Tag: Trout

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Rainbows! Brookies! Pickerel! Pickerel? The Wild Swift River, Massachusetts, April 10-11, 2025 (45)

The lower Swift River is a tailwater, so it has some advantages over wild rivers. The upper forks were dammed in the 1930s for Quabbin Reservoir, and the part of the Swift that we fished flows out of the dam below the lake. Flows are reasonably constant and uniformly cold, which encourages lots of healthy trout. Whether it’s the middle of winter or the middle of August, the water temperatures near the dam on the Swift are likely to be somewhere below 60° and above 30°,1 and the flow will be moderate. If you combine that cold water and steady flow with lots of bugs, it’s trout heaven.

Below Quabbin Reservoir the Swift is only 24 miles long.2 It runs down from Winsor Dam to join the Chicopee River, which then joins the Connecticut,3 which then flows to the Atlantic. Quabbin Reservoir provides drinking water supply, not electricity generation, so water releases don’t increase when Boston turns on its lights.

At least theoretically, free-flowing rivers are wilder, more natural, more authentic, but some of my best days fishing were on tailwaters, and when I’m trying to land a fish it’s hard to focus on the difference. In the South and the Southwest, most well-known trout rivers are tailwaters. South of the Mason-Dixon, only tailwaters are usually cold enough for trout. The Green in Utah is a tailwater. The White in Arkansas, the Colorado at Lee’s Ferry,4 the San Juan in New Mexico, and the Holston in Tennessee are all tailwaters. We’ve also fished for trout in tailwaters in Texas, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Oklahoma. Constant cold water, with lots of bugs, that’s the ticket. In all of those places there may be great fishing on free-flowing rivers, but it’s likely not for trout.

Currently there’s a backlash against dams. It’s impossible to build a major new dam, and there’s been a rash of much-heralded dam removals in recent years. Dams can cost more to maintain than the value of any electricity produced, they reduce access to historic spawning grounds for Pacific and Atlantic salmon and other less glamorous fish, and water evaporates and impoundments silt up so that reservoirs fail at their task of water storage. Neglected dams are also dangerous for folks down-river.

Non-native fish pose similar emotional qualms as tailwaters, whether the fish were last stocked one week or 100 years ago. In the Swift, there are brook trout, rainbow trout, and brown trout, but only the brook trout are native to New England. One of the reasons for the Swift’s popularity in Massachusetts–and it’s the most popular freshwater fly-fishing water in Massachusetts–is that it produces large native brook trout, and large brook trout are no longer easy to come by in their native range. Most places the brookies have been pushed out by non-native rainbows and browns. The rainbows are descendants of California stocks, the browns were brought over from Europe, and in the Swift both naturally reproduce and are still being stocked.

For me there is a resonance to catching a native brookie in Massachusetts that’s not there with an introduced rainbow, or a native cutthroat in New Mexico versus an introduced rainbow or brown. One supposes that catching a brown in Scotland feels more authentic than catching an Arkansas brown, and if anybody would like to fly me to Scotland I’d like to find out. Are there native browns in Greenland, or only arctic char? Is that why we want to annex Greenland, so that we’ll have someplace American to catch native browns?

I was thinking about this stuff on the Swift because for most knowledgeable fly fishers native fish in free-flowing rivers in wild places is the ideal. Getting ready for Massachusetts, I re-read Walden, in part because it’s an essential Massachusetts book and in part because I was looking for hints as to why the notion of wildness matters.5 The apparent threats to public land by the current Washington administration also had me thinking about wild places, and, weirdly enough, I was contemplating my own human frailty. I likely won’t be able to traipse off into wild places much longer, so to me their value increases as my opportunities decrease.

