Fishing

I took off last Thursday to fish the Provo. I had heard that The Green Drake hatch was coming off. It was only about a month late. I am always excited to be able to fish the Provo on a weekday. There should be far less people. Should be. I pulled into my semi-secret parking lot and found it not only full, but the road leading to it was jammed with cars. I figured that if I hiked up river far enough I could find a little tranquility. Seems everyone was looking for tranquility that day. I guess the fish don't like crowds either. I had a few strikes but brought on one fish to the net, it was a nice 14 inch rainbow who came up slowly from below to take my Green Drake. I got a few more strikes and fished until I ran out of light. That one fish was worth the day's effort.

The next day I went with Tom Meuleman and his friend, Wally to the North Fork of the Duchesne. After a short hike we waked onto the river that loads of bugs hovering over it This looked too good to be true. It was a hatch of many varieties of mayflies, caddis flies, and midges. I was asked what fly to use. Put on anything, I said. We began fishing and much to my chagrin, we brought up nothing. The next thing I noticed was that the water, which was clear and made the bottom visible was now murky and unfishable. We had to change plans. We drove up river and found some construction going on. We went above that and got down to the river again. This time we started picking up an occasional fish. It was difficult bring them up to the surface. In about two hours there I caught about 5 fish. I decided to switch from dry fly fishing to a "dry and a dropper". Off the dry fly I tied on a length of tippet about 12 inches long and then tied on a bead head nymph. My favorite is called the Rainbow Warrior. It is a small, size 20, hook with some tan and red dubbing with a tungsten bead. As soon as I had cast into a run an allowed the dry to drift down, the dry fly wiggled. I set the hook but I was too late. I soon learned that I had to have no slack whatsoever in my line when I set or I would be too late. Over the next hour, in one spot, I caught 20 fish. Tom and Wally had a deadline to leave as they were going to play golf that afternoon. If they had not had that, I would probably still be there.

Yesterday after work in Rock Springs, a friend called me and asked If I wanted to go fish the Green in the Seedskedee National Wildlife Refuge. Duh, it's fishing, why wouldn't I want to. My only question was do I get a annual nonresident license or pay the 14 buck daily fee. I figured that even with the conservation stamp you have to buy with the annual that I only have to fish 8 times in Wyoming to break even. Plus, I don't have to go and get a daily license every time I want to fish. We went as far as the Fontanelle dam and began wet wading. The wind was blowing and there was no surface action so we were stripping streamers across the riffles in the river. The wind was not our friend. Every once in a while it would let up and I would see bugs coming off the water. They looked like caddis to me. Then I saw a fish take one on the surface about 25 feet away. I quickly started tying on a caddis dry fly. I learned that the faster you need to tie on a fly, the slower you actually get the fly tied on. I took my time and negotiated the elk hair bristles nearly covering the eye of the hook and got the fly tied on. Was I too late. The wind was still down and I was able to get a nice dead drift over the spot where I had seen the fish before. Bam! He took that fly like he had not had a bite to eat all day. When I landed him I saw that he was a beautiful brown trout. He was only about 9-10 inches long but he will get bigger and maybe I can catch him again some day. That turned out to be the only fish I caught that day. In my optimism I noted a pattern developing. Catch one fish one day and then 25 fish the next. Hmmm. Should I go fishing tomorrow? Duh!

Back Home Again

On the Friday before the July 4th holiday, Diane and I drove to Craig, Colorado where I had an assignment to be on call for the weekend. I no sooner got there and got called to OB and then to the OR for an appendectomy. I got home about 11PM to find that Diane had saved me some chocolate cake, which I ravaged. The next day I was on beeper call and fortunately did not get called. Diane and I went for bike rides around Craig both in the morning and in the afternoon. The next day I went in for a leg fracture and after that I went off duty and we drove to Green River, WY. We stayed at my place there and the next morning(which happened to be Diane's birthday), I dropped her off at the airport and then I went to work. I worked the week until Friday and came home Friday evening. On Saturday we did our Costco business and then worked around the house for awhile. We watched Fiddler on the Roof that evening. Sunday was our hiking day. We decided to hike the White Pine trail. It starts at the same trailhead as the Red Pine trail and then splits after a mile. The trail was actually an old jeep road. It was long with lots of switchbacks. Diane was using her Camelback. After a little more than 2 hours hiking, we encountered a snowfield that we started to cross. It was on a pretty steep incline and I realized that it would be easy to slip and slide down into some boulders. That had broken femur written all over it. We backtracked and tried to climb down through the boulder field and cut across below the snowfield. We decided that this too was treacherous and unhappily decided to turn around and do the hike later in the summer when the snow would be gone. We made our way down stopping for food and water from time to time. We got back to the car 4 hours and 10 minutes after we started. We treated ourselves to lunch at the Porcupine Restaurant, eating outside in some delightful weather. I am working in Salt Lake this week but hope to do some more hiking and fishing in between

Colby and Camo

My neighbors in Green River have two labrador puppies. One is a charcoal lab and the other is a silver lab. If a chocolate lab has two recessive genes on the gene for color formation, then a silver lab color results. If a black lab has two recessive genes at this location then a charcoal lab results. Camo, the silver lab, has blue eyes. The next door neighbor girls, Aspin, Jessica, and Paige posed the puppies for me to take pictures. Meet Colby and Camo.

Graduation Day

Jamie received her Masters from Pepperdine on June 20th. We had a good time and a fun weekend.

RATTLER!

