Weekend temperatures promise to crack a hundred. An oil train derails, catches fire, begins belching toxic smoke that drifts overhead as a dirty plume directly downstream. The freeway clogs; downtown, the Friday evening crowd doubles in size. Scheduled to be elsewhere, detoured commuters pound pints as hard as the locals, so that come nightfall, the mood inside the overfilled brew pub feels strained to the pitch of an Elena Ferrante novel.
I hear Joe Kelly say, “We still on for Trout Creek?” I turn and see the fish biologist signaling me over the heads of a tangle of detoured travelers.
Trout Creek. I nod, then press a finger to my lips. This deep into it, a career that grows blurry about the edges, a name like Trout Creek still sharpens my imagination, no matter that I live within a four-hour drive of a half-dozen different creeks that go by the same name.
Doesn’t everyone, in fact, have at least one Trout Creek within striking range?
Yet it’s never that simple anymore. Because if you’re paying attention, you can bet that the Trout Creek nearest you, no matter the allure, harbors nothing — or almost nothing — like the fishery for which it was named.
This isn’t the place to talk about wild fish in our Pacific drainages, other than to point out that every Trout Creek I’ve encountered was once, historically, part of a migratory watershed where fish moved freely, upstream and down, in response to severe fluctuations in annual in-stream conditions. Which is to say nothing more than native fish are inevitably part of intricately woven and highly dynamic populations that need every portion of a complex watershed to survive. Trout Creek, in fact, was often the critical reach of a watershed, and as such, the most severely affected by obstacles to migration, habitat degradation, and the introduction of invasive, nonnative or locally nonindigenous species of fish.
Sadly, many a Trout Creek never had a resident trout in it, but instead was named for extraordinary populations of small, swift, brightly colored parr or smolts — sea-run cutthroats, steelhead, salmon, even bull trout. The creek got its name because obviously these pretty “trout” weren’t anything like the heavy fish encountered lower in the watershed. Nobody much cared about one Trout Creek more than the next. It was a name to identify a particular drainage or reach of water. It wasn’t as if you were going to go fishing there.
We pull over at the bridge a mile upstream from where the creek spills into the river. Joe wants to show me the site of the old dam, removed nearly a decade ago, a project for which he did preliminary fieldwork while employed by the U.S. Forest Service. Loggers had first used this narrow crease in the bedrock for constructing a small splash dam, a helpful measure for gathering innumerable logs at the bottom of the creek’s 225-square-mile drainage before setting them free, all at once — often with dynamite — out of the creek, into the river, and downstream to mills below. In 1935, the Civilian Conservation Corps rebuilt the dam out of concrete — and at the same time, constructed one of the earliest fish ladders on any dam in the West. Ironically, the new dam was built to provide power and irrigation for the Forest Service nursery that grew stock for replanting locally harvested timber. The nursery closed in the mid-1990s. Regional steelhead were listed soon afterward as an endangered species. Despite the fish ladder, both the dam and, behind it, the shallow, silt-laden reservoir, subject to dangerous summer temperatures, served as radical impediments to migrating fish, especially steelhead. Given the precarious state of local steelhead populations, it didn’t take long for government agencies and environmental groups to begin clamoring for the dam’s removal.
Upstream of the old dam site, streambed restoration included moving thousands of cubic yards of sediment, then building and anchoring banks with logs, some from the old splash dam itself, and seeding the bare soil with native plants. Today, the old reservoir bed lies beneath the shade of broad stands of alder and cottonwood saplings. Upstream from this recovering habitat, Joe and I begin looking for fish.
At first we don’t find them. Above a second bridge, we bushwhack our way into a series of pretty pools, wide, gentle runs with deep slots tucked beneath riffles and steep cut banks. I prance a little Humpy through one patch after another of promising shade, up tight to log jams, along root balls of toppled cedars, beneath dangling limbs of hemlock and vine maple. “Weird,” says Joe. “I don’t even see any fingerlings or fry.”