There are about 111.7 million acres of designated wilderness on American public land. That’s roughly the size of California, and more than half of our wilderness is in Alaska. The 1964 Wilderness Act defines wilderness as land where the earth is “untrammeled by man, where man is a visitor . . .” Bob Marshall, the founder of the Wilderness Society and the namesake of the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana, defined wilderness as a region “which contains no permanent inhabitants, possesses no possibility of conveyance by any mechanical means[,] and is sufficiently spacious that a person in crossing it must have the experience of sleeping out.”6

But rivers and saltwater and lakes are a little different than big tracts of wilderness. There are few big rivers that you can’t travel with a jetboat, and a lot of perfectly fishable rivers flow down by the golf course and then under the bridge. They are fishable when suburban and even urban. In rivers, though, you can capture a bit of wildness in the most mundane places. Fishing has taken me to plenty of truly wild places. I have flown into high mountain rivers, boated miles up rivers where there was no other mechanical access, ridden horses to mountain lakes in Argentina, fished in national parks in Cuba and the Everglades, and all of it with the weak and wholly unnecessary excuse that I wanted to catch fish. I have also now parked at an industrial park to walk down the improved running path to look for trout in the Swift River in Massachusetts, and I’ve done similar walks in thousands of other places. Was one experience better than the other? Was one more pure?

Well yeah, probably, but the water on the Swift is clear and clean. The approaches take a bit of effort, at least for an old man. The fish are beautiful, strong, and fat. When I’m playing a fish, I don’t really consider that I’m fishing behind a dam and not hundreds of miles from the nearest pavement.

Marshall wrote that we receive physical and psychological benefits from visiting wilderness: physical health from wilderness travel, mental independence from the challenge, satisfaction of an innate craving for adventure, and an opportunity for contemplation and repose not present in the daily business of busy lives.

We also receive intangible esthetic benefits. There is, he says, “the undisputed beauty of the primeval.” This is a constant theme of American writing, whether it’s about the magnificence of a great white whale or the quietly contemplative beauty of finning trout beneath a bridge. Emerson, a Massachusetts guy, suggests that it is in nature that we can strip away the distractions of our mundane world to fully engage with beauty.7

That other Concord, Massachusettian,8 Henry David Thoreau, does his mentor and friend Emerson proud. At different times I’ve thought that Walden was a mechanic’s discussion of housing costs, a gardener’s discussion on how to grow beans, or a surveyor’s discussion of the depth of a pond, but in his sidling way Thoreau suggests something more subtle, that only if we from time to time reduce to essentials can we we truly engage with what’s important.

I don’t think it’s an accident that Thoreau published Walden in Massachusetts in 1854, and that Charles F. Orvis opened his store in Vermont in 1856. One didn’t lead to the other, as far as I know Charles F. didn’t sell copies of Walden next to the dog beds, but they were, I think, a part of the same impulse. 1850s America was one of our most fractious times, loaded with national disputes verging on violence, not unlike today. Parts of the Northeast and New England were changing fast, from agrarian to industrial, from rural to urban, and both Walden and Orvis evidence a yearning for the natural world that was being lost. Bob Marshall (or John Muir, or Aldo Leopold, or Wendell Berry, or Gary Snyder) was still addressing that yearning for Eden well into the next century. The rest of us are still buying fly rods.

We fished two days on the Swift. It was a quick trip, one day flying to Hartford, Connecticut, then driving 50 miles to Palmer, Massachusetts, two days fishing, and then one day home. We fished with Matt Tempesta of Tempco Flyfishing, an Orvis-endorsed guide, and it was a joy. Matt is former career infantry, and he has that easy, confident, genial bearing that the best of ex-military have. He’s still a very young man, at least as I measure these things. He loves the Swift, and he seemed proud and delighted to show it to us.

The first day we waded and walked, and from the bank Matt would study water looking for fish. In a lot of the upper river the fish were apparently hanging out in places where we weren’t. Much of our first day we walked the upper mile of the river, isolated from development by a wildlife management area, looking for fish more than fishing. It’s a fine way to fish, and a better way to get introduced to water, though I will note that they have ups and downs in Massachusetts that we don’t have on the Southeast Texas Coastal Plain. There were times during the day when it seemed to me that notwithstanding Bob Marshall, some mechanical uphill conveyance would be the very thing.

Kris outfished me again, and on the first day she caught a couple of rainbows at the Y–the famous Y–immediately below the dam.9 I caught nothing. For one reason or another I hadn’t cast a fly rod in months, and my cast, which is usually pretty good, was trash. Matt kept complimenting Kris’s cast and making suggestions for mine. I hate fly rods.

