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 not as young as I used to be, and at times I get a little dismayed by the need for “Vitamin A” after a day spent rock-hopping.

Then again, when I was younger, I was less cagey about finding places like this, suggesting the aging process isn’t entirely negative.

Older Bro and I talked about it afterward (both of us tired and beat), and decided that fly fishermen simply aren’t interested in putting out this level of effort for tiny backcountry trout (we had a couple in the 9″-11″ class, and many smaller fish), so there was simply no need to publish the location.

You may applaud our thinking at will.

The Admission

I know I’m way, way behind on the writing/photo editing/posting gig; I still have unpublished photos (and the stirrings of a short essay) from my hike into an alpine lake with Craig Nielsen.

The Montana Road Trip 2010 should be good for a hefty wrap-up post, and then there’s the McCloud River Hydro Relicensing (now with the great taste of data) – plus a look into Siskiyou County’s ongoing attempts to stall dam removal on the Klamath, there by driving a stake through the heart of the salmon fishery.

Then there’s today’s Extended Rock Scramble.

I’ll get to it sometime soon. How could I call myself the first “MegaProTurboExtreme if I didn’t?

Until then, watch Older (OK, Elderly Bro) stalk and catch a trout:

Sneaking Up on 'em...

The little backhanded flip cast...

Affirmation!

See you at the keyboard, Tom Chandler.

Craig Nielsen and a tiny alpine brook trout lake

More about my bid to catch a Brookie in 2010 with Craig Nielsen as I regain the will to type.

See you in Brookie Heaven, Tom Chandler.

The water was pretty, the fish were willing, and the bugs intense.

The last described me pretty accurately, though I wasn’t completely aware of it until Curtis Knight of CalTrout asked me how often I was fly fishing the McCloud these days, and I realized the real answer was “hardly at all.”

The last couple seasons I’m more likely to hike into a small lake or stream, and while I’m sure years of psychoanalysis would uncover the root cause of my affliction (perhaps I had a bad experience with a big trout when I was a child), I’m actually pretty content to wallow in my neurosis – especially when it involves a lot of brown trout that seemingly can’t say no.

The more battered a humpy gets, the better it fishes.

Following hard on the heels of my semi-successful trip to Stream X, Elderly Underground Friend & Alert Reader Jim Troyer and I found ourselves exploring water I’d never fished before (let’s call it Stream Y).

It turns out that exploration is good.

Every run on this tiny stream held at least one eager brown trout (sometimes many eager brown trout).

In fact, the action started on the second cast, and never really let up.

Simply put, it was the kind of day you tell yourself you’ve earned via all those other ugly days, though you know deep inside that would only be true if you’d been attacked and killed by wild animals on all those other trips.

To say too much more is to gloat unnecessarily (the Underground doesn’t gloat, we report). And yes, if it makes you feel better, the mosquitoes were intense – to the point that multiple applications of insect repellent were needed (for godssakes don’t breathe the stuff), as were lots of coverups.

In fact, the slightly built Troyer was at several points in danger of being carried off by hordes of the vicious bloodsucking beasts.

You can know that mosquitoes are part and parcel of the backcountry in spring, but that doesn’t mean I have to like or even accept it (suggesting that stubbornness is a another lifelong “phase” for me).

More Brown Trout Body Parts

This time, I caught no Brook trout, though the vibrant paint jobs on the brown trout meant I wasn’t too disappointed:

A neon scaled banana? One of my brightest brownies.

Cars would still have fins if they looked this cool.

One of those darkly pigmented brown trout that looks like it lives in a cave.

More Fly Fishing Gear Stuff

The bottom line on the fishing? I fished my Diamondglass 8.5 4wt, while Troyer got along nicely with an older 8′ 3wt Redington.

As often happens on small streams, the fish weren’t selective to flies – until you tried something new. Then they’d stop eating, and you’d think they were selective until you compared notes with your buddy, who was fishing a fly pretty much the exact opposite of yours.

For the record, a dark caddis did a lot of damage, as did a Beetle Bug and humpies. The small stimulator didn’t fly. That’s really all I know.

I also test-flew the new Korkers wading boots, and there’s plenty more to be said about these interchangeable-sole critters.

More Fly Fishing Soon

It’s been an odd week, and yes, I even wasted a couple hours on a media gig that couldn’t have turned out much worse, but this weekend may find me wandering around the backcountry yet again, though I wouldn’t necessarily make book on Stream X or Stream Y.

Maybe I’ll do both. I hear the fishing’s pretty good.

See you on the couch streamside, Tom Chandler.

p.s. – No, I’m not telling. But it’s right at the end of this path:

Odds are you’ll bump into fewer fly fishermen, see more wild stuff, and – without anyone watching except the wildlife – get to stalk and cast (it better be accurately) at fish that may not have seen a fly this season.

On the flip, the trout are smaller, the mosquitoes more aggressive, hero-pic opportunities largely absent, the travel longer, the roads worse, and the odds of being stranded where no one will find you much, much higher.

Naturally, that adds to the romance.

That’s why – on a Friday where I could have headed almost anywhere – I found myself bouncing over a series of rutted, washed out roads, wondering if I was supposed to turn left two identical-looking dirt roads back.

