Tag: Washington

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Olympic Peninsula Steelhead, February 9-10, 2020.

I didn’t catch a steelhead on the Olympic Peninsula. I caught fish. I foul-hooked a couple of whitefish, landed two or three small rainbow—I remember a par and a smolt—and caught one nice 18” rainbow. I also caught a Dolly Varden. I didn’t know that Dolly Varden are named after a Charles Dickens character from the novel Barnaby Rudge, 1841. Dolly Varden are a pretty fish, with bright silver and pastel yellow jewels along their back and sides. Naming a pretty fish after a pretty Dickens’ character is such a 19th century sort of thing, you gotta like it.  There was also a style of women’s dresses called Dolly Varden, which I suspect was named after the Dickens’ character and not the fish. The dress doesn’t much resemble the fish.

William Powell Frith, Dolly Varden, 1842, oil on canvass, The Victoria and Albert Museum. This is not the fish.

Kris had worse luck than me.  She foul-hooked a whitefish, and her waders leaked. She was cold and wet and miserable the first day. It looks like a manufacturer’s defect, so back to Patagonia they go.  

We fished with Ryan Steen of The Evening Hatch, and stayed at The Evening Hatch’s lodge on Lake Quinault.  We don’t stay at a lot of lodges, but they are fun, and when we have, in Argentina and Belize, it’s been pretty luxurious, for us pretty glamorous. The Evening Hatch lodge wasn’t exactly luxurious, but it was very nice and the food was great and the coffee was excellent. It was less like a glamorous destination than when as a kid we visited my aunts’ house in Texarkana. The food was great at my aunts’ house too, though both aunts being Church of Christ there was nothing to drink but ice tea. Jeff and Jan Cotrell ran the lodge, and filled in well for relatives. If they weren’t younger than us they’d have made a great uncle and aunt. If we’d just played a bunch of dominoes it would have been my childhood all over again. 

I caught the Dolly Varden on the Quinault River, above Lake Quinault. We floated from early to late, I’d guess six or seven miles, alternating between wading and swinging streamers with Spey rods, and nymphing with artificial salmon eggs, either plastic beads or yarn. The eggs were seven or eight feet under a bobber, and the point was to let the egg drift deep while we rafted downriver.  We were fishing 9 foot 8 weights, with the bead drifting below a swivel and lead pencil weight crimped to the leader. Some folk would say that’s not fly fishing at all, but it takes some care to throw that monstrous rig without damaging your guide or yourself. I mostly managed.

Dolly Varden trout, Salvelinus malma malma, adult female, The Fishes of Alaska, 1906, Bulletin of the Bureau of Fisheries, Vol. XXVI, P. 360, Plate XL. Wikimedia Commons.

On the single hand rods we fished floating lines with a 30 lb nylon mono butt to 20 lb mono and finally to 15 lb tippet. When the bobber bobbed Ryan yelled SET! SET! SET!, and if I wasn’t watching the scenery I usually did. The set was sidearm, upstream, not a straight up trout set and not a strip set.  The idea was to pull the bead out of the mouth and pull the hook trailing the bead into the mouth. The rig is supposed to result in fewer foul or deep hook sets for trout and steelhead, though because of their small mouths the poor white fish that went after the eggs were always foul-hooked, outside the mouth and in its skin. Maybe that’s why Western anglers don’t really like whitefish. It’s all that foul-hooking guilt.

In the river we drifted the egg along the seams and in the softer water just beyond the seams, and we caught a lot of trees, both drifting and casting.  Poor Ryan lost a fortune in plastic beads and octopus hooks. 

The Olympic Peninsula is a beautiful place, and the rain forest reminded me oddly of New York City back in the 80s, where if you stood still too long you’d get graffitied. Instead of spray paint the rain forest covers everything with moss. It’s lush, with each nook and cranny covered with something green and growing: ferns, moss, the largest red cedar in the world, the largest Sitka spruce in the world, the largest . . . Oh hell, I don’t know. Just about the largest every kind of tree except mesquite and mangrove, and they were probably there too until somebody logged them.  

