A Fly Fisher's Sixty Seasons Read online

  Then I began checking out the numbered lakes one by one. I never got to all of them—there were just too many—but I did visit and/or fish at least several dozen. Sometimes the results were disappointing; some lakes were surrounded by homes and overcrowded with fishermen, others so acidic or devoid of insect life they would never produce sizable trout, still others deficient for any number of reasons. That was no surprise; I’d expected some negative results. But I also found about a dozen waters that were shallow, rich with insect life, and sufficiently untrammeled by civilization to be fished comfortably and profitably, and I returned to most of them, sometimes often. They provided a wide variety of fishing for several trout species, but I also found one lake that Wolcott noted had been experimentally stocked with Chinook salmon. That alone induced me to try it, which I probably would not have done otherwise, and I was rewarded when the lake yielded a bright salmon weighing several pounds.

  Most of the waters I sampled held relatively small trout, but some had good mayfly hatches and offered welcome opportunities for dry-fly fishing, which I needed to practice. Others, which became favorites, produced occasional large trout, sometimes as heavy as three or four pounds, much bigger than one would normally expect to find almost within sight of skyscrapers.

  My copy of Wolcott’s opus soon became beat up, dog eared, and filled with penciled marginal notes.

  These exploratory trips were always ripe with optimism and the anticipation of discovery. No two waters were alike—not even remotely—and some had unique features. I looked forward to probing their secrets.

  Sometimes, though, my optimism and excitement were quickly extinguished. I visited some lakes that had been charted by Wolcott before they were discovered by real-estate “developers”—“property pimps,” I called them—who surrounded them with wall-to-wall homes and septic drain fields that leached toxic cargo into the water. Most of these also had little if any public access. If I tried fishing them at all, which was seldom, they usually yielded nothing more than a few barely legal-sized stocked trout, which could be caught only by dodging water skiers or bait fishermen who crowded too close.

  On other occasions I found the way blocked by locked gates decorated with no-trespassing signs or other threats, so there was no way to reach the waters beyond. And despite Wolcott’s painstaking efforts to pinpoint the location of each body of water and my own efforts to find them on a map, there were some I never did find, even after spending hours bushwhacking through thick woods and heavy brush.

  But if some days ended disappointingly—lots of driving and/or hiking without a single cast to show for it—it was the other days I most remember, those when I found solitude, beauty, and exciting fishing on gleaming lakes hidden in deep woods or shaded canyons. Most held trout, but there were a few exceptions. At the end of one greasy dirt road, I came to a brush-cloaked little lake whose surface was dimpled with small rises. At first I thought they were trout, but when I got out on the water I discovered they were bluegills. I’d never caught a bluegill, had never thought I wanted to, but they came to my little dry fly so eagerly I couldn’t tear myself away. They were so small I had to set the hook gently to keep from tossing them over my head, but that was a good thing because it forced me to be more careful. I hooked a fish on nearly every cast, and spent an immensely enjoyable afternoon catching and releasing fish not much bigger than a silver dollar. It was fun, but not enough of a challenge to make me want to repeat it, and I never again fished for bluegills.

  Another time Wolcott’s instructions led to a pond surrounded by bog laurel and lily pads, and when I tried to get close to the water’s edge I found myself treading very gingerly on floating islands of peat. If I stood too long in one spot, I’d start to sink, so I had to cast and retrieve quickly, then move to a new spot. It wasn’t a very safe or comfortable way to fish, but there were some big spotted cutthroat to be had, which made the effort worthwhile.

  On two occasions Wolcott’s inventory took me to small waters that apparently had been mill ponds at some point in their history, and I was unprepared to find myself casting into flooded concrete foundations where conveyor belts had once hauled dripping logs out of the water on a final trip to the saw. The bottoms of both ponds were covered with bark chips, which couldn’t have been conducive to insect health, so I was surprised to find good-sized cutthroat in each of them. Despite its bark-lined bottom, one pond also had unusually good mayfly and damselfly hatches. I hiked into it several times and always had good fishing, although I never did get fully accustomed to catching trout within the concrete confines of foundation walls.

  Even those Wolcott-inspired trips that turned out badly usually yielded something of value. Nearly every jaunt added to my knowledge of the country and its back roads and trails, and in this way I also learned the woods, watersheds, canyons, and coulees of my native state in a way, I suspect, that few others have.

  I also learned a lot about fishing, and a few things about myself.

  During the time I was exploring the waters listed in Wolcott’s works, I was also still striving to become a successful freelance writer. A couple of my articles had been published in fishing magazines, but I was far from establishing a reputation sufficient to become a regular contributor to any of them, so I was always on the lookout for ideas that might lead to stories. One day I was paging through my battered copy of Wolcott’s first volume when I came upon three words that almost seemed to leap off the page. It was his entry for Monte Cristo Lake, and I knew instantly I’d found a surefire title for my next article. What fishing magazine editor could possibly resist a story titled “The Trout of Monte Cristo?” All I had to do was visit the lake, catch a few fish, take photos, then write a story to go with the title.