That night it snowed. It was April and it snowed. At home in Houston my tomatoes were well-along to producing fruit.

We fished the next day out of Matt’s raft in the lower river. I fished either a single nymph under an indicator or small streamers, but I never caught anything on a streamer. One of the remarkable things about the Swift is that over its short distance it continually changes, so that the narrow sections near the dam broaden and allow drift fishing. In some sense the Swift is several different rivers held together by the same water. I had better luck fishing from the boat, and on the second day caught a fine native brookie and a rainbow. Kris got the prize though, catching an unexpected pickerel. I had never seen one, and notwithstanding what Mr. Thoreau said,10 it’s an ugly fish, primeval and vicious, the smaller cousin of pike and muskie, a predator.

Matt had brought us a beer to end the day, and we stood by the launch and drank a bit. As I recall the scene, Matt was wearing a tee shirt and shorts, working on his tan. Kris and I were huddled together shivering. After a day in the wind on Massachusetts’ water, we were way out of our comfort zone. It would snow even more that night, and us poor Houstonians weren’t up for more cold. We left the last of the beer in the can, piled into the car, and turned on the heat. Then we turned up the heat. That was plenty enough wilderness for one day.

  1. The water is cold because it’s released from deep in the lake. The water temperature isn’t affected by air temperature. ↩︎
  2. Or 7. Or 31. Or 25. I’ve never found a consistent number for the length of the Swift below the dam. Somebody surely knows it, but I don’t. It’s short. The first mile below the dam is fly-fishing only. Or maybe it’s the first two miles. ↩︎
  3. 460 miles. For comparison, the Mississippi is 2,340 miles. The longest river that flows through Texas, the Rio Grande, is 1,896 miles. ↩︎
  4. The Glen Canyon Dam at Lee’s Ferry is the largest dam to ever be proposed for removal. It’s a stupid dam that loses about 6% of the Colorado River’s water to evaporation, and has always been controversial. It is great for recreation, and below the dam there’s a fine tailwater fishery. Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang revolves around a plot to blow up the Glen Canyon Dam. It’s not going to get taken out any time soon, either through official channels or by The Monkey Wrench Gang, so you’ve still got plenty of time to go fish there. ↩︎
  5. (1854) I feel like I need to say that Walden is by Henry David Thoreau. A few years ago in an adult Spanish class I made a joke about Walden and the Louisianan sitting next to me didn’t know what it was. They do things different in Louisiana, and he clearly had never had Pat Miller for American Literature. He was a very handsome young man, and he was learning Spanish for his trips to bars in Mexico, but I thought he should also spend some time reading Walden. For some reason he was very proud that he’d never read Romeo and Juliet, and never would. ↩︎
  6. Bob Marshall, “The Problem of the Wilderness”, Scientific Monthly 30 (2), February 1930. ↩︎
  7. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature” (1836). I have read some Emerson, but find him archaic and almost unreadable. He always baffles me, so I may be making this up. ↩︎
  8. Massachusetter? Massachusatonian? ↩︎
  9. Fish stack up at the Y, but so do anglers. We fished there about an hour. We were there early on a Thursday work-day morning, and two people arrived while we fished and two more were arriving when we were leaving. The usual notions of fishing etiquette don’t work at the Y, and the anglers closely line the prime water without the usual regard for distance. That’s ok. I didn’t hook anybody. ↩︎
  10. Thoreau loved to fish, and he loved pickerel. I quoted Thoreau on pickerel before, but it bears repeating:
    “Ah, the pickerel of Walden! . . . They are not green like the pines, nor gray like the stones, nor blue like the sky; but they have, to my eyes, if possible, yet rarer colors, like flowers and precious stones, as if they were the pearls, the animalized nuclei or crystals of the Walden water.” Walden, The Pond in Winter. I still reckon that they’re kinda ugly, but then I’ve never caught one. ↩︎

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Lots of Trout, Au Sable River, August 18-19, 2024 (42)

Michigan’s Au Sable River has been a fly-fishing destination for a century or so, and Gates Au Sable Lodge was built on the Au Sable in 1970, so it’s a bit more than a half-century old. People go to the Au Sable to fish, or maybe when it starts to get cold they go there to hunt, but I’m not aware that there’s anything else that’s much of a draw. It’s not well-known for spa treatments.

