A limit of grouse

It doesn't happen all that often that I shoot a limit of grouse.  I did this afternoon.  Erdos was birdy from the moment we got out of the truck -- but he knows the spot and he's been cooped up in the house most of October while I was chasing deer and elk.  We got to this favored covert after a somewhat dicey ride through heavy snow.  As I loaded my shotgun my mind was partially occupied by prospect of getting stuck on the way back out.

We left the truck and hunted into a replanted clear-cut.  Six or eight years ago these trees were waist high, now they're about three times the height of a man.  The stand of pines was thinned a couple of  years ago and the loggers left the cut trees lying every where and every which way -- this makes for hard walking and almost impossible shooting.  I usually just pass through this mess to hunt the edges.  But, still in the cut, Erdos  went on point.  I followed his lead, him acting like we were going to jump a covey of grouse at any second.  He would stop on point, and, after moving ahead of him, expecting a shot at any second, on signal he would move ahead another 20 or 40 feet before going on point again. I saw grouse tracks in the snow, lots of them.

Erdos' nose found them first, but there's no confirmation like grouse tracks in the snow.

We followed the tracks to the end of the trial they formed. They ended under a small tree surrounded by fresh dropping  with nearby brush marks left in the snow from them taking wing.  There were no birds in sight and no telling which way they'd gone.

Lots of tracks and fresh droppings.

It's usually best to let a hunt unfold on its own, guided by the dog's nose and interest. This is true even if the flow of the hunt veers from the preconceived map in the hunters head.  Even if that preconception was formed based on a previously successful hunt in the same place.  Grouse are creatures of habit and if you've found them in a particular area you're quite likely to find them in the same area again.  That said, you rarely find them in exactly the same spot you did before. You need to trust the dogs nose.

Dogs prefer to hunt into the wind though of course it's generally impossible to leave your truck and hunt into the wind and end up back at the same place.  From our deadend at the grouse droppings  Erdos wanted to hunt into the wind back toward the truck.  My own mental map of the hunt had us walk out of the opposite side of the cut. Today, this meant the wind would be quartering into our backs from our right.  We hunted less than a half a mile down a gentle ridge away from the cut.  On this diversion from Erdos' plan I saw deer, elk, moose, bobcat (I think), coyote, rabbit, squirrel, chipmunk and mouse tracks in the snow.  No sign of grouse. I came to my senses and circled back to the point where the grouse tracks had ended and followed Erdos' plan.  It lead us out of the cut into the older timber -- and onto more tracks. Lots of them.

On point.  There's birds ahead. 

As we hunted forward, Erdos went on point, not the intense one signaling birds right here, but the casual point saying to me, there are birds ahead.  Another 40 yards and he stopped, crouching on point and would not budge.  I knew the birds were very close.  I spotted on in a tree not ten feet from me.    And then one took off and then another and maybe a dozen all together.  Standing ready, the explosion of beating wings is still startling.  Before they were gone, I got off three shots dropping two birds.

I haven't often had good luck trying to follow up on blue grouse in this kind of thick cover (woodcock are a completely different story.) But, since three is a limit and we had two, we walked into the timber in the direction they'd flown.  Not fifty yards in, Erdos went on point -- and wouldn't budge.  I walked forward to find a bleeding grouse lying dead in the snow. The second time this year Erdos found a dead bird I was sure I'd missed.

Jump Shooting

"We spent a fine day driving south from Lemmon all the way to Nebraska with a specific kind of grandeur to the landscape, truly the Great Plains, a subtlety to rolling hills and rocky escarpments that doesn't suit people like Marybelle who want snowcapped postcard mountains."  Jim Harrison, The English Major.

There are few landscapes as unexpectedly beautiful as a sunrise or sunset on a prairie river or a pothole lake. Mostly, people rush by these places on their way to someplace more interesting. Water lies low in the landscape so these places are often hidden from view of the highway, concealed by tangles of willows that glow red in the last light of the day. I am not a morning person by nature; I have witnessed such views at sunset far more often than I have at sunrise.
Jump shooting is the peripatetic hunters preferred method to obtain wild ducks for the oven. You hike the riverbank trying to spot ducks before they spot you.  Once ducks are spotted, you must move into shooting range, using the landscape to conceal yourself. Once you have revealed yourself, the ducks fly and you take your shot or not, depending on how well you have calculated your approach. On a flowing river, the calculation as to where the ducks will be by the time you have moved into shooting range is always a gamble.  Running a hundred yards, bent low to the ground is hard work.  Sometimes you stand up, sure that they will be right in front of you only to find no duck in sight.   