  Wolcott said the lake was in Snohomish County, north of Seattle, “sixteen miles southeast from Darrington and two miles north from Barlow Pass” at an elevation of 1,970 feet. It had a surface area of fourteen acres and a reported maximum depth of thirty feet. The South Fork of the Sauk River flowed into one end and out the other, and the lake was reported to contain rainbow, cutthroat, and eastern brook trout. If I could just get there, catch a few trout, and get a few decent photographs, I’d have everything necessary for a story.

  I like to try to learn as much as possible about a place before I go there, so I rummaged through the Seattle Times newspaper “morgue” (library) and found Monte Cristo Lake was named for its location near Monte Cristo Peak, which also had lent its name to a nearby town. The town sprouted up after an 1889 gold strike that led to the filing of more than 200 claims and the opening of several mines, which yielded deposits of silver and lead as well as gold. A wagon road was built to the area, a railroad soon followed, and within five years Monte Cristo had become a town with more than 1,000 residents.

  Then came a series of floods that damaged the railroad. This was followed by news that gold had been discovered in the Klondike, and prospectors and miners began leaving Monte Cristo in droves for what they hoped would be greener—or more golden—pastures. Mining operations ceased in 1907, after which the town struggled vainly to survive as a tourist destination but finally succumbed to become a virtual ghost town. By the time Joan and I went there, it was almost uninhabited.

  The lake was a few miles north of the town, just off a road with the grandiose name of “Mountain Loop Highway”—actually a single-lane, deeply rutted dirt road that was closed during winter and carried little traffic the rest of the year. Nevertheless, it got us close enough to the lake so that we could see it. We found no trail or other evidence of access, but it was all downhill from the road and that made it relatively easy to slide a boat down to the lakeshore. When we got there, we saw that the “lake” was really just a wide spot in the South Fork of the Sauk River, and the size Wolcott had reported seemed greatly inflated. Maybe it was based on an estimate made at high water, because the lake didn’t seem more than half the fourteen acres Wolcott said it was.

  Undaunted, we shoved off in ou
r boat and set out to explore. The day was bright and the water mostly shallow and very clear, so we could see almost everything. The bottom was covered in silt and appeared to offer little in the way of cover for trout, except for some large colonies of thick weed whose tendrils waved in the current flowing through the “lake.” We rowed against the current until we were nearly at the upstream end, then dropped anchor and started casting. Our cameras were handy if one of us should hook a fish.

  After covering all the water within casting distance without seeing a single fish, we pulled up the anchor, let the current carry us a little farther downstream, then anchored again and resumed casting. Except for the waving strands of weed on the bottom, we saw no movement—no trout, no flies on the water or in the air. We fished with special care around the weeds, since they appeared to be just about the only likely places trout would hold, but we still didn’t see any.

  We covered the lake methodically until we finally reached the downstream end and ran out of water to fish. In several hours of fishing we had not seen a single trout. If indeed Monte Cristo Lake held the trout Wolcott said it did, they were nowhere in evidence that day.

  Getting the boat back up the slope was a lot harder than getting it down, which only added to our fishless frustration. Our cameras were put away without taking a single shot, and along with them I put away my hope for a surefire fishing story.

  I’ve never returned to Monte Cristo Lake. However, I still think “The Trout of Monte Cristo” would make a great title for a fishing story, so I hereby offer the idea free of charge to any aspiring freelance fishing writer. All you have to do is go there and catch a trout or two—if you can find any.

  That setback did little to shake my faith and confidence in Wolcott’s work—after all, there might have been trout in the lake when he first saw it—and for several years afterward I continued to rely heavily on his two thick volumes to guide my fishing efforts. By then, however, I’d found plenty of fishing venues I liked and had started returning to them regularly, so I no longer felt the need to spend a lot of time or effort trying to find new ones.

  I’d also noticed that some of the waters I had begun fishing thanks to Wolcott were beginning to change. We tend to think of lakes and ponds as stable features, but they can change like almost anything else, although it usually happens so slowly it’s hardly noticeable during a human lifetime. Sometimes, however, it happens so rapidly the evidence is visible within just a few years. That’s especially true of eutrophic lakes, shallow waters so rich with life they produce organic detritus (dead organisms and waste products, etc.) faster than the rate of decay. The surplus gradually fills in the lake, and in extreme cases the lake slowly becomes a marsh, then finally a meadow.

  This process usually happens slowly enough to be almost unnoticeable, but if you fish a eutrophic lake repeatedly over a period of decades, as I have several waters, the changes are anything but subtle. I’ve watched two formerly rich and once-favorite waters shrink to mere shadows of their former size.

  Beaver ponds also are subject to rapid change. Some remain for many years, but if the beavers are trapped out or move to a new location, their untended dams wash away sooner or later and the ponds disappear. Just as often, new ponds are created when beavers move into a new area.

  Lakes fed by good-sized streams also frequently show evidence of short-term change. This happens when silt washed down by the stream begins to build up an alluvial fan or delta that gradually expands to become part of the landscape, simultaneously reducing the amount of open water in the lake. This process has been especially noticeable at one lake I’ve fished for many years; the inlet stream has filled so much of the lake that several acres where I once fished are now dry land.

