially more a model of California’s water future than elegant-yet-ugly essay.

With Big Ag drumming up support on the back of a string of lies about unemployment, what’s causing that unemployment, and the negligible effects of a short-term halt in pumping from the Delta, it appears that California’s prevailing sentiment about water has swung toward the “dry ‘em up” side of the pendelum.

California – one of the most hyrdologically altered landscapes on the planet – is now in the grip of a drought, but it’s also witness to a war being waged for the stuff that runs in its veins.

While the media largely buys the spin offered up by those profiting from the taxpayer’s largess, the California Delta’s ecology remains in free fall, and politicos seemingly can’t hand out the corporate welfare checks fast enough.

Now – with new water “storage” and “conveyances” planned (at taxpayer expense), and a growing sense that any trickle of water that makes it to the ocean is wasted – we’re witness to what may be the last call for any sizable populations of salmon & steelhead in this state.

It’s grim and getting grimmer, and because he sums it up better than I can, I’ll let Singlebarbed wrap it up for us:

Something stinks, and it’s not the corpse of my creek. She smells of hot rock and a few posies … all that remains.

As Singlebarbed (the Underground’s brownlining equivalent) points out in his latest post, maybe it’s time someone spoke out for those waters considered too far gone by most to warrant a word:

Take a water district operating with complete autonomy; no CalTrout, no Trout Unlimited, no passionate enviro-lobby, as there’s little glamour in little brown rivulets, couple that with a week long promise of heavy rain, and you get Scarface and more like him as progeny.

140 CFS is the normal flow, yet for 12 hours during the storm the dam release was 14000 CFS – enough to take the face off what few fish could hide, and blew the rest of the fish into the Delta accompanied by Dodge Escorts and rusty shopping carts.

Scarred by massive flows? Singlebarbed thinks so.

I’m wandering an empty creek, barren of Bass – and what few fish remain show scrapes, scratches, and assorted wounds compliments of the “Zero Sum” water policy on the lake above.

You’re tired of hearing it, and I’m tired of saying it, “.. rather than spend those precious dollars on restoring the pristine, which we quickly despoil, perhaps we should be focused on restoring the balance of Nature.”

In each of the last two years the release from the lake coincided with the wettest storm, suggesting the water district management blew open the gates in response to what runoff was anticipated. Swelling any river 100 times its normal size in an instant makes a killing machine; it destroys the insect population, kills or removes all the fish, and probably wipes a goodly portion of indigenous reptiles, amphibians, and anything else that calls the streambed home.

Both years would have scrubbed the creek at the height of the salmon spawn.

Beavers are great swimmers, but not when the river is a torrent. Likely it kills most in their burrow – and those that make it into the water are battered into pieces. At right is one of three dead beaver encountered at the high water mark. A little far-gone to determine cause of death, but it’s possibly additional evidence of an abusive water policy.

If fly fishing really is experiencing a “fish where you are, not where you aren’t” movement, then maybe there really will exist the political will to make some of the simple water management changes. Then again, maybe not.

See you at Browline Unlimited’s Fundraiser, Tom Chandler.

A new scientific study led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reaches a powerful conclusion about the climate change caused by future increases of carbon dioxide: to a large extent, there’s no going back.

The pioneering study, led by NOAA senior scientist Susan Solomon, shows how changes in surface temperature, rainfall, and sea level are largely irreversible for more than 1,000 years after carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are completely stopped. The findings appear during the week of January 26 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Our study convinced us that current choices regarding carbon dioxide emissions will have legacies that will irreversibly change the planet,” said Solomon, who is based at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo.

“It has long been known that some of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activities stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years,” Solomon said. “But the new study advances the understanding of how this affects the climate system.”

While the Underground isn’t all about gloom and doom, we do have to wonder what fly fishing’s going to look like in 50 years – will brownliners Singlebarbed.com and Roughfisher.com become the “old guy” tweed sites?

And if that’s true, could the end of civilization be far behind?

See you in the desert, Tom Chandler.

There’s no online link, so if you want to see how Singlebarbed looks in print (a little grayer, actually), you’ll have to buy the magazine.

Brownlining becoming mainstream? When it starts showing up in destination mags, you gotta think so.

See you trying to become all hip and brownliney trendy, Tom Chandler.

brownlining, singlebarbed, california fly fisher

Often imitating food sources little seen in fly fishing, the new wave of brownliners are tying flies more reminiscent of saltwater patterns than those used on trout streams, and in truth, the growth in “brownline patterns” mirrors the not-so-long-ago explosion in saltwater fly patterns.

Carol’s Grass Carp Fly (courtesy Roughfisher)

The Boa Crayfish (courtesy Singlebarbed)

Singlebarbed’s Death Clam (courtesy Singlebarbed)

As a truly lazy fly tyer, I’m content to whip out a few Beetle Bugs and Hares Ears and call it a day, so I’m constantly amazed at the lengths to which inveterate materials hound Singlebarbed pursues new fly tying materials.

It’s either a sign of rampant creativity or a serious pathology, and since the guy shrugs off heavy metals and advanced bio-toxins over the course of the average fishing day, it’s probably best if I assume the former.

Of course, it’s Fly Fishing Industry Week here at the Underground, so we have to ask; now that brownlining’s picking up steam, will the industry respond?

Will the latest carp flies suddenly become centerpieces in the Umpqua catalog?

Will freshwater-tapered 7wt “carp rods” sprout at rod racks nationwide?

Can the feature-length “Carp X” be far behind?

The Underground doesn’t know. But I’ll keep my eyes peeled for signs of Brownline life at FFR.

brownlining, brownliner, carp, flies, fly pattern, fly tying

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Chicks dig it, and after all — nothing’s real in America until it has its own hat, which brownliners now have courtesy Singlebarbed.

It’s resistant to toxic waste, so a handful of sessions on the “river” won’t leave you with an eyeshade and a velcro strap.