We started 2022 heading into our third year of the COVID-19 pandemic and got introduced to Omicron and all its siblings and children. 2022 also seemed to be the year where the effects of climate change really hit home in the PNW. For all the weirdness though we actually did quite a bit this year and spent a lot of time outdoors truffling, hiking, camping, hunting and fishing.
2020 totally sucked between the Coronavirus pandemic, lockdowns, wildfires and finally Lira injuring her knees so I had hopes 2021 would be a huge improvement. As I write this we are pretty much back in the same place we were in winter of 2020 with the new omicron variant raging in Seattle and the rest of the world and the obvious impacts of climate change hammering us with snow and, for Seattle, extreme cold. The year has been full of pandemic canceled plans but has some bright spots with Lira making a full recovery by summer time and taking on new challenges this fall.
They re-opened the outdoors in Washington on May 5th and after a week of letting the crowds thin out I decided to start getting back out there. Lira and I have been hitting the lakes early in the morning to avoid the crowds and the boat ramp backups. It has been fun getting out on the water but our freezer isn’t filling up too fast, I’m in a streak of losing fish and bringing home one per day out when I hook two or three more. I need about 8-10 trout to get the trout supply in decent shape for the rest of the year so I’ll keep at it while I can over the next few weeks.
Yesterday I went turkey hunting for the day over in the Teanaway. Tough to do in a day trip with no scouting but it was great getting out into the woods for a full day. I covered a range of spots in the DNR land over there and put in about 8 miles of walking with a lot of calling and sitting in good looking spots. The highlight of the day was when a mule deer walked out into one of my spots. The deer knew something was up but wasn’t quite sure what to make of me and it finally just walked off after looking in my direction a few times but not really spooking. Of course the only turkey I saw was walking across Red Bridge Road as I was driving back home. I may try to get in one more day before the season ends just because it was so nice being outside all day and not having to deal with running into other people at all.
I have no idea what this is all going to mean for fall so I’m hoping to take advantage of as many local opportunities as possible to get a deer in the freezer and do a bunch of bird hunting. All I know is that I’m glad we have a fairly well stocked freezer at the moment from last year and between that, our garden and CSA we don’t even need to go to the grocery store too often.
Another year gone by already and what a year it was. I spent a lot of this year dealing with a relapse of SIBO and some other health issues but still managed to get outside every single day, got in a lot of hunting and fishing and had quite a few good trips locally, to the LA area and to British Columbia. So much, in fact, I couldn’t even really get it all in the picture grid.
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2018 was a good year but a tough year in several respects and I’m actually kind of glad this one is over with. Thanks to Lira I hiked close to 2000 miles this year and we managed to get out and do quite a bit of fishing and hunting, logging 108 days total in the water, hills or fields. I also somehow managed to build a boat for the sole purpose of taking her fishing with me since she coludn’t quite work out in a float tube. Catherine and I had a lot of fun spending many days exploring the Middle Fork Valley this year and also camping and hiking on the Oregon coast.
My seasons of 2017 – spring lake rainbows, spring turkey season, tenkara trout, summer fly fishing, summer steelhead fishing, pheasant hunting, elk hunting, late deer season, chukar hunting
I can hardly believe that 2017 is drawing to a close already, where did it go? As I sit back and look over the year I realize that I have had one heck of a year with a lot of firsts. For the first year in a while health was just not an issue, as you can tell from my lack of health related blog posts, so it freed me up to get back into fly fishing, to really get into hunting and to finally reach my goal of stocking my freezer by myself. On top of spending almost one-third of my days in the field I was able to get out for daily hikes (and later runs) with Lira and still find time to work all year long.
It had been a few years since I’d taken a fishing trip thanks to illness but in the spring I signed up for this trip figuring I’d be back to 100% be fall. Well, I wasn’t quite to 100% and had some doubts just weeks before the trip but decided to go for it figuring the worst that could happen is that I flared up and had to be boated back to the car early, at least there was an option for that with this trip. Jeff decided to come out to join me since we hadn’t fished together since Miami and the Keys back in February 2013.
The trip was a hosted Gink + Gasoline trip organized by Louis Cahill who I met at South Andros back in 2011, was it really that long ago? The guide service was Jeff Hickman’s Fish the Swing and they seemed ready to deal with my diet and the possibility of an early evacuation if needed. The plan was to use jet boats to head to camp up the lower Deschutes and then fish split days from a single camp instead of floating the river like we did back in 2008.
After our first two successful overnight trips to Mirror Lake and Rachel Lake/Rampart Ridge we decided to take on a bigger challenge and do a 3-day trip. We opted to do the 2015 Ultrapedestrian Wilderness Challenge Chinook Pass loop – a 32 mile long loop that starts at Chinook Pass on Hwy 410, goes south on the Pacific Crest Trail, drops into Mt. Rainier National Park on the Laughingwater Creek Trail then takes the Eastside Trail north through the park back to Chinook Pass. Most people are running this in 8-12 hours but we decided to take the slow approach and do it as an ultralight backpack trip in 3 days and adding in a few extra miles in order to camp and see a few more sights.
OK, not really fishing in a bathtub but fishing bathtub sized pools in rivers. After taking up Tenkara this year I began searching out smaller waters and smaller sections of bigger waters looking for trout and have been pleasantly surprised by what I have found.
Today was a great example. I was on the Middle Fork and the really nice corner run I wanted to fish was just so windy that I couldn’t control my line well with the wind blowing straight upstream on me. I managed a few fish but was getting frustrated so I moved downstream to check out the next spot where a long riffle ended and dropped into a pool. What I found was that the riffle did drop well but on my side the current was pushing into the bank and got deep fast so I really needed to fish from the other side to fish it well but didn’t want to cross into someones back yard to fish. Looking at the shore from where I was in the riffle I found a spot about the size of a bathtub that had some good rocks and depth, I figured there was probably one fish there. A few casts and I had a grab but missed. Next cast another grab and I was into what turned out to be my biggest Middle Fork cutthroat of the year so far, a nice 14″ fish. I sort of figured he was king of the little pool but made a few more casts. Wham, another grab and another nice 11-12″ cutt to hand. A few more casts, wham, another fish. What the heck. By the time I was done I had landed four, lost two and missed another two in this little run.
Early this year I decided to buy a Tenkara rod and try this very minimal form of fly fishing. I was pretty much hooked after my first few outings, it made me feel like a kid fishing for the first time. A few months later and I haven’t even picked up a standard fly rod and somehow ended up with a small collection of tenkara rods. Find out all about the gear and flies I use at my new Northwest Tenkara page.