Rivers

I’ve been drawn to rivers since that day as a young boy my father gave me my own spinning outfit and took me to a little creek where I caught my first trout. I find it hard to pass a river without stopping to check it out. Why go all the way to Upper Michigan, you might ask. Why not stay home and fish the Credit or the Grand up the road? Part of the reason is simply the adventure of the roadtrip. Then there is the special literary lore of UP rivers, thanks to Robert Traver and Ernest Hemmingway. As well, on the Upper Peninsula you can fish two, three, four streams all within an hour or so of driving. Parts of the mountain west are like that too, where some fishermen give themselves challenges such as catching three different species of trout in a day. (in the mountain west they also like to combine fishing and hunting in an extravaganza known as a “cast & blast”).

Indian River at the campground

Indian River at the downstream end of the prime trout water

UP Rivers mostly have a brown tinge from tannins in the water. This makes it difficult to discern how deep some of the runs are without getting in there for a look. Most of the rivers are lined with deadfalls and tag alders. Some are difficult to wade. Bottoms are mostly sandy but there are holes and there are spots where you take a step and sink down, down, down, spots where you get mired in the muck and can barely move.

The Indian in the campground stretch is difficult fishing but it is a stream that boasts outstanding growth rates and big trout. There is a lot of wood in the river to snag your fly, and there are many trees across the stream, forming deep pools and making it very hard to move about without getting out of the river and negotiating around through the bush. In the absence of bug hatches, this is streamer water. I hooked a very large brown trout in the pool featured in the top photo. I only glimpsed it before it wrapped itself around a log and shed the hook, but I would say it was a brown of 20+ inches. In the bigger water featured in the lower photo above, I caught a very nice brook trout of about 13 inches. The lower water was way easier to fish than the campground stretch. First, the mosquitoes were not nearly so bad. Second, rather than a jumble of logs, the stream was defined by pools and runs and bank cover. I tried to access the Indian at another spot, in which I drove along a two-track to a primitive campsite. A trail then led toward the river. I checked out the trail prior to gearing up and came across these mushrooms growing out of moss.

Unidentified mushrooms

I don’t know what these are. They are among the few mushrooms I came across all trip. Their caps were about 2.5 inches across. I found them where the trail became mossy and spongy and wet. At this point, well along the trail, and knowing the river couldn’t be far away, I got the sudden feeling that I might get lost deep in these woods, never to be found. There was a time when I would not have even considered my safety in a situation like this. I would have sallied forth without a worry. But these days I think about it, and I decided the river was just too far from the car and the car was just too far from the road and the river was difficult….and I turned back.

The Little Indian

The Little Indian is beaver water. It’s slow and meandering. When you try to wade it, the bottom is spongy and silty and you need to have a care you don’t sink into a hole or trip on a hidden branch and go for a spill. It’s beautiful water. I found it to be like a hatchery for small trout, 6 and 7 inchers. And then surprisingly, a fat 9 incher came up for my tiny dry fly. There will be big brook trout in this stream but I think the only time to get them would be late evening, just before dark. In the heat of the afternoon when I visited, a 9 inchers was about the best I could expect.

The Driggs

Deadfalls, tag alders and deep runs make parts of the Driggs a challenge to fish. The river has great access with a two-track that runs along much of its length. It features many S-curves, some surprisingly deep pools and runs and a very health population of brook trout. I didn’t catch any larger than 11 inches in this river but when it was hot, as it was all day Tuesday, I lost count of the the trout I caught and released. (what is this strange compulsion to chase after trout, anyway?…I can’t explain it. Robert Traver took a shot at it with this famous quote: “I fish because I love to. Because I love the environs where trout are found, which are invariably beautiful, and hate the environs where crowds of people are found, which are invariably ugly. Because of all the television commercials, cocktail parties, and assorted social posturing I thus escape. Because in a world where most men seem to spend their lives doing what they hate, my fishing is at once an endless source of delight and an act of small rebellion. Because trout do not lie or cheat and cannot be bought or bribed, or impressed by power, but respond only to quietude and humility, and endless patience. Because I suspect that men are going this way for the last time and I for one don’t want to waste the trip. Because mercifully there are no telephones on trout waters. Because in the woods I can find solitude without loneliness. … And finally, not because I regard fishing as being so terribly important, but because I suspect that so many of the other concerns of men are equally unimportant and not nearly so much fun.”). The Driggs seems inaccessable until you get in the water. It looks deep and tangled. How do you cast with all those trees and tag alders? Once you are in the water, it is as if you have been enveloped by the river. You find the rhythm of casting to avoid the alders on the backcast and on the landing. When you move, it is a wee step at a time, slowly and gently.

I pulled off on one of the two-tracks that follow the river, and as many of them do, the trail ended beside the river at a primitive campsite. But this one was special. I found a memorial there.

