I had breakfast in Houston yesterday with a lawyer from Minneapolis, a compliance officer for a securities dealer. He had grown up in Norfthfield, about 120 miles from where we stayed near Spring Grove, and went to law school at the University of Minnesota. I mentioned that we’d been to an area near Austin and Rochester, in the Driftless region, and said how much I liked it. He’d never heard of the Driftless.
We drove 2,122 miles. We fished in three states, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. We fished in five streams, and caught wild brown trout and native brookies. I finally cast a bamboo fly rod. We saw lots of corn.
It’s two days from Houston, Texas, to Spring Grove, Minnesota, which is only 22 miles from Houston, Minnesota. I’d like to tell you that Houston, Minnesota, and Houston, Texas, are similar, but they’re not. Houston, Texas, is located on a flat coastal plain in Southeast Texas, and has 2.31 million residents. Houston, Minnesota, is located in the relatively hilly Driftless region of Southeast Minnesota, and has 979 residents.
They were both named after Sam Houston. Houston, Minnesota, has a wider selection of farm implements.
According to our Minnesota guide, Tim Carver of The Driftless Fly Fishing Company, a lot of his clients are from Chicago. From Chicago, the Driftless holds the closest native trout. I guess that if we lived in Chicago we’d only be five hours from Houston, Minnesota. From here it’s 19 hours. We’d have to be Cubs fans though, so it’s not worth it.
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Gretchen, the Houston Orvis fishing manager, asked where we’d been lately and I told her about the Driftless, how pretty it was, how different from the rest of the Midwest. Gretchen is from New Hampshire, and I told her how it reminded me of New England. She’d never heard of the Driftless.
I hadn’t planned to fish in Minnesota on this trip. In Minnesota I had imagined that one day we would visit the far north, the Boundary Waters, but after I rented a farmhouse near Decorah, Iowa, I figured out it was actually in Minnesota. It was a sign.
Let’s get this out of the way now: each of the streams we fished in the Driftless was a bit different, but I suspect that if I found a place I liked in Iowa, I could find a similar place in Wisconsin, or in Minnesota. None of the water was big, the largest stream was maybe 40 feet across, and each was a mix of pools, slow water, bends, and riffles. What was remarkable was not the variation, but the amount. Minnesota claims more than 700 miles of fishable trout water, Iowa 2,500, and Wisconsin more than 13,000. If I fished a mile of stream each day, I’d be tottering around in a walker and still not out of Iowa.
Our guide Tim was a youngish man, at least to my old eyes, and I suspect that guiding and fly fishing are his anchors. I couldn’t imagine what Tim would do if there wasn’t water to fish, and nothing seemed more important to him than our having a good day. I liked Tim a lot.
We fished the morning on the South Fork Root River. There is also a South Branch of the Root, and a North and a Middle Branch, plus each has tributaries of its own. After they all join together the Root joins the Mississippi near La Crescent, Minnesota, across the Mississippi from La Crosse, Wisconsin. Even with all that joining the Root never seemed like a big river.
On the South Fork we crossed a public easement at the edge of a bit of pasture, and Tim placed Kris at the base of a long pool banked on one side by the pasture and on the other by a sandstone bluff. It was pretty characteristic Driftless karst topology. Kris spent the rest of the morning fishing that pool. Every time she thought about moving she caught another fish.
We started out fishing dry dropper rigs; at first I fished a pheasant tail nymph under a parachute Adams but later switched to a brace of dries, a spinner and a dun. I started downstream below Kris, and then moved around her and upstream.
The fish were spooky, and I was making, for me, long casts. I know all this modern stuff about keeping casts short and relying on stealthy approaches, but there are few things more thrilling than taking a trout on a dry fly after a long perfect cast, or even a pretty good cast, or even a good enough cast. It is such a joy.
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To meet Tim, we came into Preston down a long hill onto the main street. It was a handsome street, lined with houses and shops that seemed to pre-date World War I. A lot of the buildings sported American flags. It reminded me of a record cover I’d once owned, or maybe that I imagined, of Charles Ives’ New England Holiday Symphony, an Impressionistic cover that I recall as a mishmash of American flags and New England town. Likely as not I was making it up to fit the moment.
