Montana TR- Camp Life

(Obviously recent events
http://www.billingsgazette.net/artic...0-jungle_g.txt
have transformed much of my feelings about the trip. I don't know if
the places I've described will still be there when I wake up
tomorrow.)

Our last full day dawned, like virtually every day in Montana this
trip, sunny. It had been a cool night, probably reaching down to 40 or
so. We had nothing on the agenda. At some point we meant to drive up
to the beaver pond where we had seen the moose the previous Wednesday
and catch some brookies for lunch but until then there was nothing to
do but lay around camp.

Coffee. Breakfast. Wash the dishes. Split some wood.

When I was a kid we lived on a small dairy farm. The house had been
pieced together back in the early part of the century by a Finnish
guy. It was a drafty place. It had a huge wood furnace in the
basement. The thing took prodigious quantities of wood to keep the
house tolerable and in January we would all migrate from the bedrooms
upstairs to the comparative warmth of the downstairs. My dad would
stock up the wood room in the basement over the fall but it usually
ran low not long after the pre-Global Warmed Christmases of my
childhood. Then he would take the hay wagon down to the woods that
bordered the river that ran through our land and bring back whole
tree's worth of wood, the trunks cut into stove length rounds, but
unsplit. These would be stacked up outside the wood chute that led to
the wood room. The wood was all maple, elm and maybe a little oak. He
almost always used a splitting maul instead of a wedge. The sound of
him breaking apart those, at times, stubborn hunks of wood, a
strangely metallic sound like a length of steel dropped on a cement
floor, are an indelible memory of my childhood. As are the sounds of
the cursing when the maul would lodge in a hidden knot.

Now fast forward to Montana, August 2006. Falls Creek Campground. The
Forest Service had cut down some trees around the campsites and had
left the unsplit trunks, chainsawed into campfire lengths, stacked
around the area. There were a number of them piled up near our picnic
table. And a number of them had been the obvious targets of erstwhile
wood splitters. Clear, unknotted, pine can be a ridiculously easy wood
to split. But often, as was the case with these hunks of wood, there
are knots hidden on the inside, as the lower branches of the pine's
youth are broken off and then covered by the new growth of the trunk.
This makes them very hard to split through the middle, as the closer
to the center one gets the more numerous and packed together the knots
from the old branches become. It was obvious that more than one camper
had lodged his ax or hatchet in the center of these apparently prime,
dry, easy to split wood pieces and had had to work it free, leaving
the wood marked but unsplit. You could almost hear the ghostly echoes
of their frustrated curses floating through the surrounding timber.
But there is a trick. Don't try to split the wood like you would cut a
pizza but rather split off slabs of wood from the edges, swinging your
ax about 2 or 3 inches in from the bark but tangental, not
perpendicular, to the center of the trunk. This way you can work your
way around the center, getting nice, easy to burn splits and ending up
with a knotty, but still small enough to burn, center section.

So that is what I spent a good part of my morning doing. I had brought
along a Swedish Army surplus ax, a small felling ax with about a 2
foot handle. Splitting wood is very satisfying. The sound and feel of
it, the smell of the freshly exposed heartwood, the accomplishment of
a well stacked pile of prepared firewood... it just feels good. We
kept a small fire going for most of the day in the enclosed metal fire
ring. Our old blackened coffee pot sat on the far edge of the grate,
keeping warm. And this in the end is the satisfaction of camp life.
Small things of little import become the center of your attention.
Drinking coffee, watching the fire, listening to the wind, all assume
a meditative aspect. Life slows down and then slows some more. Rest.
Finally.