Meager results from a satisfying afternoon of jump shooting.

I manged to kill what I at first though was a mallard hen.  But the bird was smaller than a mallard and the beak was yellow -- leading me to think it must have been a Gadwall hen.  After retrieving my duck from the meandering current, I jumped three mallards -- but they saw me more than 100 yards off so I had no shot.  A half a mile downriver I spotted a duck floating downstream.  I ran downstream, bent to as low as possible to prevent my long shadow from falling on the water, to the point where I thought I'd have a good shot. After stalking through the willows to the riverbank, there was no duck in sight.  I hurried downstream again to the point where a long oxbow returned the flow to near where I was standing.  The duck was hidden under the bank I stood on, not four feet from me. It swam out.  I don't shoot ducks on the water. I hollered to get it to fly and instead of taking off, it dove underwater.  I was dumbfounded. I thought, if I was a duck I'd swim downstream with the current to get away.  So I quickly headed downstream wondering how long a duck can stay underwater.  I waited.  No duck. I watched three muskrats swimming in the current along the bank.  I took a few pictures. Finally, I walked back upstream and at the apex of the oxbow bend I watched the mallard drake flush wild a further fifty yards upstream -- giving me no shot.  Smart duck.

One duck is not a meal, I will head back.

Culmination of my elk season.

Grouse Hunting

Even though we had record snow pack winter last winter, it didn't seem to hurt the local grouse numbers. In fact, I've seen more grouse this year than ever. Erdos and I found grouse every time we went out. That's not unusual for my friend Andy -- the grouse killer -- but he has long legs and is willing to walk as far as it takes to find them. I usually hunt a loop less than a mile from the truck. As time passes my own inventory of places I've seen grouse has grown. And they tend to live in the same places year to year so this leads to more easily obtained successes.

I took my Dad out with me and he waited in the truck while Erdos and I hunted. Before I could get my shotgun out and loaded he was onto birds. They had walked through some time before. We followed the scent, with Erdos continually locking onto point and then looking ahead, ovbiously expecting to see a bird right in front of him at any moment. We followed them for about 200 yards, and then Erdos went on point and would not move. I walked forward and birds went up everywhere. I shot, and shot again, and two birds were down with at least five more flushed. We tried to follow-up on them, but they'd flown the coop.

We moved up the mountain to another spot. Erdos was scenting birds but we did not find them as we moved into the breeze.  I knew there was a bird there and so we circled back and we bumped two birds in a tangle of scrubby aspens.  I had no shot.  Heading back toward the truck where my Dad was waiting, Erdos went on point again.  I stepped forward, flicking the safety on and off on my 20 gauge. A bird flushed and angled across an opening in the trees, a perfect shot.  I mounted the gun to a perfect sight picture, I flicked the safety, and pulled the trigger.  And nothing happened.  As bird flew off into the taller timber Erdos turned and looked at me like I was hopeless.  I'd had the safety on when I mounted the gun and flicked it off instead of on.  Some practice with the shotgun before the season starts would not hurt me at all, not one bit.

To Gray Reef, to Gray Reef, to catch a fat pig.

To Gray Reef, to Gray Reef, to catch a fat pig;
   Home again, home again, dancing a jig.
To Gray Reef, to Gray Reef, to catch a fat hog;
   Home again, home again, jiggety-jog

                                                   Apologies to Mother Goose
                                                             -- where ever she may be.

It's about a four hour drive from Cody WY where we'd spent the night to the Gray Reef dam on the North Platte River -- that's if you do get sidetracked onto a 150 mile goose chase over the Big Horns on the way.   Long story short, an extremely enthusiastic guide at the fly shop in Cody insisted that we really really needed to go to his favorite spot, the North Fork of the Tongue River in the Big Horns.  Gray Reef is ugly and would be crowded he claimed.  I was dubious though curious, I have never fished the Tongue but have certainly heard of it.  We were finally convinced that we really would regret not checking it out by the guides absolutely unbounded confidence and the pictures he showed us of some very very large cutthroat trout.  What he didn't make clear was that the Tongue "River" in the Bighorns is  a creek that is about two feet wide and meanders through a willow choked meadow.  The only way to fish it is to wade up the middle of the stream -- which would be fine if you were the only people there -- we weren't. Every parking area had two or three cars in it and there were fishermen everywhere. We tried to access the river halfway on its flow out of the mountains.  This  required some careful map and compass navigation, negotiating some rough four wheel drive two tracks and a fair amount of backtracking. Eventually it was clear that we were as close to the river as we were going get and still had a big hike with serious elevation loss (and gain).  We left without wetting a line having wasted most of the day.