At the shop, there was a ridiculously good-looking young couple from Rochester, also meeting their guide. He was handsome and tall and dark and she was tall and red-headed and movie-star pretty. I fantasized that they were young doctors or some such from the Mayo Clinic–it’s what Rochester is best known for–learning to fly fish (they were being fitted for rented waders, so I think that I was right they were learning. I was certainly right about them being ridiculously good looking).
We talked about where they were from, and I mentioned that Preston reminded me more of New England than of the Midwest–I was still pondering the memory of that probably mis-remembered record cover–and she said that was good to know, because she’d never been to New England. I suppose that some day she’ll drive into a New England town and think to herself that it looks absolutely nothing like Preston, Minnesota.
In Decorah, Iowa, we fished with Liz Siepker, of Driftless Fishers LLC. I had googled guides in Decorah, and picked Liz first because I realized that after 20-odd states I had yet to hire a woman guide. Unfortunately Liz was only available for an afternoon, and I wanted to fish a full day. I emailed another guide who never answered, and a third who responded that on a Monday in October both he and his guiding partner had to work their real jobs. We booked the afternoon with Liz.
When I met Liz I accused her of having a Midwestern accent, but it turned out she was from Pennsylvania. Her masters was in one or another kind of fishology, and she got to Iowa via a fisheries job in Missouri and an Iowa-born husband. I still swear I heard her say you betcha.
At least theoretically, fishing in Iowa differs from the other Driftless states in a couple of ways, neither of which affected us. There is a trout season in both Wisconsin and Minnesota, and with a few exceptions in both states, trout fishing in the Minnesota and Wisconsin Driftless mostly stops on October 15. Iowa has no season, fishing is year ’round, and our guides in Minnesota and Wisconsin admitted that in late fall and winter they would cross into Iowa for their own off-season fishing.
Iowa also stocks rainbow trout in some places, though where we fished we only caught wild browns–I think Wisconsin has stopped all stocking in the Driftless. There is natural reproduction in Iowa, both among brown trout and brook trout and I’d guess the general population, and at least one Iowa creek is set aside for naturally reproducing native brook trout.
Liz suggested that we fish Trout Run, in a county park on the edge of urban Decorah. To be honest, compared to Houston, Texas, Decorah is never particularly urban, though it is multiples larger than Houston, Minnesota. It’s still fewer than 10,000 people. Urban or no, on Trout Run we were isolated enough to forget that the town was nearby, and the only other angler we saw was back at the parking lot; us going, him arriving.
Even if Liz wasn’t from Iowa, you betcha she knew the water like a native. She even took us on a jungle adventure into deepest, darkest Iowa.
With Liz we fished nymphs under a foam indicator with no added split shot. Like Kris the morning before in Minnesota, I caught all of my fish, maybe a dozen, fishing one deep pool. Nothing we caught in the Driftless was particularly large, but all of the guides assured us that there were 22-inch browns right there, right where we were fishing, and that nighttime fishing with mouse patterns was great for big browns. I’m sure it is, and I hope they enjoy it.
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I am a superstitious baseball fan, which is redundant, and one of my longest running superstitions is Frito pie. Do you know Frito pie? If you’re not from New Mexico or Texas you probably don’t. It is great stuff: spicy, unctuous chile mixed into a bed of crisp salty Fritos, then topped with onions and cheese and whatever else comes to hand. Sometimes a small Fritos bag is split down the side and the chili–at Texas high school football games it’s likely Wolf Brand from the can–the chili is mixed straight into the bag. It’s our version of a hot dog.
Frito pie is my comfort food for baseball superstitions. I’m constantly finding new sources of Frito pie in Houston, Texas (though not Houston, Minnesota), from ice houses to upscale, and if the Astros are losing, I eat Frito pie and know that I’ve done all that I can to help turn things around.
Anyway, we were in the Driftless in the final week of the baseball season and the Astros were stalled. After our afternoon fishing with Liz, Kris and I stopped at the Decorah Fareway grocery. There was no Wolf Brand in the canned soup aisle (which was also the Miracle Whip aisle–this was Iowa). I thought maybe the store stocked some kind of frozen chili, and found the store manager on the frozen food aisle. “Do ya’ll have frozen chili?”
I said those four words; I really did. It may have been the most Texas thing I’ve ever said. The guy just stared at me. After a bit he said I’ve never heard of anything like that and walked away. We found a chili spice mix where the Wolf Brand should have been, added it to some ground beef, and the Astros won the division. It was pretty good, too.
