Scott Bowen

A Day on the South Fork

outdoorlife-editor — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 12:26:28 -0400

The first big cutthroat hit with a shark-like viciousness. It turned hard and dove, surging headlong downstream. It doggedly sought the bottom until I had it up on the surface, on its side, and slid it into the net.

This, my guide, Ooley, intoned is what nature intended a cutthroat trout to be: Thick-sided, spotted, with a bright amber-gold-olive body. These were Westslope cutthroats, the hard-fighting cousin to the more light-hearted cutts I had once caught in Yellowstone, on the other side of the Continental Divide. For some reason, that ridge of Rocky Mountain peaks makes a big difference in a cutthroat's demeanor.

The South Fork of the Snake River, where I was fishing, is full of Westslope cutts and also cut-bows, the cutthroat-rainbow hybrids that are a bit heavier in the shoulders and much more spotted than the pure cutthroat. And there were also browns, some very big browns.

"When the biggest browns come up," Ooley said, his eyes bright behind his tinted glasses, "man, it's like a toilet flushing they suck down so much water to inhale that fly. I mean it's like they were tarpon or something."

I gotta see that, I thought.

I was staying at South Fork Lodge, in Swan Valley, Idaho. The South Fork of the Snake River flowed past my cabin. The evening I arrived I sat on the bed at twilight and looked out at the river through the open deck doors. The river really did appear to be a huge, live, slithering thing; a beautiful green-and-blue giant serpent making its way to its union with the Columbia River, its waters ultimately flowing into the Pacific Ocean.

"When the Vice President fishes on this part of the river," Lodge director George Sporn told me at dinner on the deck of the main lodge, "you'll see Secret Service people patrolling on horseback on top of that butte." George pointed and I looked across the river to a high, wide tabletop. I imagined the dark silhouettes of men on horseback, like something out of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

"Does Cheney fish here often?" I asked.

"He has. The Henry's Fork too." Cheney's personal secret hideout, I learned, is near Jackson Hole. Good place to hideout.

After a great dinner during which I enjoyed a caribou dish to rival Jim Zumbo's recipe, I retired, hoping to get as much rest I would need to spend a day standing in the bow of a drift-boat, performing the "South Fork Slap" again and again.

The next morning, Ooley and I were chugging along in his old, brown Suburban, the dashboard upholstery dotted with flies of various kinds. Ooley loves his old Suburbans; he patted the dashboard as we motored up a hill. "C'mon, old girl, I love you," he said. "I got a guy who scouts out used models for me, but I don't need another one yet."

Ooley had the look of an old-school guy who knows every new trick in the book. His khaki hat, vest, trousers and shirt were all well worn and stained here and there. His bristly brown-and-white beard hid most of his merry face, and his eyes were half concealed behind tinted eyeglasses. But his smile was big and broad and he had an easy laugh. The name his mother gave him is Lyle. We were hauling a drift boat of his own making, one based on the MacKenzie style but with the bow and stern points squared off to reduce drag.

The salmon fly hatch was going on in earnest, and the public access lot back on Swan Valley road was jam-packed full of trucks and trailers.

"This is Mardri-Gras time on the South Fork,"Ooley said. "Everyone comes out. It's kinda crazy sometimes."

We launched at the beginning of a section of the river called "The Canyon," for a float that would end at the Byington ramp 25 miles away. Guide boats are pretty tightly regulated on the South Fork, the state giving each outfitter getting only so many boat passes per day per section.

Variations on the Chernobyl Ant and salmon fly were the patterns for the day. Ooley offered me a super-secret pattern that he ties himself and which I will only say is meant to look like a good-sized salmon fly; the secret is in the materials used to make the wings and wrap the belly.

Nearly all the casts I was making were to the banks - to low hanging branches, under-cut edges - or to island points and snag piles. The speed of the current and the quality of casting the situation demanded led me to work out a drift-boat fly-caster's primer in my head:

1. Footing - Keep your feet apart, your legs a little bent. Depending upon your boat's design, there may be anti-skid mats on which you want to stand; otherwise position your feet so they are as flat and stable as possible. I had a tendency to want to stand too high and too far forward so my toes were bent. Don't do that. And above all, wear the most comfortable, cushiony, supportive sneakers you've got.