Memorial

Memorial

Was this a favourite camping place, a spot where a group of guys met and camped and fished together? Are there remains buried there or is this simply a memorial recognizing the importance of this remote pinprick in the universe to a few people who cared about it? I decided not to fish the river at this memorial. It was their spot, and I left it for them.

Fox River

The Fox is among the most famous trout rivers in Upper Michigan. There is a lot of water and many accesses. Wading a stretch like this one, I tie a bandana in an obvious spot on some tag alders so I can find my way out again later. Once you wade a half mile upstream or downstream it become very difficult to find the trail that took you to the river. Years ago I fished this river and almost got myself badly lost. Now I leave a marker.

Fox River

Many of the locals float the Fox, usually in 12 or 14 foot aluminum car top boats, occasionally in canoes. Tourist fly fishermen often float the river too, in bellow boats or one-man pontoon boats. The local guys I talked to are somewhat bemused by fly fishermen. “Ya, some of those fly fishermen are mighty fancy, but if you really want trout, you’ll use a minnow (dead or alive, apparently it matters not) with an inline spinner tied about 10 inches from the hook.” One fellow I talked to complained that they lowered the possession limit from 10 to 5 trout in the Fox to better manage the pressure on the river. “It ain’t right. We deserve to take 10 trout.”

Good bug bad bug

This post has background music. Lanquidity by Sun Ra and the Arkestra.

I pulled into the Indian River Campground with the duel idea of fishing the river and checking out the campground, with an eye to setting up camp there for a couple days. It was deserted. Why? It was clearly deserted because it was home to an unbelievable number of the fiercest mosquitoes in America. I opened the car door and ducked out of the way as millions of the little bastards flew in. This led to the question, how do you get them to leave? The answer is to drive fast with all the windows open. On this stretch of the Indian, there was no respite and  eventually the mosquitoes drove me off the river. In other places, the mosquitoes came in waves. At the campground on the Fox River, I tried to play the canjo. The rhythm went bum-ditty bum-ditty bum-whack. WHACK. Bum-ditty whack. Whack WHACK. Bum-ditty whack. On Wednesday, a warm day with gusty swirling west winds, the mosquitoes just about disappeared. Curiously enough, Wednesday offered the slowest fly fishing of the trip as well. There seemed to be a connection between being tormented by biting insects and catching trout, a connection I can’t understand.

Mosquitoes are not the only insect pest around the UP. I saw several of those parasitic nasties we call ticks during my travels. I took to checking in the tent,  checking my clothes, and having a good look at my legs in the tent each night before bed, just because the idea of having one of these mini-monsters attaching itself to me does not impress. I don’t like any of the other critters that attach themselves to me either (like leeches and lamprey). Last year, around home, a tick found its way to Memphis’ head and one got Rossi too, and in both cases I had to gently but firmly remove them with pliers. Certain black-legged ticks or deer ticks carry the bacteria responsible for Lyme disease and as far as I’m concerned that makes them extra nasty. I guess ticks really don’t belong in this post because I think they are arachnids (like spiders), rather than insects, but to me, they’re bugs, so I’m including them.

The Driggs river runs through a sandy plane and at every place I accessed the river, the sandy banks were mottled with anthills. Big ants. Medium-sized ants. Tiny Ants. Anthills everywhere. Everywhere. Thousands and thousands of anthills. At one point I thought it was one really really huge ant colony, a world we know nothing of.  The number of ants on the edge of the river did not escape my attention, as ants are trout ice cream, and I always carry a few ant imitations in my fly foxes. (the trouble with most ant imitations is that they are hard to see on the water. There is one clever pattern that solves this problem – the parachute ant, but that is for another post).

Stenonema vicarium? The March Brown or the Gray Fox

The real good guys of the insect world are the mayflies. First, they don’t bite. I like that. Second, they’re lovely, like flying sailboats. Third, trout love them. The one in the photo was with two of its friends on my tent one morning. Let me say that I’m not a mayfly identification expert, although I sometimes like to imagine I can tell one variety from another. I suspect the one in the picture is the mayfly I always called the Gray Fox. Somewhere along the way, guys who spend their lives thinking about bugs decided that Gray Foxes don’t exist, that they’re actually March Browns that have a slightly different colour about them. That is to say, they are both Stenonema vicarium. In any case I didn’t see any of these guys on the river, only on the tent. I did see a number of light coloured mayflies, the kind we fly fishers call Cahills. And I saw some others that, if it were still May in Ontario, I would say were the ones we call Hendricksons, but it isn’t May, so I don’t know, either the timing is different on the UP or they are another variety of mayfly altogether. Finally, the predominant mayfly emerging from the rivers were the ones we simply call Olives, or Blue-winged olives, or Baetis. There are different Olives, different sizes from very tiny to pretty small in the scheme of things. Trout like all of them. I found a fly pattern known as the Usual to be an effective imitation most of the times I saw the bugs emerging.