The Lodge is a classic. When Gates Au Sable Lodge opened in 1970, “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” was the number one song. The Beatles released Let It Be in 1970, then they broke up the same year. I was a high school freshman. That’s old.

The fish we caught in the Au Sable weren’t big, most were only seven or eight inches, but they were very pretty and both of us caught a few larger rainbows. Ok, Kris caught two larger rainbows and I caught one, but who’s counting? In any case we caught a lot of fish. Michigan guides have to report fish counts to the state, so for once we kept count. Between us we caught 27 trout the first day and 15 the second half-day, more or less. Still, that’s a lot of fish, and on each day we each caught exactly the same number of fish, more or less.

The Au Sable was originally a grayling river, then the grayling died off from over-fishing and logging and were replaced by stocked trout. There’s no longer any stocking in the Au Sable, so even if today’s trout aren’t native, all of the trout are wild. We each caught brook trout, rainbows, and browns, so we each had an Au Sable slam. I guess the size of most of the fish made them more of petite slams than grand.

Our guide, Lance Nelson, guides for Gates Lodge. He had us fish a nymph dropper beneath a surface dry fly with 7x tippet, but we didn’t fish out of Au Sable boats. They’re pirogues adapted for Michigan lumbering by Louisiana lumbermen, and then re-adapted for fly fishing. Instead of being rowed or paddled they’re poled like a pirogue. The guide poles from the back seat, and the anglers sit in the middle and the front. Lance says he owns one, but that they’re not much fun for two anglers. The second angler in the center of the boat is pretty restricted, and sitting in the center makes it hard for that angler to fish.

I’m sure Kris wouldn’t have minded sitting in the center. And that varnished wood is very pretty

We fished out of a standard fiberglass drift boat, with the guide in the center and me in the worst seat regardless of where I was sitting. Kris caught more fish than me, though I’m certain we caught exactly the same number.

The 7x tippet deserves at least a passing glance. The leader goes between the fly line and the fly, and the tippet is the last bit of the leader that ties to the fly. Normally a trout guide would use 4x tippet for nymphs underwater, and 5x for dry flies on the surface. As far as I know, until the Au Sable, I had never fished with 7x tippet. It must have worked, because we caught a lot of fish. We each caught exactly the same number of fish, or maybe I caught a few more.

The leader, including the tippet, is usually about nine feet long. It gets progressively smaller from the fly line to the fly, so where it attaches to the fly line a trout leader might be 20 lb. test, and where the tippet ties to the fly it might be 4 or 5 lbs. For bass and redfish I normally fish about 16 lb. tippet, which is big stuff, but neither bass nor redfish are tippet shy. In very clear slow water trout can be very shy, and 7x tippet, which is about as fine as a fine hair, is intended for the shyest of trout. The 7x fluorocarbon is typically about 2 lb. test.

I don’t own any 7x tippet, and I don’t want to.

Michigan was our 42nd state to fish, so I ought by now to be better at describing things, but every place is different, and I really haven’t been unhappy anywhere. Still, fishing in Michigan made me very happy. Traveling state to state we’ve encountered places that surprised me, and places that were hard. We’ve fished places that met expectations, and places that inspired awe. Michigan wasn’t exactly any of those. We were in the Northwoods on an approachable river with a good guide at a good lodge and we caught fish. The leaves there were beginning to change, and the brookies were beginning to put on their spawning colors. Can something be a memory when you haven’t done it before? It wasn’t déjà vu, but more like Plato and that cave. It was like glimpsing the archetype of what fishing is supposed to be. Quiet, contemplative, friendly, a bit technical but not too technical. There was nothing between us and what God had made.

I could fish that river again and again and be happy.

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Michigan

The best thing ever written about fishing, Hemingway’s Big Two-Hearted River, is set in Michigan. There are two paragraphs at the start of the story that I re-read often. Do high school students still read Big Two-Hearted River, or is it dated, something for old men to remember from when they were young? I loved it 50 years ago in high school, I’ve loved it when I’ve read it since, though when I first read it I suspect I was more interested in how the tarp was pitched than in Nick Adams’s post-war trauma.

