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.
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