There were June bugs and other beetles and dragons and damsels and loads of those yellow swallowtail butterflies. And, there were little wormy larvae that fell from the pines at my campsite onto the picnic table and the tent. Let’s not forget caddisflies, another trout favourite, flitting and bouncing about the surface of the stream. Bees. Wasps. Sowbugs. Those oddball stick-like mantids. House flies and other true flies (Diptera – two wings) like midges and deer flies. I’m sure there were many more I failed to notice, little bugs that live in the bark, in wood, munching leaves, or just hanging out being bugs.

 

 

Pilgrim on the Road

Pilgrim on the Road

The weather changed quickly from a cool morning with a menacing cloud overhead to a hot clear afternoon, one of several rapid weather shifts I experienced on the Upper Peninsula. This turtle was crossing Country Road 450 where it crossed The Driggs River very slowly in the heat. This turtle had places to go, things to see. I agree with my friend here that the river on the upstream side of the bridge is more interesting than the river on the downstream side.

Here are Steve Earle and the Del McCoury Band performing Pilgrim, from the recording “The Mountain”. I listened to this full blast in the car several times while rolling down the highway last week.

Once upon a time….

Let me first assure you all that this post is a work of fiction. It must be because any old fool knows what you see here is not possible. There are no edible mushrooms in Southern Ontario (we’ve been through this before). The morels you see below are fictional mushrooms that were picked in a fictional land where edible mushrooms are abundant.

Yellow Morel

I’ll post some fictional video later. Some of you may say the video looks real, but as I heard many times on the news in the past week, video can be doctored so don’t believe anything you see.

Bear attack near Cochrane Ontario

Yikes. Two women scared off the bear. One man was taken to hospital with injuries. The MNR shot the bear near the scene.

The article says this is the first major bear attack reported in the area in 8 years. I wonder what exactly is a minor bear attack?

Fishin’

I grew up in a fishing family. I would like to say that I can’t remember not fishing but it wouldn’t quite be true. I do remember my father giving me my first rod and reel. I remember the reel was a blue spinning reel called an Ambidex. It was called an Ambidex because the crank could be easily switched from one side to the other. He took me to a little creek not too far from Sundridge Ontario. I forget the name of it now, but I think I could find it again.

It was the place where I caught my first trout. At the time it seemed huge, but many years later when I found that creek again and fished it, I realized it must have been an 8 or 9 inch brook trout, huge to a little boy happy to be out learning about nature with his dad.

My father was an unrepentant bank-napping bait plonker with a knack for catching trout. He had a keen feel for it, knew just how to present his worm so it drifted just under that big log, the one where the big trout lived. Growing up, I just assumed that everyone fished with the same kind of enthusiam we did.

By the time I was in university I mostly stopped fishing. Oh I would go occasionally, but not with the same enthusiasm I had in my youth. Years later, I met my friend East Texas Red, who became interested in fly fishing. I had done just a wee little bit of fly fishing with my father. Still it was a mysterious activity steeped in lore and history. East Texas Red and I fished many places together in those years. We traveled down to Pennsylvania and west to Montana and Idaho and Wyoming, fished Yellowstone, and fished up in Alberta and BC. We met and befriended a writer named Ken and together fished many of the legendary places.

Something I can’t exactly define changed for me on the North Tongue River in Wyoming. We fished the stream all morning with little success. We could see the big cutts in the stream but they were not interested in our flies. In mid afternoon a mayfly emergence came off the water. I think the flies were the ones we called Flavs. I remember more or less matching them with parachute Adams patterns and with Usuals. The stream came alive and during the hatch I caught just about everything I cast at. It reached a point where I found myself trying to catch only the biggest of the trout or the most difficult. It was silly really. I realized it isn’t nearly so much fun if it gets too easy. I guess that’s a Romantic idea – the thrill is in the chasing and not the apprehending. I think in fact the thrill is in the chasing but it stays piqued if you can do a little apprehending along the way. Whatever it was I was getting or appreciating about the activity, it clearly wasn’t simply tied up with catching trout.

After that I became much more tuned into the broader experience and learned to better enjoy the birds and the bugs and trees and grasses and the way they all interacted with one another. Fantastic. Sure I was out there trying to catch trout, but when I did, I started thinking of it as an indicator that I was paying attention well.

During the past four years, since we got our first dog Memphis, I haven’t done so much fly fishing. I liked to spend time with Memphis and later with Ellie Mae too, and two Newfs and a creek quickly turns into two Newfs lying in the middle of the creek.

