Outdoors
Dave Sartwell
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I was sitting on a boulder on the shore of Kelly Creek, just upstream of where it joins the North Fork of the Clearwater River in northeast Idaho, when a tiny fly that had just hatched landed on my hand. It was a pale blue dun with a yellow body.
I stared at it for a couple of seconds before it flew off. I suddenly realized that I had that fly in my box.
In a moment I had flattened the barb of the hook and tied it on to the end of a nine-foot tippet on my three-weight rod. Ripping a few feet of floating line off my Redington reel, I made one false cast and then whipped this imitation out over the clear mountain water that flowed over a stoney bottom in a big glide.
The fly dropped onto the surface and floated along with the gentle current. There was a ripple, a flashing side and then a tail. It missed.
With my heart now racing, I carefully and quietly lifted the line from the water and recast to the head of the pool. Mending a little line upstream, I watched intently as the fly bobbled along with the downstream flow. A sip, a strike, a hook set and I was on.
The little cutthroat trout made his first run across the pool, ripping line out as he went. I had set the reel to a very light drag as I had a two-pound tippet on the end of my line and didn't want the trout to break off. He was determined and sassy. Up he went into the air, sides twisting and turning, trying to shake the hook. He splashed down to the water, creating a small hole in the creek. Two more runs and he came slowly to the net.
Did you ever have one of those days fishing when everything lined up just right? The right hatch, the right water, the right fly? Regular readers will remember when I wrote about almost sinking my boat because I forgot to put in the plug, or, when I fell out of my trusty craft while fishing for stripers off Thatcher Island with Bob Brophy. On this day, however, it was like the Gods were saying, okay, let this one afternoon be his.
Over the next three hours I could not keep the cutthroats off my line. Almost every drift in almost every pool produced a trout between eight and 12 inches long. A big one was 14 inches. By the end of the hatch I had caught and released over 30 of them.
The night before we had driven from Greer on Fireroad 250 back over 50 miles on a one-lane road with pullouts into the Clearwater National Forest. Using the National Parks Lands Pass you can buy at any National Park, the charge for a site right next to Kelly Creek that included a fire ring with grate, a picnic table, water, and toilet but no shower facilities or electricity was only $3.50 a night. Of the 17 or so sites, only four were taken, so we had our choice.
We set up our Cabela's Alaskan Guide six-man tent (which is perfect for two people), started the Coleman stove and cooked up a meal of fried chicken, baked beans and potato salad. Using my crosscut saw I rendered some downed wood into small enough chunks to start a roaring fire that warmed us from the evening mist and low-50s mountain air.
So as not to waste any time in the morning, I slid the fly rods out of their tubes and attached reels. The lines were passed through the guides. I thought we would start the day out with some nymphs, so to the tippets I tied on a tandem set that included a size 12 bead-headed Prince followed by a size 18 Pheasant tail. This is a set up that is a good rig to start with in almost any trout water.
It started to rain just as darkness set in, so we retired to our tent. I put my head on my pillow, pulled the covers up around my neck, let the air mattress do it's magic and drifted off into sleep thinking of large trout on the end of my line.
After a quick breakfast of eggs, bacon and toast covered with huckleberry jam, we hopped in the truck drove along the narrow mountain road the hugged the sides of the steep valley that held the rushing stream. Beautiful pool after beautiful pool revealed themselves to us as we eased along.
At one point where there was three lovely holes in a row, I jumped out and made two large X's in the road. I then drove nine miles to a fork that would lead to Cayuse Creek, turned around and headed back to the double X pool. It was here that the pale dun fly made it's appearance.
What a week-long trip we had enjoyed in Idaho. Fishing the evening hatch on the famous Henry's Fork of the Snake River snuggled up against the Yellowstone Park, drifting the South Fork of the Snake in a float boat, white water rafting on the upper most reaches of the Salmon River, using float tubes to cast to big rainbows on the Silver Creek near Sun Valley, and then fly fishing the famous, but hard-to-reach, Kelly Creek for the legendary Rocky Mountain cutthroats.
We had driven hundreds of miles on wonderful dirt roads, taken what seemed like thousands of pictures, and stopped times too numerous to mention to just take in the view. The wildlife was stupendous. The mule deer buck that stood not 20 feet from the entrance to our tent, just staring at us from a cocoon of mist in the early morning; the bald eagle that flew through the rainbow at the foot of Mesa Falls; the antelope that puffed up and blew at us every time the camera snapped his picture.
So, the next time you are planning an outdoor adventure, pull out your Delorme's book of maps and start drawing your magic marker over the backroads and byways of Idaho.
Rhumb Line Striper Tournament
The Annual Rhumb Line Tournament is Saturday, July 31. The cost to enter is $20 for adults and $10 for youngsters under 16. The tournament runs from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. The weigh-in is at the Rhumb Line parking lot. Free T-shirt and cookout to all entrants. Cash prizes and raffle goodies. Call the Rhumb Line for more info.