I was taking miles off the life of my truck (and years off the functional life of my lower spine), and I wasn’t even sure I was headed in the right direction.

It’s in those moments that you can turn back – proving that you’re possessed of common sense – and go fish the water you know how to find.

Fortunately, I’m not over-afflicted with that common sense stuff.

The Small Stream Post (Sans Pictures)

Because I planned to take many, many photographs of my small alpine stream trip, I made a point of charging both camera batteries, and promptly left the whole mess sitting by the charger.

I’ve already mentioned that the Underground’s Pentax Optio W10 – the target of much abuse the last couple years – was suffering.

Actually, it’s dieing.

It’s no longer waterproof and the batteries – one of which used to offer plenty of juice for a long day on the river – now fail a couple hours in (necessitating the charge of the second battery, which isn’t part of the pre-trip routine).

So it got left at home.

Sorry kids.

One of the benefits of a screwup like this is that I now have a reason to go back and try again.

The Fishing

Though this particular stretch of water is a spring creek, it’s still subject to runoff. It was running clear but high when I arrived, nicely illustrating that idea that we expect things to always be the last way we saw them.

I’ve never fished this stream quite this early in the year, and now I know why.

Still, it goes on the pile of useful information we accumulate over time: Fish Stream Y in the spring, then Stream X in the summer.

It wasn’t great fly fishing, but I was skulking along a small, alpine meadow spring creek, and while the bite wasn’t great (on dries), I did manage to scrape up ten or so grabs, and landed six brown trout that oddly enough all fell into the 10″-11″ size.

One brown trout would feature the intense red spots that make the species so attractive, while the next was faded, and the next featured a metallic golden hue.

The variation is both intriguing and puzzling; are these the genetic remnants of different stockings (I don’t believe this creek is stocked any more)? Or just natural variation?

My ultimate “watch this” meadow stream cast and drift – the one I learned from watching local legend Joe Kimsey fish a small creek – didn’t work (shockingly).

It’s the one where you cast barely upstream of an undercut bank, and keep just enough tension on the line to bounce the fly off the individual blades of grass. (Note to Undergrounders: Always go fishing with tricky old guys, and always take notes.)

My bites came from the calmer, slower-moving ambush water in the middle of the runs – the kind of places usually holding smaller trout.

And as further proof of the perverse nature of fish and fly fishermen, I didn’t see a single bug on the water, but saw a bunch of ants on the banks.

Naturally, the ant patterns didn’t buy a single bite, yet the smaller attractor dries did. (Next time, I’ll fish a creek where everything makes sense.)

It’s Like Thunder, Like Lightning

After a couple hours spent covering a fair amount of water (my small-stream default when I’m by myself), I stopped to take stock.

It was raining (it had been raining on and off). It was dark and cloudy, and the fishing was getting harder instead of easier.

Time to try something else – a technique explained to me by another tricky angler – where you tie on a big, rubberlegs nymph and then dangle it right in front of the deeper undercut banks.

It’s a low percentage gig, but it can net you the biggest brown trout in the admittedly small creek.

Yet when I reached for the fly box, things suddenly got very bright, and then very loud.

My hand stopped.

A bolt of lightning had struck the ridge farther up the meadow, and given the time interval between the flash and the sound, it was less than two miles away.

It’s in those moments – when adrenaline enters your system as if some overbearing gland had turned on a fire hose of the stuff – that you’re acutely aware that you’re not a Master of the Universe (the default perspective for most of us), but more an expendable, temporary organic construct.

In other words, run.

The Great Egress

Thunderstorms had been rolling through the area for a couple days (a relatively rare occurrence up here). And once or twice, I’d heard the very far off rumble of thunder far to the north.

Still, I was in a small alpine valley with very high, very steep sides, and the storm kinda snuck up on me.

The danger was minimal, but somebody forgot to tell the reptilian part of my brain that fears loud noises, the dark, the rustling of things I can’t see in the woods, and sudden flaming death from the heavens.

Abandoning the attempt at a big fish wasn’t a hard decision, and yes, it’s possible I moved at slightly above my normal pace on the way back to the truck, which I was pretty damned careful not to overshoot.

On the way out – safely insulated by four rubber tires – it occurred to me the thunderstorm was impressive as hell, with big swirly, dramatic clouds and everything that went with them. I wondered how the Brown trout – so reluctant to rise this day – perceived the thunderstorm from beneath the surface of the water.

See you on the small stream, Tom Chandler.

Ask About Fly Fishing — an Internet Radio site — is broadcasting an interview with Rich Pilatzke, who’s spent the last 15 years fishing Colorado’s High Country Lakes.

Since backcountry lakes are high on my agenda this year (I’ll be bringing you along, but only after the fact), you could say I’m interested.

Miss tonight’s live broadcast (April 2, 7pm Mountain Time), and you can catch the podcast later (even though the askaboutflyfishing site doesn’t list us among their “blogs” links).

And While You’re At It

While you’re there, tune into Ian Rutter’s interview about fly fishing in the Smokies.

In fact, listen carefully to the questions and you’ll hear the Underground subverting the serious process of asking important questions by sending a stupid “how do you stay in shape” question, which Ian was forced to answer on the air.

I slay myself.

See you online, Tom Chandler.

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