But along about 1 o'clock, the adult pleasures of camp life wearing
thin on Mason, moved him and I to pack up the fishing equipment and
try the beaver pond about a mile down the road. We got there in full
sunlight but the air was cool and the fish were rising. At first I
tried to have Mason cast but the afternoon wind was already blowing
and soon it was only me casting and hooking and Mason reeling in the
fish. The fish we were catching were eastern brook trout. The limit in
Montana is 20 fish! They are considered an exotic species, although
why the even more "exotic" brown trout isn't is an interesting
paradox. But the Boulder is under its own regulations and the limit is
2 trout per person, although only rainbows, cutthroats and browns are
mentioned. So, to be on the safe side, Mason and I only kept 2 fish
each. We probably landed 20 fish all together in a little over an
hour. I could see the fleets of small, sleek fish cruise through the
alleyways between the weed beds. There were no bug hatches that I
could see but the fishes eager response to small black Pass Lakes made
me think that the wind was blowing terrestrials onto the ponds rippled
surface. We threaded the last fish onto my homemade stringer. At 10
inches it was the biggest of the afternoon but its large head pegged
on a thin body betrayed the pond's over populated condition. A
minivan with Montana plates passed us as I was taking a picture of
Mason holding up the stringer of small trout. The driver glared as he
passed. Tourists keeping some of his fish no doubt rubbed him the
wrong way. But hey... these are exotics, an invasive species, right?
Right.

http://fishskicanoe.tripod.com/geopi.../IMG_0050a.jpg

We drove back to camp. Mason watched as I cleaned the fish. Then we
took each fish, placed a pat of butter and some lemon pepper in the
body cavity and wrapped them up in foil. We prepared a bed of coals
and set the aluminum encased fish on the grate over them. In ten
minutes they were done. The foil was unwrapped and the moist flesh
revealed. Very good. Not as good as bluegill but still the brook trout
almost melted on the tongue, its mild flavor unmasked by any strong
spices or covered by a greasy layer of breading and oil. The 4 small
fish were, of course, too meager of a supply for a real lunch but when
combined with the ubiquitous peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and
the rest of the coffee from the thermos bottle, it was enough.

http://fishskicanoe.tripod.com/geopics/IMG_0056a.jpg

In addition to splitting wood our campsite offered extremely easy
access to a bit of bouldery pocket water. Earlier that morning I had
drifted some Prince nymphs along side a boulder, through a slot of
waist deep, green water. I took a handful of small, 7 inch rainbows
from that lie and by working other slots and pockets succeeded in
catching a few more. That afternoon I returned with Mason in tow. It
was a bit technical perhaps and for some reason the fish ignored the
bigger dries that had been working earlier in the week. So he didn't
take a fish on his own. But I hooked a few small ones and let him land
them.

http://fishskicanoe.tripod.com/geopics/IMG_0043a.jpg

We played around the camp. I took the dogs for a long walk, letting
them pull their retractable leashes to their limits as they snuffled
their way through the roadside weeds and brush. After a simple dinner
I set up three rods. I tied a Prince nymph to the end of my leader. On
Mason's I tied a beadhead Hare's Ear Soft Hackle. I told Jacci to tie
on something with some flash to it. She ended up choosing a beadhead
caddis emerger with a dark green ice dubbed body. I directed her down
toward some runs near the opposite shore. Mason and I headed upstream
to hit some pockets of our own. I told Mason to cast out and let his
soft hackle dangle below us. Suddenly his rod bowed and a little
rainbow jumped clear of the water. He was obviously excited and we
exchanged high fives after I had unhooked the fish and handed it to
him to release. He re-cast and then it was my turn. It seemed as if
each rock had its resident fish, all small but hard muscled. Jacci
yelled something but I couldn't make it out over the sound of rushing
water. Mason and I waded back down to the campsite and there met
Jacci. She had taken one fish on her caddis and had lost several
others. The fish was soon referred to, by her, as her 53 dollar fish,
53 dollars being the cost of her 10 day license.

It was getting down toward evening. I wanted to fish the stretch of
water downstream from the campground. The water there ran through a
choppy run before entering another small rapids. Mason and Jacci were
both happy watching and nursing the campfire so I re-wadered and
walked the cobbled shoreline by myself. As soon as I reached the top
of the run I saw rising fish. There were two types of mayflies in the
air, light tan ones, about size 22, that were bobbing about in a
mating swarm and a larger, roughly size 18 dun colored fly, that
appeared to be actually hatching. I ran through a couple flies. I
first tried a big attractor,a size 12 Stimie. The fish ignored that.
Then I tried a size 18 Adams Parachute that I thought looked a lot
like the bigger flies coming off . That also failed to get any
business. So I tried a snowshoe foot emerger, again tied on a number
18 hook. Finally I started to get hits and after a while I hooked and
landed a small brook trout. Repeated casts brought more strikes but
the fish seemed to be splashing the bug rather than taking it
confidently.So I unspooled about 18 inches of 6x tippet and tied one
end to the bend of the emerger's hook. To the other end I tied the
same type of fly except smaller and lighter. That seemed to be the
ticket. While the fish were still spooky, if I made a good cast to a
riser I usually hooked it. Most took the smaller fly but the bigger
took its share too. As I worked my way upstream into faster water the
fish I was catching changed from brookies over to rainbows. None were
longer than 9 inches.