2. Stance - Ooley often shouted, "Forty-degree angle. Forty degrees!" That is, he wanted my cast to go out from the boat and land at a forty-degree angle, thus giving the fly time for a decent drift before the boat or the fly line overtook it. So you need to open your hips to the side a little but face upstream. Don't hunch over the gunnels. Stand up straight.

3. Sight - This kind of fly casting is almost like a shoot-out. You've got to look where you want to go, put the fly there and watch it, but then quickly make your decision to cast again. And while you're watching the fly, you're also looking upstream for rising fish. Standing and casting at the 40-degree angle allows you this window; looking directly sideways does not give you enough of a picture of what's happening upstream. The three most perfect catches I made occurred when I was in the right position looking upstream, saw a fish feed, made a cast that landed just so right that the big fly carried right to the cutthroat and I set the hook fast enough. (Remember: You're moving and the fly is moving, though not at the same exact speed; the fish isn't moving, he's holding.)

4. The Cast - I eventually became proficient at what is called the "South Fork Slap," something you can only get away with during salmon fly time when the fly is so big and the trout so eager that slapping the fly in there like flinging a stone isn't a problem. Use just enough line to reach the edge of the water, trap the standing line under your index finger against the rod handle, and just go at it like you were whipping a team of horses. Maybe you let hang an extra 15 to 30 inches of line in case you need to adjust the cast length here and there.

5. Striking - Westslope cutthroats take the fly like a stroke of lightning. If you want to take fish, you've got to be faster. Mend the line to keep a direct feel to the fly because any slight bow in the line is a curse. Your casts have to be fast and straight. Get the cast out ahead of the boat, zapping that fly right in there. No, it's not easy.

Oolee and I had a great time floating along, taking cutts and a few cutt-bows in most places where we seemed to think one lurked. At one point, I had a good cutt-bow on and was battling with the fish as the boat ploughed over some riffles and I did a back-and-forth, foot-to-foot shimmy, rod held high, as I kept myself in the boat and kept the fish on the hook.

"What're you doing up there?" Ooley called out.

"That's the boat dance," I said, having no better answer than to state the obvious.

"You're making it hard for me to steer," he said. "Can't you just wiggle a little bit?"

"Whatever you say, Ooley. Fish coming up."

Near Pine Creek we pulled over and got out to work a small back channel as hundreds of Pacific gulls flocked over head as they filled up on the salmon flies. Here were about eight actively feeding cutthroats. They were slurping down small pale morning duns. I handed my six-weight to Ooley and took his Thompson & Thompson 3-weight to cast to the cutts. Wading, I cast and cast, and got a couple rises, but because the water spilled from three different spots into this section, I faced a kind of three-speed triple mend that I was unable to perfect before I had missed about six fish and was ready to stop embarrassing myself.

But no worries: I had already boated about eight big cutts and the day was very young. Yet soon came the biggest disappointment of the day.

About eight miles into the float, we went into a narrowing of the river where tons of water flowed through a deep channel. We drifted over some whirlpools and Oolee got on the oars to move us out and back across the river. I knew my fly had been sucked down deep by the swirling current and I was about to pull it up when I snagged bottom.

"Oolee, I'm on the bottom," I yelled.

"What?"

The bottom was alive. My rod was yanked straight down, the tip-top in the water, and it began to lash and vibrate like mad. Line sizzled out of my left hand. Whatever I had hooked was making a horse-heavy run across the river.

"Oh, man!" Ooley shouted.

I was too jazzed to say anything. And then I watched as the line shot right at another drift boat in the middle of the river, parallel to us. I tried to tender the line with my hand but it burned over my skin.

The surging, powerful mystery fish was a good distance away when the fly pulled free. Either the fish plucked the leader against the underside of the other boat or I had tried to slow the fish down too soon.