We got to Gray Reef at about 6PM after a scenic tour of northern and central Wyoming.  There was no one else there.  The flows over the dam were 4600 cfs. High enough that the island was inaccessible (for me anyway) but once we were rigged up we fished the outlet and Gerry landed his first fish of the trip. Ah, sweet relief! ... sweet joy!  A red rock-worm with a midge trailer was just the ticket.

 

Gerry is clearly happy about that fish.

We fished until dusk and together we hooked and landed a satisfying number of fish, perhaps six or eight more between us. We celebrated with drinks and burgers at the Sunset Grill in Alcova. We ended up spending the evening drinking with a hunting guide from Riverton WY, a self described "full-blooded Northern Arapaho".  We ended up closing the place down and  spent the night in one of their motel rooms.

The next day we fished until around 4PM and caught many more nice fish.  The size 16 rock worm patterns seems to be the pattern of the day.  The fish just couldn't get enough of them.

And thus ended our road trip.

The Madison

We drove north from Island Park ID along the east side of Henry's Lake and up and over Raynolds Pass to the Madison.  We fished upstream from the bridge on the North side of the river.  The south bank is dotted with trophy homes, most with large picture windows looking out onto the river -- kind of makes you feel like you're the entertainment.  I've fished this place maybe a half a dozen times over the years.  Gerry had not been there since the houses were built.  There were other fishermen on the river but it was less crowded than the Fork.   The water was high and off-color and the wind was gusting pretty hard.  Not good conditions. We did not hook up working that north bank (I figured it had already been fished pretty hard that morning) so we decided too drive up along Quake lake to see if we could find where Gerry and his family had camped so often.  As best as we could tell, the old campsite which had been near the confluence of Beaver Creek and the Madison was now part of the lake.

After some lunch we stopped in Kelly Galloup's flyshop at Slide Inn.  I recall fishing at Slide Inn one spring many years ago -- before there was any shop there --  but the grade is still steep there and the river was roaring and it did not appeal.  A enthusiastic college kid was working the shop.  He was brimming over with a summer's worth of new found knowledge and he told us that we need to wait until dusk for the caddis hatch. Until the hatch he recommended fishing a small pheasant tail nymphs.  He liked our chances at $3 bridge.   We drove downstream and parked at the bridge, paying our fee in the metal box.  It was maybe 2PM, still far too early for the evening hatch at 8PM.  We rigged up and started fishing upstream. Almost immediately Gerry and I got separated.

Four golden pheasant-tail caddis larva.

As occasionally happens in flyfishing, I had an epiphany. I thought: "If there was to be an astounding caddis hatch at 8PM, wasn't the river filled caddis larva right now?"  I tied on a pattern representing a cased larva which tied with golden pheasant-tail (a pattern of my own design) and within two casts I had hooked up with a fiesty brown trout.  At one point he ran upstream through a deep opening between two large rocks and then ran back downstream on the far side.  My line was stuck, deeply wrapped around the base of a refrigerator sized boulder.  I was sure I'd lost the fish and was vaguely concerned about retrieving my line.  When I managed to free the line, the fight was back on.  I finally landed him fifty yards downstream from where I'd first hooked him. Based on the fight he'd put up I was surprised to find a buttery yellow brown trout about 15" in length attached to the other end of my line. 

Fiesty brown taken on a caddis larva pattern.

Although I was anxious to share my insight with Gerry, there was a promising unfished bit of run just above where I'd hooked the first fish.   After a few more casts I was firmly attached to another fish, this one was a rainbow and now I knew I had cracked the puzzle. 

I went downstream to find Gerry to share my  insight.  The last time I'd seen him he was below me. He'd apparently leapfrogged past me without me (or him) noticing. When I'd made the 1/2 mile walk back to the truck I realized what had happened.  I walked to the bridge and started fishing up the north bank.  Again, almost immediately, I hooked up with a feisty fish.  As I reached for my net to land another brown trout I heard something plunk into the fast current I was standing in.  I was sure it was my camera, and I frantically tried to move downstream with he current, peering down into the water to try to see what had fallen. Whatever it was, it was lost.  I turned my attention back to the fish still on my line.  I landed the fish found my camera just where I'd put it and took a photograph. It turned out that the half of the the magnetic net holder that was attached to my vest had dropped in the current.  Unable to reattach my landing net, I went back to the truck.