Which may be the most important part of this Trout Creek tale: often we don’t know. Like fishing itself, the study of fish and fish habitat remains an inexact science. What causes what? How? Why? Joe’s fieldwork on Trout Creek included tagging juvenile steelhead to gather information about how they moved through the watershed before vanishing downstream. Today, a complicated grid of streambed conduit housing a system of radio telemetry records the movement of other tagged fish above and below the second bridge. Do the data show where the fish are today? Is there an app I can get for my phone?
All we know, in a healthy watershed, is that the fish are somewhere. If the watershed remains whole, all of its parts connected, then finding fish becomes a big challenge — some would say the challenge — of the game.
“But how do you know they’re there,” we’ve all asked, “unless you hook one?”
My point — exactly.
Joe and I go searching for different habitat. We find it in the plunging, bouldery pocket water downstream from the second bridge. Pine-colored caddisflies dance in sunlight atop the stream. Immediately we begin plucking tiny “trout” — in truth, steelhead parr — from every nook and cranny in a tangle of braided pools as complicated as a teenager’s life.
Neither of us has need to do much of this kind thing, in these kinds of precious waters, for very long. Now we both know why they call it Trout Creek.
Downstream, below the first bridge, in the deep pool alongside the remains of the old fish ladder, I hook and land a fish big enough that it has lost its parr marks.
Or maybe it is a trout.
“Bigger fish, bigger water,” I say — knowing it’s not always true.
I slide the fish back into the stream. “What do you say we go check out the river,” says Joe, turning to head for the truck.
Trout Creek Caddis
Hook: TMC 2457, sizes 6 to 14
Thread: Green Pearsall’s Gossamer Silk
Hackle: English grouse or Hungarian partridge
Tag: Green tying thread
Rib: Small copper wire
Body: Peacock herl
Thorax: Dark hare’s mask
Note: Joe Kelly, originally from Michigan, fishes this pattern whenever he casts a two-fly nymphing rig. Designed to approximate the Grannom or Brachycentrus caddis, the pattern fools fish year-round, not only trout, but naturally, steelhead, as well. It’s always interesting to me to see flies developed elsewhere move into a new regional scene. Anglers seem to forget sometimes that certain patterns work, regardless of the Trout Creek on which you use them.
Step 1: Secure the hook and start the thread. Because the TMC 2457 (or the lighter 2487) is such a curved hook, be ready to adjust its forward-and-aft pitch as you work your way through the fly.
Step 2: Prepare a hackle feather by pointing the tip in the direction of the hook eye, concave side toward you, and stripping the fibers from the lower side. Flatten the stem of the feather and then secure it directly behind the eye of the hook with the remaining fibers aimed upward.
Step 3: Wind the thread deep into the bend of the hook. Then start forward, creating a tag out of a double layer of thread. In front of the tag, secure a length of copper wire to be used later for the rib of the fly.
Step 4: Anytime I wind peacock herl on a hook shank, I do so by inserting multiple strands of herl into a dubbing loop and spinning the loop tight so that I create a thick herl rope strengthened by the thread. After creating the herl rope, wind it forward, starting ahead of the tag. End the body about one-third length of the hook shank back from the eye of the hook.
Step 5: Rib the fly with four to six turns of copper wire spiraled forward and secured at the front of the body.
Step 6: Create another dubbing loop. Wax the thread thoroughly. Use dubbing — including guard hairs — clipped from the darkest part of a hare’s mask, usually from either the ears or between the eyes. Dap the dubbing material onto the waxed thread and then spin a dubbing loop, creating a dense weave of spiky material. Wind the dubbing rope two to three wraps forward to create the thorax of the fly. Secure it and clip the excess.
Step 7: Grab the tip of the hackle feather with a pair of hackle pliers. Take two or at most three complete turns back from the eye of the hook to your thread. Now wind the thread forward through the wound hackle, trying to work the wraps against the stem without matting down the fibers. Create a tidy head, whip finish, and saturate it with lacquer or your favorite head cement.