Diane and I decided to take the dogs for a walk this afternoon. We were doing the Sunrise Point trail that Mary and I did when she was down here. We got to the point and started back. She had Cub on leash and I had Chloe. All of a sudden Chloe jerked away and went after something just off the trail. When I looked up she had gone after a rattlesnake. She was all over it and I jerked her leash as hard as I could to pull her off and away from the reptile. I thought the snake would just slither away but it stayed there guarding the trail. We went around and when we got to the entrance to the park Chloe's legs starting giving out and she could not walk. I was worried that she had been bitten and was suffering from neurotoxic effects. I left Diane with Chloe and Cub and I started running back to the house to get the car. About half way there, Diane came by having flagged down a guy who drove us back to the house. When we got home Chloe seemed to be normal. We called the vet and she had us look for signs of swelling in the face and legs. There were none. We continued to watch her and she still seemed normal. She is a lucky girl. I usually have the dogs off leash in this area but boy am I glad I had her leash on so I could pull her off the snake. It could have very well been a different outcome. Have I told you, I don't like snakes.

 

We watched the weather forcast and thought we saw a window of no rain in the morning on Sunday so we decided to hike up Grandeur Peak. Some may recall the fateful hike last year with the dogs when we had to rescue Cub off the mountain with a wheelbarrow. Not wanting a repeat of that we left the dogs at home. As we started hiking we found ourselves alongside 3 other people. Two were Russian young men and a young girl from Tennessee who played the Cello and was in town for some instruction in the Suzuki method. It made for interesting conversations on the way up and down. It was about 2 1/2 hours up and about 1 1/2 hours down. The weather was cool and crisp which would have made for comfortable hiking had it not been for the 3,000 feet of elevation gain. We timed the weather correctly. Dark clouds moved in as we were driving home. We really like getting high in Utah.

Pine Creek/Zion National Park

All my previous trips to Zion National Park have been to get out on hiking trails or adventure hikes like the Subway and Orderville that require rope assists more than actual rappelling. The trip to Pine Creek has 5 rappels, the longest of which is 100 feet. That is why I invited my friend, Chris Reveley who is an expert rock climber. I obtained the permit for 5 people. The three others were Dick Weber, Pete Griffen, and Pete Jensen. Other than Chris none of us had any recent rock climbing experience. I read all about the routes, knew where the rappels were, knew where the anchors were located and knew the length of the rappels.

Pine Creek can be bone dry or it can be filled with water. With all the recent rain, we expected water. We went by the outfitter and rented dry suits, shoes, helmets and the other equipment we would need and got as much information about the route as we could. We drove to the trailhead and began to gear up. A dry suit is different from a wet suit in that it keeps water out (that is the theory anyway). It does that by having tight rubber gaskets that go over your hands and feet to form a watertight seal. It is the same thing for the head hole but it has a drawstring. Getting these suits on was a challenge in and of itself. Once we were geared up, the hike began.

We headed down a sandy hill to the wash below. After 15 minutes of hiking we came to our first obstacle, “Intimidator Pool”. This was a pothole full of water with slippery sides. The guidebook says if you have trouble here, turn around as it only gets harder. We got by the pool trying to make it look like we were not having trouble. The actual trouble was the dry suit. It made me feel like the Michelin Man and restricted my movement. We arrived at the first rappel to find a back up of several people. They said they had 12 in their group and offered to let us “play through”. We accepted. Their rope was already in place so we rappelled off of it. I went first. This was a 60-foot drop in two stages. I got down to the pool and stayed on the rope to go the rest of the way. When I tried to put some slack in the rope as it came up from below I saw that the rope was caught in a crack. This gave me a rigid line above and below me. I was on the edge of the pool and if I slipped into the pool I would have two ropes pulling me in opposite directions. Chris yelled down that I would just have to figure it out. I was able to flip the rope out of the crack and give myself enough slack to run some rope though my ATC (that was my rappelling device. It stands for Air Traffic Controller. Cute huh?). I made it down into a deep pool and pulled the rope through my ATC so the next person could come down. I met Amy who was part of the first group. She set up the next rappel for us while the rest of our group got down. This was a short rappel but again, into a deep pool. These were called “swimmers” for obvious reasons. We were now ahead of the large group. Most of the members of this group were wearing only shorts and tee shirts. They would be hurting by the end of the day as the water was cold, there was very little sunlight and they would be standing around a lot. I was glad we had our suits.

The next rappel was The Cathedral, a double arched chamber that dropped 60 feet. I was the group photographer so I went first. What a trip! It was magnificent. As I lowered myself down the rope I was awestruck by the beauty inside this rock chamber. My waterproof camera has only automatic exposure settings so I could not adjust it for the low light conditions but I did get some fair pictures. I tried to get pictures of all the guys coming down but it was difficult to get my cold hands to work the right buttons on the camera. When the entire group got down we just looked up and marveled at where we had come from. The next section was a scramble over huge boulders and a few pools some of which were swimmers. Soon we were out of the cavern and into daylight. We missed the fourth rappel. We went left instead of right and ending up scrambling down a route that they should call the Mackin Bypass. Next was the 5th and final rappel. Chris had to reach out to set it up and that was a little scary to watch. This rap was 100 feet and it was free, that is, you do not have anywhere to put your feet but you hang on the rope all the way down. I went down and then watched the others follow. It was pretty amazing. We hiked down to a beautiful grotto and had a little bite to eat before heading down the canyon. The hike out was a lot of bouldering and scrambling. There was no right path only multiple options. We came upon the trail leading to the long uphill climb out of the canyon. It was now warming up a bit so one of the best parts of the day was getting out of those dry suits. This was one hell of a day for us all.