I remember fishing rivers where you wouldn’t see anybody for days — no path on either shore, save maybe deer trails, no boot prints on the bank, not a scrap of human debris. But few like this one, it seems to me, just 50 miles from a major metropolis.
Maybe that’s because the last 20 are driven on bad dirt and because nothing of the river is visible from any road going much of anywhere these days — and those lead only to trailheads for destinations not popular in prime summer hiking season, edging along slopes not quite cliffs, but steep enough to shrink your testicles if you look too carefully and forget for the moment that the trees will save you from a 70-degree drop into impenetrable shadows. As to the river, when we fish it at last. . . .
Even the deer here seem disinclined to wear paths, though sometimes on patches of wet earth we find the fresh prints, several the size of our fists, of a solitary elk.
“River Unknown,” Steve and I will decide to call it, and we’re in love at first sight. It’s my idea of perfect, almost: maybe too clear, midsummer, but winding through alders and maples along the bottom of a canyon where second-growth evergreens climb steep slopes. More of a stream, really, rarely more than 50 feet wide, usually half that, open along much of the shore; pretty easy to wade and to cross when you need to, if you can manage knee-deep water that runs fast across oversize cobbles.
Reminds me a little of the upper McCloud, the last time I was there, but more of an emerald green and without anything close to that river’s aquatic bestiary. I find a couple of green caddis worms in my seine, along with a some burly drake nymphs with stunted abdomens, broad green wing pads like shoulder pads, and legs that move like robot limbs. There’s also another, smaller mayfly, a PMD, I’m pretty sure, though its legs too look rather meaty.
“So now you know,” I say to Steve. “Is that right.”
“Oh yeah. The river’s an open book.”
“Except we don’t know what kind of fish live in it.”
“There is that,” I agree with a sigh. “If only someone had done more research. ”
“I did lots. Regs just say it’s open for ‘All game fish,’ fly gear only, that’s it. Google came up with almost nothing on any site, and I don’t know why not. No maps, except from the Forest Service, and none that show access for 20 miles, except for some bridge that closed 30 years ago. That’s how come I had to guess.”
This guessing had led us to a trailhead for some distant lake. A single Subaru semi-SUV sat alone in a grass parking area with room for 40 vehicles — this on a lovely Saturday in July. A trail sign named only the lake, but we figured the path would have spurs heading downhill toward the river. Instead, a half-hour hike in seemed to leave us higher than when we started. We did, however, cross a small creek, where we split up to bushwhack upstream and down for two hours.
For me, that meant hupping over a dozen serious deadfall jams in less than 200 yards while climbing 200 feet. Between downed trees, unstable slopes, and slick rock walls, I figured I was past due to break something important, probably my favorite 3-weight, an 8-foot 8-inch Scott I’ve had a long time, and though the biggest of the tiny trout I plucked from pockets would make pretty bracelets if bent nose to tail, most weren’t much longer than earrings.
“No, that wasn’t a full mile,” Steve said as we trudged back to the truck, both of us bleeding a little from scratches and scrapes and copiously from horsefly bites. “Unless you measure horizontally and vertically,” I replied, “which seems only fair to me. No matter: false starts are how meanders begin. Also, of course, where some of them end.”
“Right. Meanders…… It’s not like there are signs, or even a decent map showing access to the river.”
“Which are good things, we hope, if we can find them.”
Good things there were, if looking great counts. Driving out from the trailhead parking area, Steve spotted an unmarked opening in the woods. We took another flyer, this one a switchback trail dead-ending at a bluff above a river prettier than many that call your name from glossy magazine pages. It’s so stunning that we both have doubts: “Jesus, are we sure this is open to fishing? Because if it is, why haven’t we heard about it before?”
But first things first: I urge Steve to look again at the seine samples, a process he’s never used before. “So until something hatches, these are the candidates.”
“If you say so,” he says, demonstrating the attitude of 90 percent of fly fishers and the reason why I sell 90 percent of the seines that I make to aquatic entomologists, instead. Unruffled, I point to the dark wing cases on the maybe-PMD mayflies — “Not ready to hatch yet, but getting there” — then nag him to watch as I release our specimens into an eddy. “See how the caddis worms drift a little, but the drake nymphs go down quickly? How PMDs drop too, just slower?”
“Lazy,” says Steve unnecessarily. Then, because he’s still pretty new to the sport — a fact I tend to forget, because he catches well — “All of which all means what?”
“Hard to say,” I admit, because I’ve been sampling streams a long time. While it tells you lots and simplifies fly selection, that usually means choosing from fewer and more likely options. “It’s — what? — almost one o’clock, so we might be in time for a caddis drift, but there weren’t all that many larvae. There are as many drake nymphs as the slim ones, and they’re entrées, but I’m guessing they hang onto rocks pretty tight, so the fish don’t see many yet. So what I’m thinking is maybe a size 12 drake nymph and PT combo, size 16.”
