Last week I headed across the border for the first trout session of the year.\u00a0 I\u2019m glad to be getting out, but lacking the usual amount of anticipation.\u00a0 Typically on the first trip of the year I head to the \u201cK\u201d River and do a milk run of easy spots, usually catch a couple out of most, probably get a bunch out of one or two spots.\u00a0 Based on what was going on over there last year, my expectations were low. Decided to hike in to an area we refer to as \u201cThe Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse\u201d, a reference to four good spots with a bunch of slow, brushy, unfishable water above and below.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

No one had been in there yet this year, no tracks in the shin-deep snow.\u00a0 First spot, nada.\u00a0 Second spot, well this one now has a huge willow tree lying in it making it very difficult to fish.\u00a0 Gave it a good try, no fish.\u00a0 Now I get to the ace spot.\u00a0 Can\u2019t miss.\u00a0 Easy, open riffle, deep enough to hold a bunch of fish.\u00a0 I catch them here every time.\u00a0 I scoured it for half an hour, not one fish.\u00a0 As I hike out, I think about the book \u201cWho Moved My Cheese\u201d that was popular about 20 years ago.<\/span><\/p>\n

Maybe it is still popular now, but it was 20 years ago when I read it.\u00a0 I don\u2019t remember all of the details, and I\u2019m not going to re-read it, but as I remember it described a group of mice who led their lives always going to the same place where they could get all of the cheese they needed.\u00a0 At some point in the book, the never-ending cheese supply dried up and disappeared.\u00a0 Some of the mice continued to go to the same place, hoping the cheese would re-appear.\u00a0 It never did, these mice ended up in downward spiral of despair.\u00a0 Meanwhile, some of the other mice, the more ambitious ones, dared to look elsewhere for new cheese.\u00a0 As I remember, they had to travel farther, and work harder to find it, but they did indeed find new cheese and lived happily ever after.\u00a0 So the moral of the story is that when you lose something, whether it be employment, relationship, favorite fishing hole, cheese\u2014let it go, and go find some new cheese.<\/span><\/p>\n

Trout are my cheese.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve written before about how good the local streams were \u201cback in the day\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0 In the mid 90\u2019s the \u201cR\u201d River was THICK with big browns.\u00a0 One September day in about \u201998 I said goodbye for the season to all my trout friends, happily finning around in the crystal clear canyon pools. \u00a0Came back in the spring to stick hooks in their faces, you know, just to say \u201cHi, how was your winter?\u201d and they were gone. Like 90% gone.\u00a0 After a couple of years the stream rebounded, but has been different ever since\u2026perhaps more fish, but smaller overall.\u00a0 A lot more brook trout.\u00a0 A lot more Subarus parked at the bridges too.<\/span><\/p>\n

The \u201cK\u201d River has long been a favorite of mine.\u00a0 Historically is has held crazy numbers of wild browns.\u00a0 Walk the banks and you would see trout everywhere-even flat, non-descript sections would have trout scattering.\u00a0 You\u2019d come to a corner hole and you could see 50 in there.\u00a0 Spring 2015 came around and the fish were gone.\u00a0 Walk the stream bank and there were no fish on the flats, come to a corner hole that used to hold 50 and there would be two.\u00a0 Two trout where there used to be 50.\u00a0 The stream rebounded some by 2019, but going by results there last week it seems like the stream is nearly barren again.\u00a0 Not sure who moved my cheese, or where they moved it to, but a search for new cheese was in order.<\/span><\/p>\n

Acting on 20-year-old intel, I decided to head farther east to a stream \u201cfilled with big fish\u201d according to the report from decades ago.\u00a0 With tools like Google Earth and the Troutroutes ap, finding and exploring new streams is easy if you have the time.<\/span><\/p>\n

When I got there I found the stream to be a bit bigger than expected, it can be hard to judge the size of a stream when using street view on Google Earth.\u00a0 After getting suited up I stepped in and started working my way upstream, nymphing with a beadhead.\u00a0 For all I knew, this stream\u2019s trout population was similar or worse than my \u201chome streams.\u201d\u00a0 But it looked good.\u00a0 Real good.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

There is a certain satisfaction that comes with arriving at a new stream, analyzing the water, and catching a fish right away.\u00a0 I\u2019d be lying if I said I caught a fish out of every likely looking spot, but most pools and runs gave up a fish or two, and a couple of spots had a whole bunch in there.\u00a0 Definitely cheesy.<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite no other anglers around on this fine spring day, there were signs.\u00a0 You could argue that even if I didn\u2019t catch a fish that I found enough tackle left by other anglers to make the trip worthwhile.\u00a0 That blue Rapala is worth 7 bucks alone.\u00a0 I was not impressed with whoever lost the jig worm thing\u2014it had about 50 feet of braided line trailing off it which is quite a menace to songbirds and other animals.\u00a0 I disposed of the line, the jig is headed to my wall of shame.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fished for about 4 hours.\u00a0 Caught 15, maybe 20 trout.\u00a0 Mostly browns, a couple of little brookies.\u00a0 No big ones, the longest one wouldn\u2019t made it past the end of a ruler. To someone who doesn\u2019t trout fish, this might sound like a colossal waste of time.\u00a0 Drive a hundred miles, walk up though unknown waters and woods to catch 20 fish that if you weighed them all in a sack it wouldn\u2019t be more than five pounds.\u00a0 I like catching big trout, but guess what\u2014I figured out that trout fishing, to me anyway, isn\u2019t about catching big fish. \u00a0That\u2019s what muskies and sturgeon are for.\u00a0 Here\u2019s what I like–put me on a stream where I can hook up a couple times an hour, not see another angler, not hear anyone trying to save lives with their loud pipes.\u00a0 White pines on the ridges, silver maples and alders vying for space along the banks, critter tracks in the mud.\u00a0 End the day with chapped hands and no worries other than figuring out where my waders are leaking from now. <\/span><\/p>\n

Since this story is about cheese, and these streams are in America\u2019s Dairyland, I tried hard to come up with a good punchline about Wisconsin and cheesy trout.\u00a0 Couldn\u2019t find one, so I\u2019ll leave you with this picture of an unknown fish from a Wisconsin steelhead trip in the 90\u2019s.\u00a0 The streams were so cheesy back then I even caught what we decided was a \u201ccheesehead\u201d.\u00a0 Photo courtesy of Trout Camp News<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week I headed across the border for the first trout session of the year.\u00a0 I\u2019m glad to be getting out, but lacking the usual amount of anticipation.\u00a0 Typically on the first trip of the year I head to the \u201cK\u201d River and do a milk run of easy spots, usually catch a couple out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1545,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/wildsmallie.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1542"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/wildsmallie.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/wildsmallie.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wildsmallie.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wildsmallie.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1542"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/wildsmallie.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1542\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1551,"href":"http:\/\/wildsmallie.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1542\/revisions\/1551"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wildsmallie.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/wildsmallie.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wildsmallie.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wildsmallie.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}