As I worked up to the campsite I saw that there was another mayfly
species starting to swarm. These guys were tannish yellow and an
honest size 16. I hustled up the bank to grab Mason and soon had him
in his waders. It was getting dark but I thought we'd have another
half hour of light. We went back down to the choppy run and I cast in
front of a rising fish. It took the fly and I handed the rod to Mason.
He stripped in the brook trout and I cast again. I noticed that the
dark had increased to such an extent that I could barely make out the
flies on the broken surface of the water. Eventually the smaller of
the flies disappeared in a soft swirl and another small brookie came
to hand. When I prepared to re-cast I realized that I had again been
fooled by the rapidity with which the light failed in these mountain
valleys. There was no long lingering dusk common to the waters at
home, no pale strip of sky on the horizon to lend me its meager light
and make possible one cast more. Just day and then night. I gave Mason
the small LED I had clipped to my vest and we stumbled over the
grapefruit sized rocks on the shore back to the ring of light that
suffused the air around our campfire. Some quiet talk ensued, some
more splinters of wood were tossed inside the flames. Then it began to
get cold and the thought of a sleeping bag wrapped warmly around our
bodies called us to the tent. As I lay there, waiting for sleep to
come, I was struck at how much fun this lazy day had been... at how
pleasant it was to work those small fish and finally come up with the
right fly... at how little the size of the fish had matterd... at how,
in fact, those small fish had given me the best day of the trip... its
most satisfying moments. Then I fell asleep. In the morning we'd be
leaving Montana.


g.c.

A big 10-4 from me on the firewood, except I also like to get my Farm
Boss cranked up and cut it all up first too! The maul is the way to
go. I'll be cutting apprx a ton of firewood this weekend. bruce h

"George Cleveland" wrote in message
...
(Obviously recent events
http://www.billingsgazette.net/artic...0-jungle_g.txt
have transformed much of my feelings about the trip. I don't know if
the places I've described will still be there when I wake up
tomorrow.)

Our last full day dawned, like virtually every day in Montana this
trip, sunny. It had been a cool night, probably reaching down to 40 or
so. We had nothing on the agenda. At some point we meant to drive up
to the beaver pond where we had seen the moose the previous Wednesday
and catch some brookies for lunch but until then there was nothing to
do but lay around camp.

Coffee. Breakfast. Wash the dishes. Split some wood.

When I was a kid we lived on a small dairy farm. The house had been
pieced together back in the early part of the century by a Finnish
guy. It was a drafty place. It had a huge wood furnace in the
basement. The thing took prodigious quantities of wood to keep the
house tolerable and in January we would all migrate from the bedrooms
upstairs to the comparative warmth of the downstairs. My dad would
stock up the wood room in the basement over the fall but it usually
ran low not long after the pre-Global Warmed Christmases of my
childhood. Then he would take the hay wagon down to the woods that
bordered the river that ran through our land and bring back whole
tree's worth of wood, the trunks cut into stove length rounds, but
unsplit. These would be stacked up outside the wood chute that led to
the wood room. The wood was all maple, elm and maybe a little oak. He
almost always used a splitting maul instead of a wedge. The sound of
him breaking apart those, at times, stubborn hunks of wood, a
strangely metallic sound like a length of steel dropped on a cement
floor, are an indelible memory of my childhood. As are the sounds of
the cursing when the maul would lodge in a hidden knot.

