Spring Creek 8/26

 

    It's the first day back at class, of a bustling, synchronized, collectivist chimera that I thought a few months in the summer sun would have totally cooked out of my brain. 

    I'm currently sitting on a concrete block whose purpose has long since been forgotten to time. I'm soaked from head to toe. I got my yo-zuri pins minnow stuck in a tree and foolishly thought that I would have been able to climb over and retrieve it, with all my belongings still hanging around in my pocket. Instead of triumphantly emerging with jerkbait in hand out of the silky dogwood, I instead ate shit, slipped, and landed in about 5-6 feet of water, one of the biggest drop-offs in all of Spring Creek, I suspect. It's amazing how clumsiness leads to desperation. I'll swim almost as gracefully as a semi-wounded dolphin but the second I splat into 5 feet of cold limestone stream when I least expect it, suddenly I'm head-down and floundering desperately to breathe. 

    I drug myself out onto a soft patch of moss beneath the dogwoods and left all my stuff on a nearby rock to dry, before putting down my notebook, sitting on a old structure, and beginning to chronicle my mishap for the world to read. 

    Earlier that day, as soon as I left my Geography and Human Populations class in a ball of sweat and dog-tired, I hopped in the Buick and drove down to a place that's near and dear to the hearts of every crusty old Central PA fly-fisherman: Fisherman's Paradise, Spring Creek. 

    Spring Creek's a mid-sized limestone stream that's a giant in the fly fishing world. The creek houses Fisherman's Paradise, a few miles of stream through the canyon that was set up as a fly-fishing, C&R only area, one of the first in the continental United States. I don't particularly care for fly-fishing only regs, preferring the money and time to be spent protecting and preserving clean water and clean air over kicking out kids for fishing with the wrong type of line. Luckily, Spring's about as clean and protected as they come in this country ruled by fat old greasy swines who like nothing more than leveling forest and clogging streams to make room for shopping centers and gold courses. Spring's water runs green, green as the spicebush and walnut trees that grow around it in the river valley. Green like life. 

    I arrived at Fisherman's Paradise in the heat of the afternoon, rigged my fly rod with a nymphing set up, and trudged upstream through goldenrod and black-eyed susans and found a section I could wade in to begin working my way upstream. 

   

    After about two hours and several break-offs with little sign of life, I decided to turn back. I looked everywhere for the golden flashes of brown trout rising to bugs, or at least coming up to take a swipe at my flies. Nothing. Maybe I hit a bad day. Maybe Spring Creek's reputation as one of the most pressured streams in the State is real. Maybe I just suck at fly fishing. A picked and chosen combination of all three, perhaps. Still, I was happy to spend an afternoon in a beautiful, albeit overmaintained location. 

    I drove through the valley downstream, with the caps and fog covered ridges on both sides off in the distance, reaching a different, less pressured section of creek where I was allowed to fish a spinning rod. 

    I began throwing a yo-zuri pins minnow, casting behind boulders and picking off browns behind almost every one. Most managed to jump and shake the barbless hooks I had on, but I brought enough to net nonetheless. A few miracle rises happened around sunset; brown trout gulping air and fall and grasshoppers, which is when I managed to pull my biggest fish of the day, a properly colored and osprey scarred brownie. I made an upstream cast right afterwards, and my line shuddered to a stop earlier than expected. Shit. I thought, looking at my lure hanging from the dogwood. Eh, I can probably reach it. 

Snakehead By-Catches

 

    I'm on an unbeaten streak. For the past three years, my biggest largemouth of the year has been a Snakehead by-catch. And so far, this hasn't show any signs at slowing down. For 2022 and 2023, a chartreuse buzzbait that I was slow-rolling a top of some weedy patches for dragons has instead looked too tantalizing for a Larry. So far, 2024 has proven no different. 

    The mission for the day was simple: get my buddy Kyle onto his first snakehead ever. Kyle's no stranger to river fishing; he lives by the Delaware and has spent many summer nights soaking chicken livers and cutbait off the docks for catfish and stripers. However, this was going to be his first time on a proper river snakehead hunt. 

    We arrived at a weed-choked backwater about two hours before sunset. A slight trickle of cool river water still flowed into a small section, but most of the spot was lentic and hydrilla-dressed as slow as the dog-days of summer drag by. I put on a black popping frog and began casting up onto the opposing bank, letting my frog crawl back into the water with a splat, hoping for a snakehead to be up on the shore ready to ambush anything that wakes across its path. A deep gurgle on the opposite shoreline later I set the hook into a brick wall. This fish tries to jump and I put the rod tip down and start reeling as fast as I can, dragging up onto the bank not a snakehead but my biggest largemouth of the year and possibly ever. 