  Lakes and ponds are subject to other changes as well. Decades ago the mammoth Columbia Basin Reclamation Project diverted Columbia River water through a series of canals into the formerly dry “channeled scablands” of eastern Washington, literally making the desert bloom with agricultural development. A side effect was to raise the area’s water table, which led to the appearance of scores of so-called “seep lakes” in once-dry canyons and coulees. Many of these became highly productive trout waters, but as the Bureau of Reclamation continues fiddling with the plumbing of its great system, some waters have all but dried up while other new ones have been created. It’s getting a little hard to keep track.

  Then there is the “beaver complex” that afflicts some real-estate “developers” who dig “lakes” so they can build houses around them. Golf courses with artificial “water hazards” are a similar phenomenon. And for as many ponds as have been constructed for these purposes, others have been drained because they got in someone’s way.

  All these changes have rendered Wolcott’s works increasingly out of date, and many waters that were pristine when I began using his books as a guide have now been rendered worthless for fishing. What’s surprising, though, is how much of his work is still relevant. Technology may have provided faster, easier ways of finding lakes, but you still have to know they exist before you can find them, and for that purpose it remains certain there’s no better reference than Wolcott’s two-volume magnum opus.

  A poet he was not, but anglers never had a better guide or friend than Ernest E. Wolcott.

  PAIN MANAGEMENT

  THE MORNING sun was still behind the ridge beyond the river when I hooked the fish. The fly, a riffle-hitched Purple Peril, had nearly finished its swing near the tail-out of the pool when the fish knifed through the surface, grabbed it with a great splashing rise, and bounded high in the air at the first touch of the hook. It was big and bright, perhaps eight or nine pounds, a large summer steelhead for this river.

  I felt the spurt of adrenaline that always comes when a big fish is hooked and tried to follow as it ran downstream over the lip of the pool into a long stretch of choppy water below. I like reels that make lots of noise, and mine was obliging now, issuing a veritable symphony of excited racket.

  The fish took all my line and an ample share of the backing while I stumbled in pursuit. I didn’t know this section of the river very well, so I was feeling my way like a blind man through the rocks and boulders on the river floor.

  When the run finally ended I couldn’t tell exactly where the fish had gone, but I knew it was still on because I could feel it shaking its head angrily, each movement telegraphed through the long, taut line and backing. My pursuit had led me into deeper water, so I changed direction and headed toward the rocky beach, still reeling as I went. The steelhead immediately sensed the change and burst out of the water—once, twice, three times—then started another run, longer than the first. I tried again to follow, continuing to reel while simultaneously watching where I placed my feet among the slippery, unfamiliar rocks.

  After a long sprint the steelhead finally paused, then halted altogether, though again I couldn’t tell exactly where it was. I kept moving downstream, still reeling, until at last I felt the backing splice slide through the stripping guide. It was followed by several turns of line, then several more, and I continued gaining line with every downstream step until I figured I must be getting pretty close to the fish, although I still had no firm idea where it was.

  Suddenly the fish exploded out of the water not thirty feet away. At the apex of its leap it turned and seemed to hang in the air for a long moment while it fixed me with a cold, dark eye. Then it disappeared back in the river and took off on the wildest run yet. Line whistled out, the backing splice followed quickly, and the reel’s racket rose to a screech.

  And then … there was nothing. The line went slack, the rod straightened, the reel fell silent, and instantly I felt the hollow feeling that always comes with realization that a fish has been lost. I won’t repeat what I said then, not in polite company anyway, but here’s a clue: The word had four letters and one was a vowel.

  The empty feeling gave way to pain. It started deep in my gut, down where it always does, spreading upward and outward unti
l it seemed to fill my whole being. It wasn’t agonizing like the pain of a kidney stone—I’ve had several of those, so I knew—but it was sharp enough. Of course the pain of a lost fish is psychological, not physical; it’s the pain of acute disappointment, the hurt of irreversible loss, but that hardly makes it any easier to bear.

  Trying to ignore what I was feeling, I reeled in to see what damage the fish might have done. Surprisingly, my leader was still intact and the fly still attached, but a closer look revealed the size 4 low-water Atlantic salmon hook had been straightened as neatly as if it had been done in a forge.

  What would make a fish do that? Could a steelhead have as much adrenaline as a human? What could motivate such a desperate surge of strength in an eight- or nine-pound fish?

  Perhaps it was that laser-like look the fish had given me from the top of its last leap. In all its freshwater life and seaward migrations, it had probably never seen anything quite like me—the sudden image of a broad-brimmed hat perched over a pair of dark glasses with a ruddy beard sticking out around the edges, a sight that must have frightened the poor fish beyond measure. Its only thought, if thought it was, had been a mortal urge to get away from that ugly sight as far and as fast as it could—which, it turned out, was fast enough to straighten a size 4 hook.

  I marveled at the irony. While the fish was trying with all its might to get away from me, I was trying with all my hope and skill to fight it to the beach, remove the hook, and return it gently to the river. Of course the fish didn’t know that, and its fright had obviously greatly exceeded my desire.

  Not a flattering conclusion: A steelhead thought I was so ugly it had straightened the hook in its panic-fueled dash to get away.