This is northern spotted owl country, which from its photos is a lovely little owl that doesn’t really deserve its notoriety, but it’s not an easy place for people to live either. There’s tension between the wildness of the place and its human inhabitants. Ryan tells good stories about the area, insightful stories, about backwoods North Carolinians who moved there a century before for logging, and who still live in isolated backwoods pockets; about Theodore Roosevelt creating the national park to save the elk wintering ground for hunters and how he incidentally saved the rivers for salmon and steelhead; about tribal netting of salmon and steelhead; about boom and bust logging and the minimal old growth forests preserved for the spotted owl. 

It can’t be an easy place to live, either for the remaining tribal nations or the loggers, the commercial fishers, or the small business owners. The population is estimated to be a bit more than 100,000, or about 28 people per square mile, which is 15 more people per square mile than my hometown county in Texas, but still . . . It feels more remote, especially on the west side, and especially in the midst of all that isolating forest. Plus in West Texas we had oil and cotton and wheat and cattle, they’ve got trees and fish and tourism, tourism and fish and trees, and balancing wild places with making a living can’t be easy. It’s probably better now. At least for loggers and millworkers forest land is probably better managed, but it will never be perfect, and there’s always spotted owls to blame.

The flip side of all that fecundity is the rivers. The rivers aren’t rich with all the good things trout love, insects, baitfish, crawfish, there are few of them. The rainfall scours the rivers too often, much of the flow is glacial melt or spring water or rainfall, without a lot of organic stuff taking hold, and there’s not the richness in the water that grows concentrations of trout. There is some stuff, but the wealth in the rivers on the Olympic Peninsula is its access to saltwater. It’s salmon in the fall and steelhead in the winter that make the rivers great fishing, but it’s ultimately access to the Pacific, to baitfish and glass shrimp, that make the coastal rivers a destination fishery.

Kris didn’t have all the bad luck.  I failed a cast—this is an important life lesson. You have to end the snap of the snap-T with the rod tip in or near the water or the weighted fly will slam into your rod tip and snap it. Notwithstanding its name, that’s not what the snap-T is all about, it’s not the snap-tip. It was operator error, but operator error that Beulah the rod maker will repair with a small contribution from the operator.  Thank heavens for no-fault rod warranties.

The second day fishing we didn’t swing flies. I don’t know if it was because Ryan wanted to cover more water (we covered a lot of water), or because he was worried about Kris’s wader leak and wanted her to stay dry and warm (relatively warm anyway—we are, after all, from Houston), or maybe because he was sick of watching us flail around with Spey rods and wanted to watch us flail around with single handed rods (I don’t blame him, variety is the spice and all that). We were on a different river, the Clearwater, above where it joins the Queets. Fishing with Ryan was a bit like taking a river tour, only the sights to see were usually just the other side of that seam, closer to the bank, alongside that rock, and this is shallow. Every now and again he’d yell SET!

The Quinault ran through a broader bed with more channels and, as I recall, more riffles and rapids than the Clearwater. There was more rock in the river and on the banks, and more room between the river and the trees. The Clearwater ran in more of a channel, through heavier forest. 

On the Clearwater I came as close as we got to a steelhead. There was a set, a thrash, a feel that this 8 weight may be too small for this fish, a streak of silver at the surface . . . It was enough to know that this is a big fish, to wonder if I could handle this big of a fish, and then it was gone. Just that moment, it lasted no more than that, but then again that’s the kind of lost fish that lasts a lifetime.

We had two days of sun while on the river, and it was amusing that Ryan had no sunscreen in his kit. “The next ten days,” he told us, “it’s rain.” Of course for all I know he was just telling us a tall tale. It may never rain on the Olympic Peninsula, and may always be sunny. I do know there are steelhead though. For a few seconds I hooked a steelhead.  

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Rain Falling on Cedars

One night last week I woke up in the middle of the night and checked the Washington weather. There were flood warnings again on the Queets and Hoh Rivers. The next morning the Queets was over 13.5 feet, and running at over 15,000 cubic feet per second. I gather that flows below 4,000 cfs are considered safe for wading, so flows of 15,000 . . . Probably not. We were supposed to fish the next day, but we went sightseeing instead.