    As I'm releasing this fish, I turn to see Kyle with a snakehead on the end of the line. He manages to flip the fish up onto the bank, but it does a signature snakehead death-roll back into the water and snaps his line, getting away. 

    I told him not to worry, that I had lost plenty of snakes before I landed my first one, and that I still lose them to this day. This is all true. Snakeheads are tough SOBs with a rock hard jaw that fight dirty. A few weeks prior I lost an absolute giant right next to the bank, one that could have beaten my 31 incher from last year. 

    We continued upriver, stopping along the way to hit a couple striper spots. I made a cast with a topwater behind a river-rock that was creating a current break, a resting spot from the boiling rapids around it. I give the lure a few pops and something tucked up in the break comes out and crushes it, revealing itself to be a quality smallmouth that fought like hell in the current. 

    The sun began to dip down behind Goat Mountain and the golden hour was soon upon us, when the sky turns that beautiful shade of summer blue and gold and purple and the baitfish all turn their attention upwards. Soon, the section we were at was frothing with jumping shadlings, offspring of the American shad that worked so hard to make their river-ward journey in the spring to dance and spawn and die. I managed to pull out one more largemouth on a topwater before it got too dark to see and I had to go home to attend to personal responsibilities I had been putting off. We'll be back for those snakeheads. 

    

Appalachian Adventures

 

    The Appalachian Mountains are old, older than you or I, older than language and measurable time. Beneath the mountains contain 1.1 billion years of history, billions of years of rock crashing and grinding and pushing and pulling until eventually, over 2,000 miles of deeply carved peaks were stretched across the American East. And between these mountains are creeks and stories, the deep gurgle of water whispering centuries of folklore both Indian and white settler. Stories of beasts and witches deep in the forest, wendigos and skinwalkers, gods and angels and demons, passions that are excited in the deepest and darkest recesses of the mind when you're walking through the woods by yourself. 

    I awoke to the sound of the earliest catbirds and thrushes, twittering away in the trees. My ears were no longer ringing from the Five Finger Death Punch concert that Sharkey and I attended the night before, a mashup of circles, loops, guitar riffs, drums, and blinking lights that left me exhausted and feeling punch drunk. I stepped out of my little nest inside the car to the gravel parking lot, our two companions being a small green SUV and a large white van whose occupant was sleeping in a tent about 30 yards upstream. 

    The sun was still yet to show her face, hiding on the other side of the great white valley, but the sky's blueness was getting paler by the minute and the air hung thick and wet and heavy. I knelt beside the freestone stream and washed my face, letting the blissfully cold water seep slowly through me, a wake up call. 

    By this time Sharkey had awoken as well and we strolled off into the woods for a quick morning hike. The faded colors of muted greens and grays amongst the ancient ferns of the forest floor brightened with each step towards daylight. Little bits of muted light hit the moss and ferns where canopy permitted it. At last, we stumbled into a clearing, strewn with sun, where suddenly, like an itch that needed to be scratched, I had the insatiable urge of yelling, to no one in particular. I did. 

    "You just sparked some new local folklore," remarked Sharkey. 

    "I know." 

    We turned back towards the parking lot to grab out trout rods, our paths turning inverse with the sun down the mountain. As we crawled back into view, we spotted the green Subaru that was parked there during the night, still sitting in the exact same place. What we didn't see before and what became apparent in the morning light was the broken windows, rusted frames, seats piled to the ceiling with discarded loose trash. The license plate was from Washington. 

    "That's fucking spooky" 

    "Yep." I replied, lost in thought, staring at the memories of spider web cracks in the broken mirror. "This might be an Alexander Supertramp type character," I remarked, harkening back to the Georgia boy who ditched his car in Arizona and hitchhiked his way to Alaska before succumbing to starvation. Just another kid who wanted to get away from it all. 

    I filed away the Ranger number to make a report as soon as we got into cell service range. However, as soon as we returned to the lot, the car was gone, disappeared into the early morning fog. 

    After this experience Sharkey and I made our way downstream, stopping after about 1/4 mile to begin working our way up. This stream was a tricky tailwater, chock full of sunken trees that served as perfect vanishing places for a hungry brown. I managed to pick off a few small wild brownies on a Parachute Adams, tenacious ones tucked up behind wood piles, and Sharkey got a nice brookie on an inline spinner. 