I thought I was going to puke. I couldn't look back at Ooley.

"Man, that was a big fish," he said. "When I saw your rod going straight down in the water like that, whew...You couldn't hold him, could you?"

"Shouldn't have tried."

"Yeah, you gotta let the big ones run."

"He went cross current, Ooley - and right into that other boat."

Ooley nodded, smiling. "That's why he's big."

By lunchtime, the awfulness of loosing the big fish had faded, as I had made some good casts and Ooley had netted about four more good cutthroats for me. Parked along a bank of cottonwood saplings, we ate lunch and jawed about fishing. Ooley exhorted me to be faster on my strikes.
"Cross their eyes, man," he said. "If you miss, you should have a backcast all ready to go."

Other guide boats, some from South Fork and some from Henry's Fork outfitters, drifted by and Ooley and I waved and called out. A guide on his day off drifted by with his fetching girlfriend standing in the bow, casting.

"Swap you clients!" Ooley shthe salmon flies. Here were about eight actively feeding cutthroats. They were slurping down small pale morning duns. I handed my six-weight to Ooley and took his Thompson & Thompson 3-weight to cast to the cutts. Wading, I cast and cast, and got a couple rises, but because the water spilled from three different spots into this section, I faced a kind of three-speed triple mend that I was unable to perfect before I had missed about six fish and was ready to stop embarrassing myself.

But no worries: I had already boated about eight big cutts and the day was very young. Yet soon came the biggest disappointment of the day.

"Oolee, I'm on the bottom," I yelled.

"What?"

"Oh, man!" Ooley shouted.

I thought I was going to puke. I couldn't look back at Ooley.

"Man, that was a big fish," he said. "When I saw your rod going straight down in the water like that, whew...You couldn't hold him, could you?"

"Shouldn't have tried."

"Yeah, you gotta let the big ones run."

"He went cross current, Ooley - and right into that other boat."

Ooley nodded, smiling. "That's why he's big."

"Swap you clients!" Ooley sh

Missoula Trout Tour

outdoorlife-editor — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 12:26:28 -0400

Missoula, you might say, is a nerve center of the Western fishing world. With this fine college town as a base of operations, you can fish some of the most venerable waters in the country: the Bitterroot, Blackfoot and Clark Fork Rivers, Rock Creek and the Little Blackfoot. Drive a little further due north out of town and you've got Flathead Lake, the largest natural lake in the West.

Then there's the timing. For slam-dunk trout fishing on the rivers, aim for June and July for the salmon fly, stonefly and Green Drake hatches, as I did, or fish through July and August for hopper time. The brown, rainbow and cutthroat trout all make eating a major priority when there is so much protein floating above. And all summer long, the deep lake trout in the Flathead Lake will snap up a jig-fly combo. With daily bag a liberal 15 macks, you'd better have a big enough smokehouse.

Rock Creek

When I got to Missoula, I ran into some minor misfortune: the rains that preceded me had blown out the Bitterroot, Clark Fork and Blackfoot Rivers. But in a good little local fly shop, Kingfisher's (shop slogan: "It's about fishing, not fashion"), I read on the daily river report that Rock Creek was hot.

Golden stone flies and salmon-fly patterns like mini hotdogs with wings were what the situation called for. A San Juan-worm dropper could be added to the stonefly, though that's a heck of a stinger you may want to reserve for slow times and special situations, like plying deep holes.

I had the best luck on Rock Creek casting to four different kinds of structure: the upstream ends of islands, especially in front of or along side piles of snags; short, deep channels along undercut banks; deeper flat sections studded with big, submerged rocks; and in pools just behind big, exposed rocks. Nearly all of Rock Creek runs through the Lolo National Forest, so there's about 38 miles of creek access anywhere you want.

My strategy was to drive far down Rock Creek Road (four-wheel drive might be a good idea, at least when it rains) until I saw the big bugs in the air (by late June this is just about anywhere below where the pavement ends) and then searched for islands or boulder-filled runs. There are lots of trout all along Rock Creek, but these were some of my hot spots:

Below mile marker 33, there's a big parking area along the creek. Downstream is a good-sized island. I walked out to the island on a fallen pine and then cast to a deep side channel. My stone fly was left alone, so I played dirty and put on the San Juan worm dropper. Bang - a nice 16-inch brown.