Meantime that day it was 46° in Quinault, Washington, and 37° in Houston. I didn’t run that morning in Houston; I might have in Quinault.

On social media I viewed a succession of snow pictures from friends in the Texas Panhandle and Vernon and Dallas, which all-in-all were more interesting than the news about the failed Iowa caucuses and the impeachment vote. On a lark I checked the temperatures through the Great Plains. That morning it was 16° in Vernon, Texas, 19° in Wichita, Kansas, 16° in Omaha, and 16° in Fargo, North Dakota. I hope my friends in Vernon were warm. It’s been 45 years since I left there, and I can still remember both the bitter Plains winds and the excitement of a cold, still morning when the earth was covered with snow.

Tra Cardwell, Vernon, Texas, February 5, 2020.

That night Jack called from The Evening Hatch to warn us about what we already knew, that the rivers were blown out for Saturday, but Sunday and Monday might be better.  I told him I could get in plenty of guitar practice on Saturday. He said good attitude. I didn’t tell him that attitude was fine but that what he should really wish for was a better guitarist. 

Getting ready for our trip to Washington I read some stuff by Washington State writers. I didn’t reread Trout Fishing in America, but Richard Brautigan was from Spokane. It’s the only Washington State book I ran across that was arguably about fly fishing, but I’d just re-read it two years ago when I started this exercise. I googled its genre because I figured Tom Robbins, a Seattle writer, was similar, and it might give me some insight into their mix of 60s sexual adventurism, improbable plots, and moral superiority. Magical realism came to mind, but I figured magical realism had to be South American, then I saw Robbins and Brautigan described as magical realists. As far as I can tell Washington State is decidedly not in South America, so maybe I was wrong.

But I also found their work described as Fabulism, which description I really liked, mostly because I initially mispronounced it “fab” as in “Fab Four,” and for me every good impulse in the 60s is summed up in the Beatles. Even if I didn’t exactly like Brautigan or Robbins or even the 60s. On reflection though I figured out it was Fabulism as in fable not Fabulism as in Fab Four, and that made more sense: these books are fables, adult fairy tales with lots of sex but still a moral. I suspect though that the moral is that having sex with the author is a good thing. Honestly, if all young male achievement is driven by the desire for sexual partners (and any male who doesn’t at least suspect that isn’t being entirely honest), Brautigan and Robbins may be the most honest writers ever, even if reading them’s a mixed bag, and if honesty by a fiction writer isn’t quite the point.

I remember pretty vividly the last time I read Tom Robbins, in 1976. The book was Another Roadside Attraction, and I remember the couch I was on and the room I was in when I read it, but I don’t remember anything about the novel itself. This time I tried to read Robbins’ memoir, Tibetan Peach Pie, which made me think of Robbins as the enfant terrible who I might have envied a long time ago; I tried to read the book about the sexual adventuress hitchhiker with the big thumb, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (which happily set off a several-month long binge of Emmylou Harris singing in my head), but I got bored; and I started his last novel, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, but I gave up after four pages, when he said a moth resembled a clitoris with wings. Sometimes a moth is just a moth.

I only got very far with one novel, his second, Still Life with Woodpecker. It’s about a red-headed terrorist bomber nicknamed the Woodpecker having sex with a red-headed princess from a deposed East European royal family.  The usual stuff. Sometimes Robbins can be an interesting observer: “That is why virtually every revolution in history has failed: the oppressed, as soon as they seize power, turn into the oppressors, resorting to totalitarian tactics to ‘protect the revolution.’ That is why minorities seeking the abolition of prejudice become intolerant, minorities seeking peace become militant, minorities seeking equality become self-righteous, and minorities seeking liberation become hostile . . .” Mostly though he’s only the enfant terrible: “And, of course, Bernard, as all men, carried around in his trousers the most renowned redhead of all—characteristically funny and dangerous.”