Now fast forward to Montana, August 2006. Falls Creek Campground. The
Forest Service had cut down some trees around the campsites and had
left the unsplit trunks, chainsawed into campfire lengths, stacked
around the area. There were a number of them piled up near our picnic
table. And a number of them had been the obvious targets of erstwhile
wood splitters. Clear, unknotted, pine can be a ridiculously easy wood
to split. But often, as was the case with these hunks of wood, there
are knots hidden on the inside, as the lower branches of the pine's
youth are broken off and then covered by the new growth of the trunk.
This makes them very hard to split through the middle, as the closer
to the center one gets the more numerous and packed together the knots
from the old branches become. It was obvious that more than one camper
had lodged his ax or hatchet in the center of these apparently prime,
dry, easy to split wood pieces and had had to work it free, leaving
the wood marked but unsplit. You could almost hear the ghostly echoes
of their frustrated curses floating through the surrounding timber.
But there is a trick. Don't try to split the wood like you would cut a
pizza but rather split off slabs of wood from the edges, swinging your
ax about 2 or 3 inches in from the bark but tangental, not
perpendicular, to the center of the trunk. This way you can work your
way around the center, getting nice, easy to burn splits and ending up
with a knotty, but still small enough to burn, center section.

So that is what I spent a good part of my morning doing. I had brought
along a Swedish Army surplus ax, a small felling ax with about a 2
foot handle. Splitting wood is very satisfying. The sound and feel of
it, the smell of the freshly exposed heartwood, the accomplishment of
a well stacked pile of prepared firewood... it just feels good. We
kept a small fire going for most of the day in the enclosed metal fire
ring. Our old blackened coffee pot sat on the far edge of the grate,
keeping warm. And this in the end is the satisfaction of camp life.
Small things of little import become the center of your attention.
Drinking coffee, watching the fire, listening to the wind, all assume
a meditative aspect. Life slows down and then slows some more. Rest.
Finally.

But along about 1 o'clock, the adult pleasures of camp life wearing
thin on Mason, moved him and I to pack up the fishing equipment and
try the beaver pond about a mile down the road. We got there in full
sunlight but the air was cool and the fish were rising. At first I
tried to have Mason cast but the afternoon wind was already blowing
and soon it was only me casting and hooking and Mason reeling in the
fish. The fish we were catching were eastern brook trout. The limit in
Montana is 20 fish! They are considered an exotic species, although
why the even more "exotic" brown trout isn't is an interesting
paradox. But the Boulder is under its own regulations and the limit is
2 trout per person, although only rainbows, cutthroats and browns are
mentioned. So, to be on the safe side, Mason and I only kept 2 fish
each. We probably landed 20 fish all together in a little over an
hour. I could see the fleets of small, sleek fish cruise through the
alleyways between the weed beds. There were no bug hatches that I
could see but the fishes eager response to small black Pass Lakes made
me think that the wind was blowing terrestrials onto the ponds rippled
surface. We threaded the last fish onto my homemade stringer. At 10
inches it was the biggest of the afternoon but its large head pegged
on a thin body betrayed the pond's over populated condition. A
minivan with Montana plates passed us as I was taking a picture of
Mason holding up the stringer of small trout. The driver glared as he
passed. Tourists keeping some of his fish no doubt rubbed him the
wrong way. But hey... these are exotics, an invasive species, right?
Right.

http://fishskicanoe.tripod.com/geopi.../IMG_0050a.jpg

We drove back to camp. Mason watched as I cleaned the fish. Then we
took each fish, placed a pat of butter and some lemon pepper in the
body cavity and wrapped them up in foil. We prepared a bed of coals
and set the aluminum encased fish on the grate over them. In ten
minutes they were done. The foil was unwrapped and the moist flesh
revealed. Very good. Not as good as bluegill but still the brook trout
almost melted on the tongue, its mild flavor unmasked by any strong
spices or covered by a greasy layer of breading and oil. The 4 small
fish were, of course, too meager of a supply for a real lunch but when
combined with the ubiquitous peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and
the rest of the coffee from the thermos bottle, it was enough.

http://fishskicanoe.tripod.com/geopics/IMG_0056a.jpg

In addition to splitting wood our campsite offered extremely easy
access to a bit of bouldery pocket water. Earlier that morning I had
drifted some Prince nymphs along side a boulder, through a slot of
waist deep, green water. I took a handful of small, 7 inch rainbows
from that lie and by working other slots and pockets succeeded in
catching a few more. That afternoon I returned with Mason in tow. It
was a bit technical perhaps and for some reason the fish ignored the
bigger dries that had been working earlier in the week. So he didn't
take a fish on his own. But I hooked a few small ones and let him land
them.