Steve nods. “Think I’ll start with a dry fly,” he says.
“Ah, yes.” I respond mildly, because so many of Ye have so little faith. “Any one in particular?”
“The one I tied last night.”
Steve likes to do that. And it works more often than it should, morally, on lakes near us, occasionally even when rises are rare, sometimes even when he presents a size 12 Steve Especiale to fish obviously slurping midges. And who knows, maybe it will work this time. George M. L. La Branche wrote about fishing fast water with a dry when nothing’s coming off. I’ve tried this and been surprised.
“And I think I’m going to head downstream,” Steve adds, pointing to a long pool down about a hundred yards.
That will work fine. We won’t need to hop the series of riffles separating runs and pools, for one thing, and I’m going to rig with an indicator to work upstream, slowly and carefully, because the water’s so clear and the sun bright and high.
It’s also a good idea because I’m still a bit fagged by the distance we walked. Steve might be, too, but he’s six feet five, and four of those feet are leg, which means he lopes. He’s also slightly pigeon-toed, à la the Great Jim Thorpe, so he’s fast and sure-footed. A more reasonably built person would have a hard time keeping up, but I’m not, quite, with a little scoliosis and a slightly twisted humerus that points one foot forward while the other angles left.
Rather than explain this to Steve, I just smile wide when I say, “Catch you later.”
I will catch other things first.
It’s also been awhile since I fished indicators. Worse yet, a well-intentioned, but misguided washing of my vest reduced my yarn cache to dryer lint. But there’s one of those plastic bobber doodads in a pocket, and in another a plastic tub of floating gunk neatly divided between chartreuse and hot pink, along with a couple of split shot left behind after a spill. I’m trying to decide between systems as I add a length of 5X tippet, because the water’s so clear, then knot on a fattish AP Nymph, drake like if I squint. To the bend of that I tie 20odd inches of 6X, tipped by an size 16 Pheasant Tail point fly. Not to boast, but finishing these four knots takes me only two hours.
I learned indicator fishing, as much as I know, from two experts with significantly different styles. Along with Dean Shubert, Dave Hickson developed and perfected a technique using tufts of poly yarn tied directly to a leader. Then, to the leader he ties on a dropper line, creating a 90-degree angle. (Dave and Dean refuse to write books, but the former finds John Judy’s Slack Line Strategies for Fly Fishing satisfactory.) This hinge at the indicator allows for a dropper leader not much longer than the depth of the water — an important dimension, though a pain to adjust when conditions demand — and with proper yarn grooming and greasing, it allows for the use of substantial weight to get a nymph or nymphs down. The real skill is in reading water, throwing mends in the cast, then mending constantly during a drift to keep the fly moving slower than the surface current, because friction slows water moving along the bottom, and fish don’t expect helpless food to race.
Of course, you can catch fish just lobbing a bobber up or across or drifting one from a boat while sipping juleps. But if you haven’t seen somebody cast this rig 50 feet, landing it under an overhanging branch, then mending five times across two current seams to adjust speed while still keeping the line tight enough to set a hook . . . you haven’t seen sophisticated indicating and might be comparing tic-tac-toe to three-dimensional chess.
Gary A’s style was different. He used light leaders, sometimes 18 feet long, tippets down to 7X, tiny foam tabs pinched on at four or five times the depth of the water, and slightly weighted micronymphs. To get his flies down to the fish, he waded carefully into place, then cast way upstream above a lie where he’d spotted a fish or expected to find one. How he knew where his fly was relative to the foam tab remained a mystery to me and would have seemed awfully Zen, if not for the Marlboro always wedged in Gary’s mouth. “You just know,” he’d say, smiling through smoke, or sometimes, “Look for the wink. And if the indicator twitches so much as an eyelash” — grin — “strike.”
Usually I go with a yarn rig. And I would have, if mine hadn’t been reduced to lint. I considered putting a hinge in the bobber, but suspected it would drop too hard on thin water at the tail of this run. So would a glob of float paste big enough to support a split shot, so I use a dab only, four or five feet up from my faux drake nymph, add no weight on the line, and stalk in as low as the knees I’m using will allow. On my second cast, I take a tiddler rainbow. For a ride, I mean, striking with such conviction that the babe arches 16 feet over my head. Already unhooked and probably hysterical, it splashes down behind me — safely, luckily — dashing off with a story to tell its eggs. Chagrin settles me a little, so when I put a cast higher up, on the left edge of a deeper channel obscured by faster current, I don’t slam quite so hard when the paste pauses suspiciously. After two drifts descend without incident, I edge up higher, throwing a big reach cast well ahead of a prime part of the run, watching and mending as my line and much of my leader ride slower currents well to the side of the indicator dab.