I don’t know whether I’ll finish “Still Life,” but I will recognize that woodpecker is certainly a double entendre, which is a lot of what you need to know about Tom Robbins.

The first 100 pages of Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette, may be the best travel guide to a city, Seattle, I’ve read. Early in the book Bernadette rants off-and-on about Seattle, and her rants describe the architecture, restaurants, rain, private schools, behavior, blackberry bushes . . . all the things that a good description would tell about a city. Bernadette is a bit of a Fabulist as well, and maybe that’s characteristic of a lot of post-WW II literature. But if Robbins’ characters achieve fulfillment through sex, Bernadette is surprisingly chaste: she only achieves fulfillment when she hitchhikes to Palmer Station in Antarctica and signs on to design the new South Pole station. Does that make it a women’s book? It does make me suspect that Maria Semple is built differently than Tom Robbins, and one is certain that Bernadette doesn’t have abnormally large thumbs, nor does she need them.

“They were young and scruffy, like they could all have worked at REI . . .” Was there ever a more Seattle-ish description of anything. 

Gunderson’s Snow Falling on Cedars is as far from Fabulism as it gets. It’s a lovely book, with a flaw, but still lovely, slow and descriptive, evocative of a place and unforgettable. It is a story about a death that might be a murder, an accused the reader suspects is wrongly accused, and a moral dilemma for a damaged man. It is a story about a moment in time, post-World War II, when pride in the community mixes with guilt over the treatment of neighbors and friends: the Japanese internment, and the place of the Japanese Americans in the post-war community. It’s a book about a small town, an island in Puget Sound, and people who at their best are careful, deliberate. Their island demands it. The flaw—the accused’s silence—is explainable if not entirely convincing, but then the novel would have been profoundly different if he’d told his story early, like how you can’t have The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn if there were a realistic ending.

There’s a good movie version, that looks just like the book reads. 

If I recommended a single book about the Pacific Northwest it would probably be Timothy Egan’s The Good Rain, and if I were to recommend a single book about the Texas and Oklahoma plains it would probably be Egan’s The Worst Hard Time. The Good Rain is an older book now, published in 1990, but Egan told me that I was going to a place where the best descriptions might be green, rivers, Pacific, mountains, logging booms and busts, and drip, drip, drip. For Oregon and Washington Egan talks about the right stuff, the history of the place, the natural world, and the people who could only come from there. The book holds up well.

Post script: there was an moment when we were driving through the Olympic Peninsula, re-listening to The Good Rain in the car, and Egan was describing the road we were on. Good timing.

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Mt. Olympus, Rain, and Bunny Leeches

Gurling, Mike. National Park Service, Mount Meany (right) and Mount Olympus, Olympic National Park, September, 1990.

Next Thursday we go to the Olympic Peninsula for steelhead. The Olympic Mountains cut through the center of the Peninsula, and their name evolved from the highest peak, 7,980 feet, which was dubbed Mount Olympus in 1778 by English captain John Meares. He thought the peak looked godly, or at least Greek. The name Olympus not only stuck, it spread to the mountain range and finally to the Peninsula.

It must have been a sunny day when Captain Meares saw Mount Olympus, because he actually saw it. Here’s next week’s forecast for Quinault, Washington, where we’ll stay. Quinault is on the rainy west side of the mountains.

Snow, sun, snow, rain, rain, rain, rain, sun, rain. There’s not a lot of promise for visibility. We will fish Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, but I’m thinking we should take the day off Sunday to sunbathe. The mountains create a rain shadow on the northeast side of the peninsula, so parts of the Peninsula have as little as 15 inches of rain a year, but we fish in the wet west. You’ve heard Seattle is wet and rainy? Well this is from whence those rumors arise. Drip, drip, drip.

At Quinault it rains 189.7 days per year, and winter when the steelhead come is the wettest season. The Quinault Steelheads could never actually complete a 162-game baseball season without a domed stadium. At Quinault average annual rainfall is 122 inches, 10 feet of rain each year, compared to a US average of 38 inches, plus there’s another 7 inches of snow. The average monthly winter rainfall for the Hoh Rainforest valley is 18.33 inches. The average annual rainfall for Lubbock, Texas, is 19.18 inches. I’m betting the Hoh Rainforest doesn’t look much like Lubbock.