Around mile marker 20, near a trail head, is a tree with a sign nailed to it that says, "Wahlquist Creek." Just upstream from this tree is a flat, rocky run. You'll have to throw a good amount of line and do some fast mending, but I took two 15-inch cutthroats and two 16-inch browns here on a stonefly in about half an hour.

Around mile maker 19 is another island. Here, I took browns on a salmon fly pattern at the head of the island around a snag pile, and another brown on the opposite side of the island under low-hanging branches of cottonwood saplings. I made upstream casts, putting the fly beyond the branches and then letting it float under, stripping and mending as it came back to me.

Near mile marker 14, I parked just below the driveway for the Dalles Campground and fished the pools around the huge, dome-shaped boulders. Multiple 12- to 15-inch browns came from here.

You may be tempted to fish around the Welcome Creek Trailhead - it's a popular place with lots of parking and a swinging rope bridge to get you to the other side of the creek. But the fish here get pounded all day, so if you try this spot, try it on the way down the road in the morning.

Right now (late August) the salmon fly hatch has pretty well petered out, though there e golden stonefly hatches through the month. Some of the biggest caddisflies I've ever seen come off Rock Creek in the evening, after five o'clock, and a size 10 Muddler Minnow fished just under the surface or an elk-hair caddis can turn the trick. Pale morning duns and green drakes are also happening. Good-sized Prince nymphs and brown or black stonefly nymphs, about size 10, are taking fish. But hoppers are the most fun right now. Dave's Hoppers or the local patterns do fine.

Rock Creek's browns, cutthroats and rainbows all run from 12 to 17 inches, though there are a good number of fatties pushing 20 inches here and there. All species have a fast take, so be ready to make a quick strike. There are also bull trout, which you must release immediately; some of this can run pretty big and will even slam a small trout you've already got on the line.

With larger flies you can get away with 3x to 4x tippets and seven to eight-foot leaders. But the PMDs and caddis flies need 6x and 5x respectively.

The Little Blackfoot River

With the big rivers swollen with rain, I decided to meet up with Montana writer Andrew McKean in Garrison and let him guide me along the Little Blackfoot River.

To reach the Little Blackfoot take Route 90 east from Missoula and turn off on Route 12 north, at Garrison. Follow Route 12 for about two miles until you see a dirt parking area on your left. This is a good public access point. Fishing is allowed along the river to the high-water mark. But from the parking lot you have to cross active railroad tracks to get to the water, so be careful, and absolutely, positively do not walk on or along the tracks or your buddies will divide up all your gear when that locomotive carries you away.

The Little Blackfoot is a classic meandering free-stone stream through pasture land. Working the edges with golden stone flies, Chernobyl ants, hopper patterns and Stimulators or big stonefly nymphs is the way to go. During the stonefly hatch and hopper time, the cutthroats and browns are pretty aggressive, so you can get away with 3x tippet.

Downstream from the parking area McKean and I found a pretty productive run, beyond a place where the river widens and flows flat around some islands. Opposite a rocky hillside we cast to fast riffles and pocket water and took a number of browns between 13 and 17 inches. This was the one place where I saw browns literally jumping clear of the water to snap up stoneflies.

Flathead Lake

Tapping a "Leadagator" jig on the bottom of Flathead Lake, 200 feet down, isn't easy. And feeling the soft take of a lake trout is a learned skill, but I learned quickly.

Andrew McKean, his friend and lure-maker Dick Zimmer and I had trailered McKean's motor boat up Route 35 along the lake to the Blue Bay boat ramp. Then we maybe spent all of three minutes slowly motoring away from the ramp, watching the depth gauge until we saw that we were in 200 feet of water.

"The lakers are down that far because they're feeding on the mysis shrimp," Dick said. "There are lakers at various levels, but in the deepest sections, the shrimp are way down and the lakers follow them."