Gerry came walking in rather soon after that.  He had hooked one good fish that took off upstream like a steelhead, but it broke him off.  My nymph rig included a tiny tin shot (size 4) pinched on the line about 2 feet above two of my golden pheasant caddis larvae which were tied about a foot and a half apart on 5X tippet. Gerry was fishing deep with a heavier rig and did not get as many hookups.  It's surprising how seemingly small differences can have such an effect on outcomes.

Madison river brown.

It was a bit after 4PM. We were both tired and hungry so we decided to move on. We debated driving to Ennis and fishing the Madison again the next day.  I love Ennis. But at some point on every road trip, driving further away from home, even only 30 miles, seems too far.  After a brief discussion, we decided to head east and south on to our last destination, the North Platte River at Gray Reef, my home water.  Our path took us to West Yellowstone where we ate dinner.  With at most a couple of hours of light left in the day, we drove in through the West Entrance of Yellowstone. We drove through the park to the East Entrance and on to Cody WY where we spent the night.

Henry's Fork of the Snake

Gerry back on the Fork after a 45 year absence.

Gerry and I decided a real fishing road-trip would be a good idea in late July and, by dog, we did it.

Gerry flew into Denver and I picked him up and drove us up to Laramie. The next morning we drove from Laramie up to Jackson Hole where we ate dinner on the porch at Calico in Wilson.  The Snake in Jackson was high and muddy. We drove up and over Teton pass into Idaho spending the night in Driggs. 

We were on the Henry's Fork above Harriman State Park the next morning.   Gerry had spent his youth fishing the Yellowstone area rivers with his parents: the Henry's Fork, the Madison and the Firehole was their summer home.  For many years they camped for a month and more along the Madison where Quake lake now is.  The lake was formed by a massive earthquake on July 17, 1959.  After the devastating quake they continued to fish the Yellowstone area for a few years but eventually refocused their fishing efforts to trout in lakes in British Columbia.  Gerry had not been back since.

Even though the reputation of the Henry's Fork is not what it once was, it is still a major destination for an international crowd and even with regular reports of poor fishing it is still crowded.

Instructions for "proper release" in English, Japanese, French and Spanish.

The fishing on the Fork is tough and technical.  We arrived on the water a bit late after a leisurely drive up from Driggs and then spent too much time in Lawson's old shop obtaining Idaho Fishing Licenses and some flies.  There were a few PMD's coming off as we walked down river and it looked promising, there were a few Caddis too. But that action turned off shortly after we arrived and neither of us hooked up, nor did we see anyone else hook up.

For me, fishing is not a competitive sport, at least not the way I practice it.  But even so, when I'm not catching fish and no-one else seems to be either, it provides some evidence that it may not be that I am doing everything wrong -- it may be that the fishing is just tough.  

The author in full fishing regalia.

 The evening hatch was more exciting.  We spotted a very large trout methodically rising behind a rock on the far bank. We waded across the river to work the fish.  There were a few other fish feeding as well. We took turns casting to that large riser for more than an hour.  We did not put him down, but neither could we interest him in any of our offerings.  There were sporadic small flurries of BWO's and Flavs hatching through the evening.  At one point I left Gerry to work the large bank riser. I waded out to try a pod of smaller fish working the main current.  I drifted my fly downstream to them and, with most of a flyline out on the water, I hooked up. I lost what was optimistically a 14" rainbow when it jumped. For me, and for Gerry, this spot and stalk style of dry fly fishing is perhaps the most enjoyable of all  and even though we did not hook up we both had a great evening.  In the fly shop the next day we were told that our large fish was probably taking Flav emergers. We both stocked up on a few.

The next morning we fished a mostly non-existent morning hatch to no avail.   We tried float-tubing Henry's Lake -- Gerry's first time out in a tube -- but the wind came up and we caught nothing.  We tried fishing down river at the takeout above Mesa falls, but caught nothing.

On Henry's Lake before the wind came up.

We did work that same fish for a second evening, this time armed with the magic Flav emergers.  Unfortunately, two oblivious blokes walked down the path along the top of the bank just where we were working the fish and put it down!

 That pretty much did it for us on the Henry's Fork, we'd been skunked and we decided to cut our losses and head to the Madison the next day.