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.

Trips like this generate enough hope to power a small city, though all that wattage rubs against the very real possibility of abject failure and disappointment, so you wouldn’t normally make a big public deal about it (like posting it on a blog or anything).

Still, we’re planning to confirm a couple places we have been, try a couple we haven’t, and also to fish some of our “normal” spots. (Hey, we know there are fish there, so why not?)

Because you’re fishing and looking instead of just fishing, you don’t catch as many fish on these trips as you could, but I see it as an investment; fewer trout now mean more places — and more trout — in the future.

And unlike your 401k, it’s an investment that’s probably on solid ground.

Since I’m posting this late on a Friday afternoon on Pacific Standard Time (thereby ensuring it’ll be read by upwards of three people), I’ll stop here, except to note that looking for new fish and new water in your own neighborhood offers the best of all worlds.

You’re dealing with few exotic diseases and a minimal carbon footprint, yet unlike that spot halfway around the world, there’s a chance you’ll make it back next weekend.

See you on the map, Tom Chandler.

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.

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

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.

The last two days have found me working hard, stacking next year’s trout water (in the form of snow) in neat piles alongside the driveway, keeping it away from filthy things like dirt and grease until it finds it way into a trout stream near you.

I know.

At the Underground, the giving never stops.

Today's experimental snow picture...

And those nice, neat piles? They’re growing rapidly. Yesterday the Underground/Man Cave World Headquarters — located above the alpine town of Mt. Shasta — got ten inches of snow; last night was another 3″, and today’s it’s going gangbusters, and a foot is likely.

In fact, I’ll be out there again with Mr. Snowblower as soon as this is posted.

(In a reminder that I need new friends, Raine accused me of not putting fuel stabilizer in the gas tank of the Honda snowblower after it took three pulls to get it started.)

With lesser amounts of snow predicted to fall through the weekend, it’s clear the high-pressure system keeping California snow-free is gone. Whether we reach our “normal” snowpack after one of the slowest starts to winter in recorded history remains to be seen.

At least we’ll have some water to throw at next year’s trout, and while I’m probably happier when I don’t face an hour or two of snowblowing duty per day, I will say this about the snow: It’s About Goddamned Freakin’ Time

The Media Thing

If you haven’t stumbled across the Underground’s Catch Magazine discussion — where one of the ezines announced a $12 annual subscription fee, and readers and content creators reacted — then stop by.

I’m amazed by the depth of the comments, which are covering a lot of ground, both philosophically and practically.

The world is changing, and while pundits are fond of throwing around terms like “disruptive technologies” and all, it’s far from an abstract concept if you’re a writer or photographer or other person whose professional life has been upended.

And given the pace of the change (ebooks now represent more than 20% of the book market, tablet PC sales are going through the roof, everything “streams”, etc.), things aren’t slowing down. In fact, the change is probably only beginning.

Where It All Relates To Fly Fishing

Maybe all this change explains my recent small stream fly fishing kick. Extremely high-modulus marketing jargon, prohibitively expensive foreign lodges, and two-handed fly rods are not needed to catch 8″ backcountry trout, which, it turns out, are largely immune to the latest trends.

On small streams, the tips printed in the musty books I read as a kid still work, the fish are still impossibly gorgeous, and the primal “me catch fish” jolt to the brain still fires, which is precisely why someone facing dramatic change in his professional and family lives would tend to find it all pretty comforting.

See you caretaking next year’s trout water, Tom Chandler

The now-standard Underground Trout Portrait (of the last small stream trout of the year/)

Yesterday’s trout were surprisingly willing to eat a dry, and the little guy above (about 8 inches) was the last of the handful I caught.

It’s a easy to get melancholy about the season closing on a set of trout streams not all that far from my home. The good news is I’ve got a bunch of small trout streams near my home, so if they disappear for 5.5 months, I still enjoy 6.5 months more access than most people.

See ya next year...

For now, I’m teaching more online marketing classes and then there are the clients who expect me to actually perform useful tasks for them before sending a check (the nerve).

Work is good (it’s what makes us miss fly fishing), yet I’d be happier with a little less of it, leaving me more time to write and fish.

I’m sure I’m unique in that lament.

See you in a couple days, Tom Chandler.

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.

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

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. 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.

Not big, but definitely unfished for.

Humanity’s pretty good at filling in the blank spaces (though we’re not all that good at doing so accurately), and I’ve heard people suggest the world was explored out decades ago (and that was before Google Earth).

From a great distance, it might seem that way, but on a personal level — and given a less-than-geologic time frame — big chunks of the world are still practically new.

It's not always about the trout

Last Sunday, when I finally fought my way past the cliffs and scree slopes and willow thickets that defined the upper bounds of my fishing experience on a little-fished small stream, I thought I’d find a smaller version of the parts I knew; smaller stream, smaller pools, smaller fish, smaller human footprint…

I was wrong about the fish, though I was right about the lack of humanity; outside of the jet contrails in the sky, I didn’t see any sign of a person during the four hours I fished my way upstream.

No boot prints. No garbage. No fire rings. No anything.

And really, there’s little reason I would.

The trout I caught were beautiful and wild and perhaps even pure-strain rainbows untouched by hatchery genes, but the one or two small trout I’d get at each plunge pool don’t justify the grind.

First time fooled by a fly?

Unless you award extra credit for trout that may not have seen a fly their entire lives.

Turns out I do.

The Discovery

Past the end of the known universe, the narrow gorge widened and the water flowed over a series of surprising bedrock benches, and the deeper pools glowed that emerald green that makes it difficult to look away.

The trout were pretty and unmarked and skittish as hell, so dicey stalking or casting left you fishless.

The Arizona mini-hopper

I kept waiting for the good-looking stuff to peter out, and it simply didn’t.

The bigger trout (one from each pool) were in the 6″-8″ range (one may have gone 10″), and they persisted right up until I reached a five-foot high waterfall.

I couldn’t see what was above the falls, remembered I was a half hour past my turnaround time, and that after an hour’s hike and four hours of fishing — most of it spent scrambling over refrigerator-sized rocks, up cliffs and through damned-near-impenetrable thickets — I was bushed.

When it comes to solo hikes through rough terrain, I’ve learned you don’t wear yourself out to the point your quads start making bad decisions for your head.

Besides, I couldn’t see around the falls, so I have no idea what lies there.

The end of the trip. (This trip)

Offering me the perfect excuse to go back.

See you someplace unusual, Tom Chandler.

Cell phone photos aren't my cup of tea apparently...

I’m heading upstream — to a part of a stream I’ve never fished. Lots of bouldering and bushwhacking so the fly rod is staying in its sock until I get to the new stuff.

Which means I’m walking past pretty stuff like this. Discovery hurts…