We stuck mainly with the Leadagator and "Trilobite" jigs, both of Zimmer's making. The bright blue-and-white lead lures, coupled with a white kokanee salmon fly on a 10-inch dropper line tied about a foot above the jig, just sailed down to the bottom. I wondered if these things would be good for surf casting for stripers and blues, given how far they could be tossed.

Pretty soon the lakers were on, hitting the jigs mostly, with a few taking the fly. They hit with a light throb that you have to be attuned to and strike the second you feel it. Once hooked, the fish begin a staccatoed bam-bam-bam fight that doesn't really turn into brawling until you get them within twenty feet of the boat. Then the bigger ones-anything over 20 inches-make lunging turns, while the smaller ones thrash.

This is purely a catch-and-eat endeavor, as often the laker's swim bladder expands to a lethal limit when you bring them up from so deep. So you call for the "priest" as soon as the fish are in the boat and knock 'em dead, and into the cooler they go. The daily limit is 15 fish under 30 inches and one fish over 36 inches.

Between the three of us, we took 35 fish, all in the 15- to 25-inch class. I ate smoked trout sandwiches all the rest of the week while on Rock Creek, so the $17 nonresident tribal license I had to buy was easy lunch money.

get them within twenty feet of the boat. Then the bigger ones-anything over 20 inches-make lunging turns, while the smaller ones thrash.

Search-and-Rescue Man

outdoorlife-editor — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 12:26:25 -0400

Late in the fall of 1994, a father/son hunting team moved up a draw in the Lewis and Clark National Forest in central Montana. The son had hoped to flush some elk into a clearing toward his father, then cross a ridge and make his way out of the trees to a rendezvous point. But he didn't show up. His father searched.

Soon, the Meagher Country Sheriff's Department was searching. That night, a snowstorm blew in. The police and local rescue team searched in the snow for two days, their hope of finding the boy alive waning. Thinking they should start looking for a body, they called in the Lewis and Clark Search-and-Rescue team, from Helena, for help. But when team leader Ralph DeCunzo (at left) arrived, he said, "We're not going to look for a body. That boy is alive."

DeCunzo was right. His team found the boy. His feet were frozen, but he was alive. "Lost kids are incredibly
resilient," DeCunzo says. Determination and faith weren't the only factors of success, however. The boy's life hinged on DeCunzo's intricate psychological methods, developed over years of trying to get inside the heads of lost hunters and other wanderers. If you get lost in Montana, Ralph DeCunzo knows you pretty well before he even meets you.

"I asked the boy's father what kind of frame of mind his son was in, and whether he had recently been reprimanded or had been in trouble," DeCunzo says. "I create psychological profiles of lost people and figure out what they might do when they're lost, given their frame of mind."

Before starting any search for lost hunters or lost children or even people with Alzheimer's disease, DeCunzo and his team members work through in-depth interviews -- usually over the telephone late at night -- with spouses, siblings, hunting partners and friends, even doctors, to piece together as fully as possible the mental state and spirit of their subject. Then the 30-member Lewis and Clark team sets off to turn the lost into found.

A great deal of search-and-rescue science is mixed in with the more intuitive psychology. In the case of young Scott Furman, 13, DeCunzo and his team fed their hunches about the boy's mental state into computer probability programs to figure out which areas of the forest the boy probably went to, which places he probably did not go to and what the chances of finding him were. DeCunzo then put a trained aerial observer up in a helicopter and began crisscrossing high-probability areas. They found the boy not far from a makeshift shelter he had built, and not far from the estimated PLS (Place Last Seen).

There was a critical irony to the frost-bitten ending. "This young guy was taught in hunter-education class that you never trespass on private property without written permission," DeCunzo says. "At a fence line he saw the porch light of a homestead in the distance, but he was more afraid to cross that line and go up to the house because it was private property than he was of being cold and lost."