Fog on the west side of the peninsula adds up to 30 additional inches of moisture to the rainforests each year. No wonder vampires love it.

Apple Maps.

Winter steelhead season, wild steelhead season, begins in February and ends in April. I’ve fished for steelhead once before, last year in Oregon, but those were summer steelhead, and winter steelhead are a different kettle of fish. Steelhead are ocean-dwelling rainbow trout that, like salmon, come back to their natal river to spawn, and they are often considered a species of Pacific salmon, but they’re genetically the same as rainbow trout which stay in freshwater snd are not considered a species of Pacific salmon. It gets confusing.

Anadromous. Steelhead (like resident rainbows) hatch in the spring or early summer and then (unlike resident rainbows) work their way to the ocean. The resident rainbow might reach five pounds (which would be huge). The ocean-dwelling steelhead, feeding on ocean shrimp and baitfish, might reach 20 pounds or more. After two or three years of growing, steelhead get notions for some hanky-panky and go back home. 

But going home can be early or late, depending on the steelhead’s genetics. Summer (and fall) steelhead come into the rivers before they are sexually mature. The early arrival is probably a reproduction strategy that gives summer steelhead time to move further inland. They may swim upriver a thousand miles or more. Winter steelhead on the other hand come into the rivers already hot and bothered, have their liaisons closer to saltwater and then, if they’re lucky, return to the ocean. Unlike the other Pacific salmon, steelhead can survive the spawn and return to spawn again next season. They don’t usually, maybe 10 percent or so return from a prior season, but they can. The rest of the Pacific salmon never swim back. They die.

National Forest Service, spawning steelhead.

Because winter steelhead are mature when they enter the river, they are much larger than summer steelhead. We had two spey rods for summer steelhead, a 6 wt. and a 7 wt. In our gear list for next week we were told to bring 8 and 9 wts. We’ll take a 7 and and the new 8 (don’t tell Kris), and otherwise use the outfitter’s rods. We’ll leave the 6 at home.

We were also told to bring both regular and dual or triple density Skagit lines, with a wide variety of sinking tips. Floating Skandi lines weren’t on the list. Apparently we need to get our flies down deep.

I hope your eyes are starting to glaze over. Spey rods. Weights. Skagit and Skandi heads. Tips. It’s not really important, except that the bigger the weight of the rod, the bigger the fish it can handle, and the bigger the fly it can throw. Spey rods are long two-handed rods designed to cast to salmon and steelhead. Skandi heads (named for Scandinavia) float on top of the water. Skagit heads (named for Skagitavia) usually also float, but they’re short and heavy, and are designed to throw sinking tips and bigger flies. There. I’ve explained everything, right? Of course I could also be wrong. I’m from Houston. What do I know about all this stuff?

So I emailed Jason Osborne at The Portland Flyshop. Jason has helped me before more than once, and had suggested The Evening Hatch as our outfitter on the Olympic Peninsula. He called me to sort out my confusion, and then told me I was going to the most beautiful place on the planet.

“You will see every shade of green,” he said, “and the Queets is the perfect river when it’s on. It’s wadeable, and easy to read, and the water is beautiful.” It was pretty exciting, but I could have told Jason that if in mid-August he’d go to Lubbock, Texas, he could probably see every shade of brown.

Wild Olympics, Proposed Wild and Scenic Rivers, https://www.wildolympics.org/forests-and-rivers/wild-scenic-rivers/ .

The Queets isn’t the only river on the Olympic Peninsula to fish for winter steelhead. From what I can make out there’s also the Sol Duc, Calawah, Hoh, Bogachiel, and Quinault. The Peninsula is home to a spider web of rivers running to all points of the compass from the central mountains. Some are fed by the (disappearing) Olympic Mountain glaciers, some by springs. This week though, they’re all fed by rain. Western Washington, including the Peninsula, has received as much as 9 inches of rain in a day in the high mountains, and along with landslide warnings the rivers are in flood.