Liz had recommended the Root River Rod Company in Lanesboro, so on Tuesday on our way out of \Minnesota for Wisconsin we stopped there. Kris bought some stuff, and then bought some more stuff–she was jealous of Liz’s wading boots, so it was a pretty good day for the Root River Rod Company. Liz was right, it was a good shop, but best of all the owner, Steve Sobieniak, let me cast one of his bamboo rods; he both builds and restores bamboo. I cast one of his builds, and it was a lovely thing, casting soft and true. If I fished the Driftless day to day, season to season, that’s what I would own. The Driftless is bamboo rod water.
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I’ve read that there are more certified organic farms in Driftless Wisconsin than in any other area in the States. The first night in Viroqua we ate at the farm-to-table Driftless Cafe. At the table next to us were guys passing around fish photos on their phones. I didn’t have the Frito pie, but it was wonderful. The second night at the Driftless Cafe (we went back the second night), we had the pizza, and not only were guys at the table next to us declaiming how they ate there every time they came to Viroqua to fish, our guide Matt was there for his Dad’s birthday. The third night (we made night three) we ate appetizers and a salad at the bar (which was inlaid with a swimming trout), and we saw their framed James Beard semi-finalist certificate. I reckon you don’t get a lot of James Beard semi-finalists in cafes in towns of fewer than 5,000, even if the cafe is pretty upscale. If I was still in Viroqua I’d be back for night four. They also have good martinis.
On Wednesday we fished a half-day with Matt Bethke of Driftless Angler. I figured we’d fish with Matt in the morning, then explore in the afternoon. Matt grew up in the area, moved around the country some, and came home to Westby, just up the road from Viroqua.
Agriculture almost killed the Driftless streams before World War II, sort of like agriculture almost killed the southern plains with the Dust Bowl. Trees were clear cut, everything was plowed for planting, and streams filled with silt from erosion. It was the damaged Wisconsin of A Sand County Almanac. What had been spring-fed coldwater wild-trout streams was choked with silt. The states have largely reversed the damage, and private groups like Trout Unlimited have also invested heavily in stream restoration.
Matt took us to Weister Creek, in the Kickapoo Valley Reserve. The Reserve was originally land accumulated by the Corps of Engineers in the 1960s for a since-abandoned dam project. After the proposed dam project was finally abandoned, a chunk of the Corps-owned land in the Reserve, about 8600 acres including part of Weister Creek, was given to the State of Wisconsin or held in trust for the Ho-Chunk Nation. The land has been undeveloped and reclaimed by nature since the 60s. I don’t think it’s an accident that Weister was the most deeply incised water we fished; I suspect that the Weister was as close as we came to what the streams were like before the Driftless was farmed.
We fished a nymph under a foam beetle, and the fish were spooky. We cast a lot from the banks, though I couldn’t stay out of the water–since Pennsylvania I’m a convert to the notion that my best drifts are straight towards my rod tip, and that can be hard to manage from a bank. Most of our casts were pretty short–there wasn’t sufficient space between cut banks on a winding small stream to make long casts or take long drifts.
That morning we fished about a half-mile of river and caught wild brown trout. We didn’t see anybody else.
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The van’s change oil light came on, so Thursday I spent part of the morning at the Viroqua Chrysler dealer. I waited on the sales floor for the oil change, and passed some of the time talking to a salesman. We talked a lot about the Brewers winning their division. He asked what we were doing there, so I told him we were fishing. He asked what for? Walleye?
I’d like to catch a walleye. I’ve never seen a walleye.
Following Matt back from Weister Creek to Viroqua, he showed us a bit of isolated stream where the state had eradicated the European browns and reestablished the native strain brook trout. That evening Kris and I went back to the brook trout stream and fished a quarter mile up the easement until dark. We didn’t catch anything.
The next day after the oil change I worked at lawyering through the afternoon, and then in the evening, before our third dinner at the Viroqua Diner, we went back to the little creek. At first nothing, but after a while I figured that maybe we were too close to the road, that maybe that portion of the water got fished too hard and too often. I walked further upstream, maybe a half mile from the road, and watched trout rising in a long pool. I was fishing dry flies, and I caught a brookie, went back and got Kris to show her where I had fished and how, and on my example cast caught another brookie on a long just-good-enough cast with a Royal Wulff. She had lost her fly, so we traded rods and I headed back to the car. I’d caught a perfect fish.