Nick looked at the burned-out stretch of hillside, where he had expected to find the scattered houses of the town and then walked down the railroad track to the bridge over the river. The river was there. It swirled against the log piles of the bridge. Nick looked down into the clear, brown water, colored from the pebbly bottom, and watched the trout keeping themselves steady in the current with wavering fins. As he watched them they changed their positions by quick angles, only to hold steady in the fast water again. Nick watched them a long time.

He watched them holding themselves with their noses into the current, many trout in deep, fast moving water, slightly distorted as he watched far down through the glassy convex surface of the pool, its surface pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of the log-driven piles of the bridge. At the bottom of the pool were the big trout. Nick did not see them at first. Then he saw them at the bottom of the pool, big trout looking to hold themselves on the gravel bottom in a varying mist of gravel and sand, raised in spurts by the current.

I understood though, even at 16, why fishing the swamp would be left for another day. It’s not a difficult story, it’s simple and direct, but it’s very beautiful.

So because of a short story I’ve saved Michigan until close to the end of our project. In Michigan I want to find a bridge and look down into the river. I want to look for fish holding in the current. If I’m lucky enough to see any trout I want to watch as they feed.

Geography and Grayling

The lower Michigan peninsula is shaped like a mitten, which everybody knows, but that’s not the amazing thing about Michigan geography. The amazing thing about Michigan geography is that it’s mostly bordered by freshwater, by four of the five great lakes, from left to right, Superior, Michigan, Huron, and Erie. It has the longest freshwater boundary of any state, and has the highest percentage of area covered by water of all of the states. It is second only to Alaska for total water area.

Waterways and lakes of Michigan, https://gisgeography.com/michigan-lakes-rivers-map/.

The upper Michigan peninsula, the U.P., juts out into Lakes Superior and Michigan from northeast Wisconsin, and is separated from the Lower Peninsula by the narrow strait of Mackinac. If life were fair and rational the U.P. would be part of Wisconsin, but Michigan got it because of its southern border. Do you see that protrusion in the south? Michigan claims that its southern border should have been drawn further south. When Ohio became a state in 1803, Michigan was still a territory with no votes in Congress, and by political fiat Congress gave Toledo to Ohio over Michigan’s objections. Relations got pretty testy between inhabitants of the two states, and to calm things down Congress gave Michigan the Upper Peninsula. Michigan didn’t like it, but, honestly, it got the better deal.

I don’t think Wisconsin got anything, but it still ended up with all the good cheese.

Northern Michigan is heavily forested, and early Michigan fortunes were made in timber. The native fish of Northern Michigan was the grayling, a char that needs cold clean water and can be found now in Canada and Alaska. Logging killed off Michigan’s native grayling. It also damaged the native brook trout populations, which were the trout that Hemingway likely described. Streams were restocked with browns and rainbow trout from Europe and the Pacific Northwest, and with more brook trout. We’ll fish near the City of Grayling, population 1,917, in the center of the Lower Peninsula. In Grayling there are no longer any grayling.

Arctic Grayling, Evermann, Barton W., and Goldsborough, Edmund Lee, The Fishes of Alaska (1907), Washington D.C., Department of Commerce and Labor Bureau of Fisheries.

We’ll fish the Au Sable River. There is a different Au Sable River in New York, which is also a fly fishing river. They are pronounced differently, but according to any random Frenchman, both American pronunciations are wrong. I can’t remember how to pronounce the name of either the Michigan or the New York river, but in French it would be pronounced something like oh Sah-bleh. That’s the only one I’m reasonably sure of.

As logging slowed, Michigan’s south was already selling Fords and Olds and Cadillacs. With mass production of cars, Michigan changed how we do everything, and by the 1920s, Detroit was the center of the automobile universe. It was the fourth largest U.S. city (and home of one of my favorite baseball players, Hank Greenberg). Grayling was visited by the likes of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, but to fish, not to cut timber.

Frank Lyeria, Hank Greenberg, the Hebrew Hammer, 1946, The Sporting News archives.