    As we moved upstream, a deep hole with a log jam on the downstream side lay ahead. Wanting to fish deeper, I put on a copper john under my dry fly and roll casted to the middle of the stream. My dry drifted down, slow as the neighboring bubbles, until it drops down 6 inches away from the timberpile. I lift and tied into the biggest brown of the day, who had made just one foolish mistake. 

    Maps told us there was a reservoir about a two miles upstream from us. Both Sharkey and I being former track athletes, the hike up didn't sound too bad on paper. Yet the trails ended, replaced by huge patches of nettle and burdock, twisted and turning to who knows where. By now, the sun had risen up high above the thick canopy and my Monster Energy was wearing off, so we made the decision to call it and start the drive back home, stopping for a few side quests on the way back. 

    We only saw a few miles of the thousands of trail that makes its way from the Maine Northwoods to the Mountains of Western Georgia and already I feel them calling me back. Maybe I'm haunting the mountains, maybe the mountains are haunting me, maybe its a spiritual symbiosis that can't quite be put into words but is tangible all the same. 

Fuck Around and Find Trout

 

    We have three kinds of trout streams in the East that hold viable populations of wild fish: tailwaters, spring creeks, and freestone streams. This isn't the West, where you can pull wild rainbows out of a ditch behind the grocery store; our wild fish are scarcer, held in a different type of esteem than the routine, cornerstone role that a brown trout plays in a Montana fly fishing town. 

    Still, we have our own trout towns, especially in my home state of Pennsylvania, which boasts thousands of miles of small streams tucked away within the Central portion of the state. Most of these are spring fed, cut clean and cold from the limestone caverns where the clear waters run little by little from the ancient hills. However, in the Poconos we have a lot of freestone streams, hung from rainwater and ice melt down the mountains with beds of smooth, flat pebbles opposed to the rough, gray, sedimentary limestone. 

        After work one day, I packed my little Buick full of random fishing and camping gear and drove up to Hickory Run State Park, an expanse of Pocono deciduous forest filled with boulder fields and miles of trout streams that sustain the Lehigh River on its grand journey towards Delaware and sea-ward. 

    I arrived at a small and rolling run filled with plunge pools and a mixture of wild and stocked fish, rigging up a 5wt and a #14 Parachute Adams. Hatches be dammed. In a stream this small, the fish don't care about things like Latin names and what kind of mayflies are hatching. Dead drifting detritus moves too fast in the plunge pools, too shallow to look anywhere but up. Trout will usually rise to anything drifted through their house, snatching it up with a sort of urgency needed for living in fast water. I was proven right when on my third cast a stocked brown rises to take a look at my fly, turns away, then decides it can't afford to lose such an opportunity and gulps down the dry with a small fistful of water and sky. 

    I kept moving upstream, hopping over rocks, past the random groups of summer-drunk hikers and swimmers, sliding through old canyons and spooking a massive northern watersnake and a blue heron that was hopefully having as much success. Missed a few surface eats, managed to land a small native brook trout. 

    Native Brookies are an ice age remnant, a reminder of the past. The Appalachian mountains are old, very old. Sometime in their millions of years of history, a species of char was trapped in its creeks, growing and adapting to life in small and fast water, all the while retaining that signature char-aggression. Their cousins: lake trout, dolly varden, and arctic char, all grow much bigger and live in further northern latitudes, but you can find little brookies as far south as North Carolina, holding out in clear and cold mountain streams. 

    Sometime in the afternoon, a thunderhead rolled in over the mountains and into my little valley, dumping rain on me as I was walking back to my parking spot. I took shelter underneath a nearby stone bridge and decided to make a cast. Instantly, a big brook trout comes up and sips down my dry fly before taking off downstream. 

    Releasing that fish and making my way downstream, sliding through bright purple brambles and old stone walls whose purpose was long forgotten led me to another spot ringed with moss and shallow riffles. I sat there, pulled out my notebook, led those riffles monotonely sing to me for half an hour, then let my pen do the same. I could have fallen asleep there, as the sky began to clear and a fine mist settled over the forest, but crow calls and peepers and the prospect of more fish kept me awake and I kept fishing, managing to pick off a few wild browns on dry flies and dry droppers. 

    Trout, especially brookies, know what they want and what they want is clean water. The fact that there are native fish in this system is a testament to the water quality and the work done by stream lovers to keep it semi-wild and cold. They say trout don't live in ugly places. I was a doubter before, but now, that's becoming harder and harder to refute.