http://fishskicanoe.tripod.com/geopics/IMG_0043a.jpg

We played around the camp. I took the dogs for a long walk, letting
them pull their retractable leashes to their limits as they snuffled
their way through the roadside weeds and brush. After a simple dinner
I set up three rods. I tied a Prince nymph to the end of my leader. On
Mason's I tied a beadhead Hare's Ear Soft Hackle. I told Jacci to tie
on something with some flash to it. She ended up choosing a beadhead
caddis emerger with a dark green ice dubbed body. I directed her down
toward some runs near the opposite shore. Mason and I headed upstream
to hit some pockets of our own. I told Mason to cast out and let his
soft hackle dangle below us. Suddenly his rod bowed and a little
rainbow jumped clear of the water. He was obviously excited and we
exchanged high fives after I had unhooked the fish and handed it to
him to release. He re-cast and then it was my turn. It seemed as if
each rock had its resident fish, all small but hard muscled. Jacci
yelled something but I couldn't make it out over the sound of rushing
water. Mason and I waded back down to the campsite and there met
Jacci. She had taken one fish on her caddis and had lost several
others. The fish was soon referred to, by her, as her 53 dollar fish,
53 dollars being the cost of her 10 day license.

It was getting down toward evening. I wanted to fish the stretch of
water downstream from the campground. The water there ran through a
choppy run before entering another small rapids. Mason and Jacci were
both happy watching and nursing the campfire so I re-wadered and
walked the cobbled shoreline by myself. As soon as I reached the top
of the run I saw rising fish. There were two types of mayflies in the
air, light tan ones, about size 22, that were bobbing about in a
mating swarm and a larger, roughly size 18 dun colored fly, that
appeared to be actually hatching. I ran through a couple flies. I
first tried a big attractor,a size 12 Stimie. The fish ignored that.
Then I tried a size 18 Adams Parachute that I thought looked a lot
like the bigger flies coming off . That also failed to get any
business. So I tried a snowshoe foot emerger, again tied on a number
18 hook. Finally I started to get hits and after a while I hooked and
landed a small brook trout. Repeated casts brought more strikes but
the fish seemed to be splashing the bug rather than taking it
confidently.So I unspooled about 18 inches of 6x tippet and tied one
end to the bend of the emerger's hook. To the other end I tied the
same type of fly except smaller and lighter. That seemed to be the
ticket. While the fish were still spooky, if I made a good cast to a
riser I usually hooked it. Most took the smaller fly but the bigger
took its share too. As I worked my way upstream into faster water the
fish I was catching changed from brookies over to rainbows. None were
longer than 9 inches.

As I worked up to the campsite I saw that there was another mayfly
species starting to swarm. These guys were tannish yellow and an
honest size 16. I hustled up the bank to grab Mason and soon had him
in his waders. It was getting dark but I thought we'd have another
half hour of light. We went back down to the choppy run and I cast in
front of a rising fish. It took the fly and I handed the rod to Mason.
He stripped in the brook trout and I cast again. I noticed that the
dark had increased to such an extent that I could barely make out the
flies on the broken surface of the water. Eventually the smaller of
the flies disappeared in a soft swirl and another small brookie came
to hand. When I prepared to re-cast I realized that I had again been
fooled by the rapidity with which the light failed in these mountain
valleys. There was no long lingering dusk common to the waters at
home, no pale strip of sky on the horizon to lend me its meager light
and make possible one cast more. Just day and then night. I gave Mason
the small LED I had clipped to my vest and we stumbled over the
grapefruit sized rocks on the shore back to the ring of light that
suffused the air around our campfire. Some quiet talk ensued, some
more splinters of wood were tossed inside the flames. Then it began to
get cold and the thought of a sleeping bag wrapped warmly around our
bodies called us to the tent. As I lay there, waiting for sleep to
come, I was struck at how much fun this lazy day had been... at how
pleasant it was to work those small fish and finally come up with the
right fly... at how little the size of the fish had matterd... at how,
in fact, those small fish had given me the best day of the trip... its
most satisfying moments. Then I fell asleep. In the morning we'd be
leaving Montana.


g.c.

wonderfull story. Thankyou !
Leonard Brown