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…

The cold spring meant the wildflowers were firing on all cylinders (they should have been done a month ago), and everything that wasn’t a flower wore the hard-working green of summer leaves.

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(click the images to see full-size versions)

Older Bro and I hiked into this tiny alpine meadow stream based on his recommendation; “You’ll love it, though don’t get too excited about the size of the fish.”

I knew exactly what he meant.

And frankly, I was proud of him. He’s a relatively new fly fisherman, but aside from the casting and the knots and drag-free drifts, he’s already mastered the art of couching his recommendations in case the weather’s bad or the trout are sulking or the other guy’s a headhunter.

I’ll be blunt; I think a lot more people say they love these little streams than actually fishes them; they’re pretty, but for a lot of fly fishermen, fish that seem to top out at 9 inches (we got one 13″ and one 10″ fish on this trip) add a little glitter to that other, bigger water.

Still, we hiked the length of the meadow and fished our way back up, and before we even strung up our fly rods my heart rate was picking up.

I even tried a couple of the standard gambits on him (“Didn’t you notice the special reg poster at the ranger station? This stretch is bamboo fly rods only…”).

Sadly, he didn’t fall for any of them, but then, he’d probably been disappointed if I didn’t try.

I admit I was disappointed by the state of my lower body after we got back to the car; if we went farther than six miles I’ll eat my government surplus Boonie hat, yet I felt like I’d been crossed the continental divide, and with a heavy pack.

The late, great Jim Gade once told me that the way to avoid geezerhood was to not start thinking like you were an old man. “Once you start thinking you’re a geezer, you’ll start feeling like one.”

Tomorrow — if I can drive a stake through a couple projects — I’m going for a walk.

The Fishing Details

I fished a (probably) 60 year-old Phillipson Peerless 8′ 5wt, and I was reminded that although the rod wasn’t necessarily designed to cast a leader, the mass of the bamboo in the tip does tend to load the rod when there isn’t enough line to do so.

And if you’ve worked your way through the pictures, you can imagine how rarely we cast more than a foot or two of line.

As you might imagine, fly selection wasn’t exactly critical, though given the sheer tonnage of grass and insect life living around the stream, I wasn’t surprised when the Arizona Mini-Hopper worked slightly better (OK, it’s hard to know for sure) than anything else I tried.

After all, it’s as much a beetle or caddis as it is a hopper, which seems like a pretty ideal combination for a stream so often visited by terrestrial bugs.

See you somewhere green and wavy and Brookie-filled and beautiful, Tom Chandler.

Fly fishing a small brook trout stream

Today is launch day for a client website, so instead of writing about the weekend’s fly fishing trip, I’m throwing a teaser photo at my readers. Tomorrow we’ll get to the real thing.

I already detailed my Olympic-quality belly flop and the Wonderdog’s Assault on Burger King, and since this isn’t a big fishing report (it wasn’t a big fishing trip), I’ll simply upload a couple pictures and a few thoughts:

Wally the Wonderdog standing in my trout water

The Wondermistake

I bundled the Wonderdog and brought him along (it’s almost impossible to leave him home), but I shouldn’t have.

This little stream runs through some fairly Wonderdog-unfriendly terrain, and in fact, I fell while trying to find a Wonderdog-friendly route around a logjam.

Worse yet, the temperatures hovered around 90 degrees, and the all-black Wonderdog collects BTUs like the Republican Party collects presidential candidates, so more than once — having crawled up to a small pool on my hands and knees so as not to frighten the trout — I’d see Wally the Wonderdog swim right into the middle of it in an attempt to cool off.

I don’t necessarily measure the success or failure of a fishing trip in the numbers of fish caught, but I will cop to at least wanting to have a chance.

The Fly Rod

One thing I can say with some assurance; the Orvis Superfine Touch 8′ 4wt fly rod I’ve been testing is tough.

In the fall, it took almost as much of a beating as I did; I fully expected to end the day with a 5pc fly rod.

Instead, it’s still in four pieces.

Without getting all gushy and unmanly about it, I will say the Superfine Touch is a better small stream rod than I initially wanted to give it credit for.

More coming soon in the review.

The People

After I’d thoroughly mashed my left side, I was headed upcanyon, where I’d gain the road and hike back to the truck. I was bypassing the marginal water and only fishing the bigger pools — a form of pain-induced cherrypicking — when I stumbled out of the brush and into my favorite water on the whole creek.

And ran smack into a topless woman.

Well, not literally into her, but she and her boyfriend were enjoying the cold water, and basically, they were being all Euro and calm about nudity and I’m basically all Upstate New York about it, so it was an interesting few minutes trying to get Wally and their dog to stop sniffing each other and to get the hell up the creek without (dear god no) looking.

I think she was more amused than I was embarrassed (which frankly sums up a lot of my interactions with women over the years).

Tight fly fishing, but a pretty small stream...

No fly fishing trip ever occurs without a few notable moments, but I remain astonished how much weirdness the Wonderdog and I can cram into a short, two-hour fly fishing sprint.

See you at the medicine cabinet, Tom Chandler.