Michigan geology divides more or less into two parts, the U.P. and the Lower Peninsula. There are the Huron Mountains in the far northwest U.P., the highest peak of which, Mount Arvon, is 1,979 feet. It’s the highest peak in Michigan. Other than the Hurons, Michigan is pretty flat. Actually, even with the Hurons it’s pretty flat.

Both peninsulas are mostly bedrock covered with glacial drift. Apparently there are different ages of bedrock, and the older it gets the better it is for mining, and the oldest and the best mining is in the U.P., so take that, Toledo. The glacial remains have a good bit of variation, but regardless one typically doesn’t go to Michigan to see the rocks. When comparing topography shaped by glaciers and topography shaped by continental plate collisions, go for the collisions every time. That means if you want to look at rocks, go to Utah not Michigan.

Politics

In 2016, with 63% turnout, Donald Trump carried Michigan by about 9,000 votes, 2,279,543 to 2,268,839. In 2020, with 73% turnout, Joe Biden carried Michigan by about 150,000 votes, 2,804,040 to 2,649,852. It’s about 60 days until the 2024 election. According to the New York Times, current polling averages show Kamala Harris leading in Michigan 48% to 47%, and that’s almost certainly well within the margins of error for the underlying polls. If Harris carries Michigan and Wisconsin (where polling is running about the same), she would likely need only one additional marginal state, North Carolina, Georgia, or Pennsylvania, to carry the election. On the flip side, if Trump manages to carry Michigan, then like as not Harris has lost.

It’ll be kinda fun to be out of Texas and into a state where there’s actual electioneering going on.

From Wikipedia, Michigan State Legislature.

I check the polling about every three minutes, so if anything changes I’ll let you know.

Michigan’s governor is Democratic, as are both of its senators, seven of its 13 members of congress, and both houses of its state legislature (in each case by two-vote margins). It’s a tight squeeze for the Democrats. Its governor, Gretchen Whitmer, was considered as a possible running mate for Kamala Harris.

There is also a U.S. Senate race in progress in Michigan, where the incumbent, Democrat Debbie Stabenow, is unexpectedly retiring. According to polling, the Democratic candidate, Elissa Slotkin, leads the Republican Mike Rogers in the polls.

Population

There are 10,077,331 people in Michigan as of the 2020 census. About 18% of population claims German ancestry, 11% English. About 62% of the population is Anglo, 12.4% Black alone, 18.7% Hispanic, and 6% Asian. Ten percent of the population reports as two or more races. The population is heavily concentrated in the south.

Michigan was part of the Ohio Territory and was admitted as a state in 1837. It didn’t grow as early or as quickly as neighboring Ohio, but once it did start adding population, it piled it on. In 1870, the population was 1,184,059. By 1910 it was 2,810,173, so in 40 years its population more than doubled. Between 1910 and 1920, Michigan grew by 30.5%, to 3,668,412, and between 1920 and 1930 it grew another 32%, to 4,842,325. You can almost see the cars pour into America out of Detroit and Flint.

Then Michigan growth slowed. Because of the loss of industrial jobs, Detroit went from the nation’s fourth largest city to a cautionary tale of white flight, high crime, and unemployment. In 1967 there were the Detroit riots. In 1971, there were more than 600 homicides in Detroit. Between 1971 and 1973, there were 84 killings by police. It was the Wild West. When I came to Houston in the 1980s, there was constant patter about the number of Michigan license plates on the streets. It was the age of Robocop and Roger & Me. Detroit was declining. Houston was on a tear.

In the 2010 census Michigan actually lost population.

Phil Cherner, Detroit, Michigan, 1967, www.philcherner.com, by permission. Thanks Phil.

By 2013, Detroit’s population had dropped from 1.8 million in 1950 to 700,000. Detroit was broke, violent, unemployed, bleeding all but its poorest population, and in 2013 it filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history.

As late as 2018 Detroit had the fourth highest murder rate among major cities, but it’s improved in recent years. In 2023 Detroit had its lowest number of homicides since 1966, with 252. Houston had 348. It’s finances seem under control, and it has invested in its central city. Violent crime is still high, with 2,028 violent crimes–murder, rape, robbery, assault–per 100,000 people, compared to a national average in 2023 of 369 per 100,000. Based on its violent crime rate, Detroit remains the second most dangerous city in the U.S., second only to Memphis and ahead of Little Rock, Arkansas.