Compared to hikers or climbers, most hunters are much more independent and determined. These qualities can make them more difficult to find. "When you do a psych profile on a hunter and find out he's a hard-charger who's been lost before and thinks he can work his way out of it, you've got yourself quite a situation," DeCunzo says. Montana hunters are an even more determined lot: While the national average distance a lost person travels
is five miles, lost Montana hunters typically go seven or eight miles before being found. "When they get lost, native Montana hunters go farther than out-of-state hunters, that's for sure," DeCunzo says, looking back on 25 years of search-and-rescue experience.

"Back in my early days, search and rescue was not nearly as sophisticated as it is now," he says. "Today, lost-person behavior is something that is taught nationally and it's very statistical. The Lewis and Clark team was among the first to take search and rescue to the psychological extent that we do." A standard psychological-profiling tool called the Lost Person Questionnaire resulted from the compilation of methods of search-and-rescue teams nationwide.
In 1985, DeCunzo, along with a searcher named Don Cooper, created the handbook Fundamentals of Search and Rescue, which emphasizes psychological profiling and lost-person behavior: Experienced people tend to look for and follow streams; young people tend to move uphill; adults and overweight people move downhill.

Cold is the worst enemy of the lost hunter. It quickly does away with any mental toughness a hunter has and throws off a psychological profile because hypothermia overtakes a person's mind. Yet DeCunzo has miraculously found hunters who have shed their backpacks and clothing and gone wandering around naked in a total panic. Fire-starting material is an obvious but often neglected essential for hunters.

"We've never had a subject die because we couldn't find them, but a few have been dead long before we found them," DeCunzo says. "We've also found a few face down in the snow and revived them."

DeCunzo and his team even once found a man who would have preferred to remain unfound. A hunter's worried wife called to report that her husband was missing. After going through the usual psychological profile -- which might have included the question, "How's your marriage?" -- DeCunzo sent up two search planes. They soon spotted the "lost" man's truckÃƒÂ¤at another woman's house.

Saving the Atlantic Salmon

outdoorlife-editor — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 12:26:25 -0400

The effort to preserve and restore wild Atlantic salmon stocks has turned into something of a quest, and with good reason: There are now only about 600 wild salmon returning to Maine waters every year. Back in their heyday, Atlantic salmon ranged across all of New England, from the Connecticut River northward. Over the past 30 years, a combination of commercial overharvest, acid rain and disease has reduced the Atlantic salmon to an endangered species.

To help save this great game fish, the Outdoor Life Conservation Fund recently donated $10,000 to the American Forest Foundation's (AFF) "Shared Streams" program. The AFF has joined forces with local private landowners and the Wild Salmon Resource Center (WSRC), in Columbia Falls, Maine, to restore sections of the Pleasant River where salmon could spawn in greater numbers were it not for siltation and habitat destruction. The AFF, which also is involved in restoration efforts on the Kenduskeag and Narraguagus rivers, serves as a liaison between local landowners and conservation groups, connecting the right people to the Shared Streams program.

"The cooperative three-party grouping of the AFF, WSRC and private landowners on the Pleasant River is essential to salmon restoration, and was something that was lacking in the past," says Dwayne Shaw, watershed programs coordinator for the WSRC.

The restoration effort on the Pleasant River is intended in part to bring about a sustainable sport-fishery within the next 30 years. That may seem like a long time, but the minimal number of salmon necessary for a viable spawning run is roughly 100, and fewer than six adult fish have returned to spawn each of the past five years in the Pleasant.

"Some of the people who are skeptical about restoration ask if water quality and the impact of acid rain on smolt development will allow for a salmon comeback, but I think there's a future sport-fishery on the Pleasant," Shaw says.

"In rural economies there is often the strong misconception that dealing with conservation groups and land-use regulations will bring about a negative economic impact," says John Burrows, the Atlantic Salmon Federation's representative in Maine. "But if you can show that there are economic benefits of watershed restoration, such as sport-fishing, you can create incentives for landowner participation."

The Outdoor Life Conservation Fund monies are being used to cover the costs of tree plantings, fertilizer, terrain grading, geotextile silt fences and other landscaping necessary to prevent erosion and siltation.