Mend, mend . . . the dab darts right at the same moment that I see a silver flash.
I set with a downstream, sideways sweep. Instantly, the Scott bows sideways in an arc that explains why I like the flex of soft rods for fishing light tippets. In the next moment, the shaft absorbs even more pressure — a cross-current lunge of a fish that breaks through the surface and looks as long my arm from shoulder to wrist.
I love this rod, but it is a 3-weight, as noted. And this run is fast — also, I realize after five minutes, without any slower sections deep enough to prevent a fish from bashing itself against rocks when I land it. Worse yet, in the two jumps that follow, I see that the fish has taken the size 16 PT, the fly tied to 6X, with a breaking strength just over three pounds.
I turn to call Steve. He’s not where I last saw him, 200 yards away — he could not have heard me at that distance anyway — and has disappeared around a bend.
Sometimes everything seems to go right. Sometimes you commit hubris. I know this fish is still green when I get him close, but have found the best of the poor landing spots, just less than knee deep, and by then have the kind of confidence that encourages an angler to clamp his or her rod under an armpit and reach for the fish with the hand at the end of that arm while the other hand fumbles to extract a camera from a zipped vest pocket, then from a waterproof pouch, all while leaning so perilously far forward that when his or her toes dig a previously stationary rock right out of the substrate, he or she hangs very briefly above the torrent before taking the fall that cometh with youthful pride or fully mature folly, even as his or her fingers miss a grab for a fish back as broad as a hand.
It’s been a while since I’ve regretted losing a fish so much, but this one makes up for that middling-long stretch of philosophical serenity. So I marinate in angst diluted only because the Scott’s okay, the camera’s dry, and my right knee’s mangled and bruised, but filling with fluid slowly enough that I can still bend it some. It also helps a little that I take a 14-inch rainbow higher up in the run, but I soon descend into despond after a fish sized somewhere between these two breaks me off above the paste dab, suggesting a bad knot, or a wind knot, or a nick in the leader I failed to notice. About then I decide to rest the run, where I sit tweaking tackle when Steve returns.
He lopes up rather slowly.“Nothin’,” he says, then measures off four inches between thumb and forefinger. “Couple like this.”
I nod. “Landed two pretty good ones.” “Yeah?”
“And,” I spread my arms, “lost one like this.”
Steve looks at me hard. I can tell he’s waiting for me to confess I’m joshing, or at very least modify an exaggeration. I don’t. “No way,” he says.
“Four pounds, maybe five.”
He stares at me more seconds, then suddenly laughs loudly. “You didn’t,” he declares . . . which is what happens when you’ve told too many stories about crooked cops, life under Sharia law, and a wolverine you met up around Tule Lake.
Still, I’m a little surprised that Steve doesn’t believe me. So I tell him I’ve rested the run, and maybe he’ll get to see something special. He says, “I hope so” sincerely enough and watches for a few minutes, but has moved to the pool upstream and is looking away when I stick something big, but lose it on the first boil the moment I’m shouting Steve’s name. Ten minutes later, I set again and wait five seconds before calling, so he turns in time to see two feet of trout leap two feet into the air.
His lope back is a run. His grin is as wide as mine, and he gets his camera out in time. I tell him this isn’t the big one, and prove it: the photo he shoots shows two paste dabs: one on the line, another trailing downstream in current. This is the second fish I hooked — the one that broke off above the indicator — not the giant.
Sometime in there, Steve makes two confessions, a lot for a guy disinclined to bare more than necessary. The first one comes as he’s packing his pipe. “You know … I’m glad you caught that big one. Because you do tell some fantastic stories, on occasion.”
True.
“So when you told me you lost a fish so long today . . .” he laughs, “I began to wonder.”
“One other thing. I should try an indicator. But . . .” he squints through a cloud … I’ve never used one before. At least, not in moving water.”
That, I didn’t know. So I tell him as much as I do — see above — and we work our way upstream a quarter of a mile or more. We don’t find a trail on either side of the river, no tracks other than those of that enormous elk, nor as much fishable water as we’d hoped, mainly riffles and a few widely spaced pools beneath deadfalls, places where there could be beasts, but only tiddlers take.
On the way home, we debate whether the smaller rainbows are resident fish, the bigger ones small steelhead. It’s possible: 40 miles downstream, this river empties into another that has a small return of hatchery fish, most years fewer than a hundred, and a suspected remnant of wild fish that run in numbers too few to census. That would be a surprise, however, in an area and at a time when any water that might have what’s left of these runs is identified and protected rigorously. Not here: “Look for yourself,” says Steve, handing me the regulation brochure. “All it says is ‘Open to all game fish.’”