Little Rock? Really? I love Memphis, but I always think of Little Rock as nigh onto rural. I did once spend an interesting afternoon there in a tornado.

I’m excited to see Detroit. We’re staying downtown in the new Shinola Hotel. The downtown architecture is terrific, and the Institute of Art is supposed to be among the world’s best museums. Municipal services like street lights and garbage pick-up have been restored, plus the Tigers have always had the classiest uniforms in baseball.

Where We Won’t Go

We won’t see Mackinac Island, or Traverse City. We won’t visit the U.P. , or drive through the U.P. to Wisconsin. We won’t visit Holland, Michigan, where my parents bought my sister a pair of wooden shoes when I was one. The shoes were very uncomfortable, and I learned early that I was not cut out to be Dutch.

We won’t see the Detroit Tigers play, because they’ll be on the road. We will not make it to the Motown Museum because it’s closed on the days we’ll be in Detroit. I do promise, however, to hum “Baby Love” at least once an hour, and largely because of Motown my Michigan music playlist is magnificent.

Chris Butcher, Hitsville USA, 2006, public domain.

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Lee’s Ferry, Rainbow Trout, June 24, 2024 (39)

Lee’s Ferry is the only place in Northern Arizona where steep canyons don’t surround the Colorado River. In 1872, John D. Lee established Lees Ferry, also known as Lee’s Ferry (with an apostrophe) and Saint’s Ferry, at the direction of the Mormon Church. Five years later, in 1877, Lee was the only person executed for the murders by Mormon militia of 120 gentile men, women, and children at the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre.

In 1939, Lee’s Ferry was cinematically burned by Apache warriors in John Ford’s Stagecoach, though in the movie the ferry’s location had migrated to Southern Arizona. Stagecoach is a great movie, but its geography surely is imaginative.

Standing on the west bank of the Colorado and looking left upriver is Glen Canyon National Recreation Area topped by the Glen Canyon Dam, about 15 river miles away. To your right is the Grand Canyon, which continues for 277 miles. Everything left and right is steep canyon. Lee’s Ferry is the only crossing.

Lee’s Ferry isn’t usually spelled with an apostrophe, and Lees Ferry is how it appears on maps (if it appears at all). I recall that some Park Service signage uses Lee’s, but that may be wishful thinking, and Lees is far more common. I’m a stickler for apostrophes though, and its painful for me to leave it out.

Lee’s Ferry is the staging point for raft trips through the Grand Canyon, and it’s a busy place. It’s also popular for sit-on-top kayaks. Outfitters ferry boatloads of kayakers about ten miles upriver from the ferry past Horseshoe Bend, then drop off the kayakers who paddle home. This is not technical whitewater kayaking, and there’s a lot of traffic.

If you have good enough resolution on your computer, there are some little white specks in the river in Kris’s photo of Horseshoe Bend. The specks that aren’t rocks are kayaks.

Thirty years ago Lee’s Ferry was the Southwestern Mecca of big trout, lots of big trout. Wendy and Terry Gunn owned Lees Ferry Anglers and they were famous, at least among fly fishers. My friend Mark says he remembers an issue of Fly Rod and Reel–you remember magazines?–with Wendy Gunn visibly pregnant on the cover. Ladies could fly fish! Even pregnant ladies could fly fish!

Their son, who would have been in utero on the magazine cover, is now in his 20s and runs Kayak Horeshoe Bend, an offshoot of Lees Ferry Anglers. It’s a kayak ferry and rental service. He rescued us when the starter on our guide’s jet boat conked.

Glen Canyon Dam was completed in 1966, and it was always controversial. The Sierra Club hates Glen Canyon Dam, Monkey Wrenchers plan to blow it up, and its success for water storage is dubious. It does, however, let trout thrive where no trout have thriven before. Fly fishers (who tend towards the environmental side of the ledger) may feel queasy about Glen Canyon Dam, but that doesn’t mean they’re not going to fish it. Big wild trout? Lots of big wild trout? You gotta fish that.