My brother Salvelinas had been collecting mushrooms for some time and he started showing me how to identify my first mushrooms. This is an activity that shares certain things in common with fly fishing. It is very much all about observing what is going on in nature, in this case in the forest. As a bonus, I could take the dogs along. They love romping through the forest with me. I’ve been doing less fly fishing these last four years and lots of mushroom collecting during my free weekend time. Last year I hardly fished, if at all.

I have to say I miss it. Really, more than anything, I miss walking streams and smaller rivers, watching, watching, casting, getting into it like a meditation. This year I’m planning to get more time on rivers. I’m thinking of taking a road trip just for the hell of it, maybe camp on the UP in Michigan for a few days. I spent a little time up there a few years back and I know some streams. I have a picture of one of them tacked up in my cube at work. I work in a room with no windows, and so I keep this picture up for those moments when I need to transport myself outdoors. I took the photo in one of the upper stretches of the Fox River at a place where I saw two very large brook trout holding and fished for them without success for hours. It was a very memorable spot and I’d like to see if I could find it again.

Blue Jay

Mosaic Blue Jay by Sheila Gregory and Eugene Knapik

The only thing left to do on the mosaic blue jay is screw in some hanging hardware, and where that goes depends on the angle at which it’s going to hang.

A few words about mushroom identification

Today I received two requests to identify mushrooms. One was based on a photo and the other on the real thing. The photo looked to me like a large batch of mature honey mushrooms growing on wood, but based on a photo I’d never say for certain that’s what they are. Better confirm the ID. One helpful way is to take a spore print. If I thought they were honey mushrooms, I would cut the caps off a couple of them, lay the caps gill-side down on paper that has both black and white sections, cover the caps with a bowl and leave them overnight. I wouldn’t use plain white paper because honey mushrooms have white spores. The point is that a picture only tells part of the story. You want to be able to see all aspects of the mushroom. Does it smell? What happens if you slice it or bruise it? Does it stain? If you break a piece off, does it release a milky substance? If there are gills, do they connect to the stem?

If you’re planning on collecting mushrooms for the table (I’ve mentioned here before that I’m not recommending that you do that), you need to be 100% sure of your ID because if you make a mistake you can become very sick. Some Ontario mushrooms can kill you. You don’t get a second chance.

The reason I bring this up is that I’ve had many searches about Ontario edible mushrooms land on this blog recently. It’s been my experience that mushroom pickers show up in our forests in droves in the fall. I’ve met some people out in the woods who have very little idea what they’re picking. These people are reckless gamblers with misguided mushroom fever. Here are some samples of the recent searches:

edible mushrooms of ontario
edible mushrooms in southern ontario
where to pick up wild edible mushroom in toronto
types of mushrooms found in canada
field mushrooms in ontario
giant puffball ontario
ontario wild mushrooms
can i eat puffball mushrooms in ontario

There are more. I’ve mentioned before that my favourite is: Map for King Boletes near Toronto.

By contrast, the other request comes from a friend who is going to drop off some samples for me to look at. There are still no guarantees I can identify them, even with a good field guide to help me, but I have a much better chance of success if I have them in my hands. My friend thinks they are a kind of mushroom that I happen to know very well, and I’m confident I’ll at least be able to declare if she is correct. If she’s wrong, that’s another story. I’ll have to see them.

Each year I try to add a species or two to my list of mushrooms I can identify with confidence. I’m nowhere near as good at this as my brother Salvelinas, and there are mushroom hounds around who are able to identify many more mushrooms than either of us combined. It takes a lot of study and field experience. The way to learn is to start with one or two species and learn them very well, so you can identify them with certainty each and every time. Once you have those down, learn one more. Don’t try to learn too many at one time. The good thing is that in many places, the number of common edible species you’re going to find regularly is fairly small. The first mushrooms I learned about were chanterelles and the curiosity we call the lobster.  I recall the first hedgehog I found. I was with Salvelinas. “What the heck is this weird thing with the teeth,” I asked him. He picked it up, looked at it carefully and tossed it into his basket. The good thing is that many of the tasty edibles are very distinctive. But then again, there are lookalikes so you have to be sure….

Autumn Weeds, Long Branch

A Welcome Gift

 

Today, M kindly dropped off a bag containing a generous quantity of Chicken of the Woods. Wow, was that ever nice! She harvested a beautiful and huge chicken and I was thrilled to receive some pieces. Chicken of the Woods is a very tasty mushroom that grows on tree stumps. When you find one you are very fortunate indeed, because often they contain many shelves and you can harvest several pounds of mushroom from one stump. The younger they are the more tender they are. When you have one, the usual approach is to cut away any tough woody areas and just cook and eat the tender parts.

I made up a big bowl of pasta, featuring a sauce made with great quantities of “chicken” and some hot fennel sausage. It was really delicious, and even better, I have lots left for tomorrow!