Jack Mitchell at The Evening Hatch says that everything’s blown out but that we should hit things about right. If we do it will be the first time, but on the flip side I’m happy with just about anything short of a landslide. As long as I’m not drowning in mud I can spend my time hanging out and working on Bach on the guitar. I am happy to see that after reaching 22. 5 feet the Queets is moving in the other direction. Ideal flow for fishing the Queets is probably something less than 4,000 cfs. The current 20,000 cfs is probably still just a wee bit high, even if it’s better than the 70,000 cfs it was running this time yesterday. That’s blown out.

Meanwhile I’ve been tying flies. A winter steelhead’s digestive system shuts off when it comes back to freshwater, so even if it does take a fly it’s not feeding. The notion is to tie a fly that triggers something: curiosity, anger, habit, and then keep your fingers crossed.

This is clearly hubris on my part: I’ve got no notion of what flies might be useful or worthwhile in winter in Western Washington. I tied fish tacos last time, and caught my steelhead on the fish taco I tied from the ostrich feather the guy in drag gave me at the Houston Pride Parade. This time I’m tying bunny leaches in various attractive color combinations and weights: pink/orange, pink/purple, black/pink, blue/orange. They’re not much like anything I’ve tied before. For all I know they may not be like anything anyone else has tied either, though I’d like to think there are people catching steelhead with them all over steelhead country. In any case, I’m taking that Pride Parade fly with me.

But the good news is that it probably doesn’t much matter. To fish steelhead you stand in the river and cast and cast and cast and then cast a thousand times more and maybe get a strike. Maybe. I haven’t caught any fish so far this year, to be honest I haven’t fished much, and like as not I’ll keep my streak going. There’s always Bach.

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2020

We’re at 16 states, with two more, Hawaii and Wisconsin, where we didn’t catch fish. I thought this would take ten years, but then Louis Cahill wrote that we were doing it in five, and that wormed its way into my head. If ten, we’re way ahead, if five we’ve got some catching up to do.

Going someplace and catching a fish is pretty easy, except for time, money, and effort. There are states that are left, Tennessee, New Mexico, Arkansas, North Carolina, Colorado, California . . . Where I’ve spent enough time in my life that I could probably fly or drive in, catch a fish, and check the state off my list without missing much, but there are also states, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming, Maine, where spending less than a week just seems wrong.

If we really spend a week in all the places that deserve a week ten years won’t be enough.

In eight days we can do some justice to three states, say Arkansas, Missouri, and Tennessee, but try to add Georgia into that and it’s just too much for anything but a drive-by. Pennsylvania, for instance, is one of the reasons we’re doing this. Neither of us have ever been to Pennsylvania, and how can we not spend at least a couple of days in Philadelphia, and how can we not see Gettysburg? I could probably spend a week in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile I’ve still got work, and there are our dogs at home who love us, and there is the cost of long trips.

So we’ve been planning for 2020. Earlier this year I had decided Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa as a trip, taking about a week so we could fish the Au Sable, some of the UP, Hayward for Muskie, and then the Driftless in SW Wisconsin/NE Iowa. We had talked about a ten day driving trip north, fishing in Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota. We booked Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, mostly to fish with the guide and teacher, Dom Swentosky in Pennsylvania; and to see Philadelphia. We talked about a great tailwater trip through New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, but no.

Here’s the first map I came up with. The proposed 2020 states are light blue or pink.

And now that’s all shot to hell. Instead we’ve scheduled Washington in February, which is great fun to tell people, and which I blame on Kris: She didn’t say no. New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina are still on for June, and then, because of a chance conversation, we’ll go to North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia in early August. That driving trip to the great Southwestern tailwaters will have to wait, and we won’t be driving straight north to North Dakota.

Here’s how the map looks now. Blue states are pretty settled. We’ll try to pick up some of the pinks as we go along. Maybe we’ll make Arkansas Christmas morning.