Something happened though, and since its heyday the number and size of trout in the river have decreased. Terry Gunn speculated that trout sizes decreased because of the introduction of bad genes from stocked fish during the 90s, or maybe from the reduction of raw sewage from the Town of Page–there’s nothing like just the right dollop of raw sewage to boost insect life. Current studies posit that the drop in numbers of big fish is caused by increased water temperatures, reduced nutrients, reduced dissolved oxygen, and increased numbers of predatory brown trout. Some of the reduction may be drought related, some global warming related, or maybe those are both the same thing.

They should think about adding some raw sewage. It’d probably be good for all those kayakers too.

There are still a whole lotta fish, and fish or no fish, it’s beautiful, with clear green water surrounded by steep red canyons. I can kinda understand why most of those kayakers forgot their fly rods. By all reports there are still big fish in the river. The fish we caught were somewhere around 16 inches or a bit north, and they were solid, healthy wild rainbows. We caught plenty. I caught the first fish early, and Kris caught the last fish late, and we caught a bunch in between. We never worried we wouldn’t catch our Arizona fish.

We fished with Natalie Jensen of Lees Ferry Anglers, who started working for the Gunns in their fly shop in 1995, and started guiding at Lee’s Ferry in 2006. Weirdly Natalie was only our second woman guide. We actually delayed our trip a day to fish with Natalie.

Guides use jet boats on the Colorado. There has to be some kind of motor to get upriver, and jet boats work better than propellers in rocky water.

Natalie’s boat was big, heavy, aluminum, with a Ford inboard V-8. It had a Bimini top, because in Arizona bringing along some shade is a brilliant idea. One of us stood at the back of the boat casting and singing hey-nonny-nonny, carefree as a meadow lark, while the other stood at the front singing blow blow thou winter wind because he had convinced himself that he couldn’t clear the Bimini with his backcast. Which one of us was a walking breathing puddle of mess, unable to throw a fly line? I’m still traumatized.

Natalie would also say that I’m one of the most accomplished line tanglers who ever graced her boat. I spent a goodly part of the morning trying to untangle my line, and after I’d made the tangle worse trying to untangle it, I’d hand the whole mess over to Natalie. She’d keep the boat on track, clear my tangle, continue to give Kris advice, and make it all look easy. Good guides are born to multitask.

We were fishing a double nymph rig, with two flies under split shot and a bobber, so I might as well have been wearing my “Here to Tangle” tee shirt. Layering in my perfectly unreasonable phobia about casting over the Bimini just made things worse. I really should remember to take photos of some of my better tangles. You don’t get my full fishing experience without contemplating a really good tangle.

Natalie was patient though. By mid-morning I had settled down. I remembered that she had said to make a high lift off the water, and I changed my cast so I was making her high lift with a kind of big loop over my left shoulder instead of over the Bimini. It worked ok. I spent the rest of the day without tangles. Ok, mostly without tangles.

Early on I would try to set the hook by lifting my rod left upriver. Mostly Natalie used the oars to keep the boat drifting stern first, so on the bow I was at the back of the boat. We fished mostly to the right of the boat, and left was upriver. I don’t why, but that upriver strike seemed like a good idea, but it pulled the fly away from the fish. Natalie told me to strike straight up, which after the first few misses I managed. After that I still lost a few fish, but not many. I caught a lot more.

How many fish did I catch? Of course I have no clue. I can’t count past one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish, and then I lose track. I caught a pretty good number of fish. Kris caught a pretty good number of fish. It was a day of a pretty good number of pretty fish on a pretty river.

Late in the day the boat’s starter died. It had been cranky all day, but it had the grace to wait to die until the day was almost over. Natalie rowed to keep us out of trouble, Kris kept fishing–now with a big foam cicada fly on the surface–and I daydreamed about the S.S. Minnow and how when we were marooned I’d have to be Gilligan. The Gunn’s son came to rescue us. We listened to the cicadas get active in the afternoon, and we could see them flying off the cliff face. We saw bighorn sheep on the shore. Kris caught a last fish, a brown trout on the dry cicada pattern. I put my rod away and managed to do it without getting tangled.