Hard to say, then, what we were catching. And to be honest, we weren’t eager to ask in places where a discussion might open floodgates to what, so far, was just one point of access. I found a copy of Judy’s book and suggested Steve start on page 134 — a chapter I was delighted to find didn’t make my streamside lecture look entirely foolish. He scoured map sources for other places where we might reach the river — one a dirt track that might have been a logging road and that dead-ended at a bridge that closed so long ago that the dotted lines leading away on the other side seemed only to head generally toward assorted peaks, then peter out. We found the bridge. In four-wheel drive, 11 miles down a one-track that reminded me of the road in to Ah-Di-Na if it was half as wide and hadn’t been graded for years. We noticed a few pullouts along the way, far from the river, probably used by hunters, but found none near the blocked-off bridge nor any trails leading down from the abutments, one of which had a lightning-shaped crack three inches wide.
Again we’d arrived at midday, this time prepared to stay until dark. Neither of us saw a fish rise all afternoon, but we did find golden stonefly shucks on the broken bridge abutment and then a two-inch adult that barely fit in a 4-mil specimen vial. How about that?
Toward evening, we took separate arms of a braid upstream from the bridge. Boy, but mine looked good. No runs, but some deep pools and pockets, and despite an absence of surface action, I did get two strikes on a Stimulator near where the braids join again. Unhappily, I tied this fly and a dropper nymph onto a branch above an excellent lie. I broke it off so as not to spook the water below and was knotting on another when I saw Steve hiking toward me. He’d had about the same luck.
“Gonna keep going up around this bend,” he said. “Figure if I’m to get a steelhead, if that’s what they are, now’s about the time.”
He did. About 15 minutes later, Steve comes tromping back, and I’m telling you, those slightly pigeon-toed lopers can move. “You got to see this,” he said, groping for his camera. “What happened was, when I hooked it, I got so excited that I tried to call you, and I think that’s what I’m doing when I hear myself shouting ‘Steve! Steve!’
“That’s how crazy I was . . . it was keep it in the water and take a picture at the same time ”
Steve’s not in the photo I see on his camera screen, of course. But there’s his reel and rod butt, submerged beside a rainbow at least as long as mine from the week before.
“That,” I sigh, “has just got to be a steelhead.”
“If it is, it’s my first.” “On a fly.”
“No. First on any tackle. Just first, period.”
To my mind, that made it suddenly seem right, quite right, really, that the name he called out was his own.
We had to skip a weekend before our third trip in to River Unknown. And we were nervous while driving the paved road to the dirt first turnoff, passing lots more traffic than ever, including a dozen vehicles pulling boats. We know these had been used on a lake relatively near to our destination, but that’s fed and drained by a river and tributaries from a completely different watershed — one of those surprising coastal mountain divides. So, perhaps . . .
Even so, “You know, one of these days, we’re going to drive in here and find the place a zoo.”
“Like maybe today?”
“Could happen.”
It didn’t. We drove first to the grass trailhead lot, where I wanted to fish the first run. Still room for 40 cars. Today, a brilliant Sunday, there were two. The owners of one stood around it and didn’t look a bit like fishers.
We were rigging up when a guy from the other approached us. And if the three of us had antenna, they would have twitched.
“Hey fellas,” said a fellow about our age. We “heyed” back.
“So . . . I fished upstream last week.
Maybe those were your tracks I saw?” “Could be,” Steve answered, “from the week before.”
“Right. Seemed like there weren’t as many fish as I expected.”
“They’re still there. What were you using?”
“Royal Coachman, like that.”
We looked at each other. “Anything of size?” I asked.
Long pause. I thought I could see his mind working, hard. “Eleven inches, maybe. Like that.”
Then we looked at each other some more, until it got slightly awkward. He didn’t ask us about our fish, and we didn’t offer.
“Long as you know it’s all fly fishing.
And I’m sure you’re C and R.”
“We are.”
“Good luck, then.”
“Good luck to you.”
Steve and I remained silent as walked away.
“Eleven inches. That might be what he gets on a Coachman.”
“Could be.” Then again . . .
The fish Steve caught that day was part of a classic stalk approach, this time with a Stimulator as his indicator and a small mayfly flymph fished on the dropper. It was just a spectacular moment, and this time, I was there to get photos.
We were beat by the time we drove out, but not so much that we forgot our encounter with the other fisher. “So I’m thinking that he guessed it was our tracks he saw, because he’s not seen anyone else.” “Seems like that,” said Steve, slowing exhaling pipe smoke. “We hope.”
“Right. And right about now, we’re hoping that’s true. As selfish as that is.”
“Right.”
Because, you know, it’s been a long time since I fished a river where you wouldn’t see anybody for days — no path on either shore, save maybe deer trails, no boot prints on the bank, not a scrap of human debris, where solo elk leave tracks the size of your fist.
