Certain parts of the river never see the sun all day. Each night, the freeze returns, frosting over everything again. Those dark pieces of river never quite thaw during the day, and after a week of this, the river bar looks like a page out of christmas – frosted thick white, waiting for santa’s sleigh to zip across at any minute. Then there are the more open bits of river, where the river heads in a more southerly direction. Here the sun makes it above the ridge for a good six hours. On a sunny day, this could be October. Bugs come alive, birds dance in the trees, and sometimes the tiniest breeze announces afternoon before quickly passing. Otherwise, this place is like perpetual morning. The sun seems like it struggles to rise all day, just burning off the valley fog, before giving up and falling back behind the ridge. One long morning, dark at 5:00pm. How was it that I fished this place in a sweat bath barely three months ago?But this year is turning out to be an anomaly – the driest December on record marches on, leaving a river low and clear – barely higher than early fall flows, though much clearer and certainly one hell of alot colder.

With all the worry over a critically dry year looming, this does give the opportunity to maybe see winter fish working there way up this river when, otherwise, it would be too high to fish. However, in hand, they seem like fall fish – bronze backs and compact size. Not the sleek and shiny winter fish seen on the coast. They are classic inland river fish and I think if you showed me a photo of just the fish, many of us diehards could name the river and time of year within three months with only a  snapshot. They take a swung purple leech – a nice, long slow swing – the grabs are firm and whole-hearted, but not freight train swipes.

Although we are desperate for rain, this does provide the opportunity to explore a completely new river. Curious if those silvery sleek winter fish that are just a rumor will show?

Objectives of the day were to find some of the uppermost waters listed by Van Fleet, namely Wallace and Stanishaw. According to him, these were fairly popular places to visit during the 1930s and 40s. Today, all this seems to be a ghost of its former self – with both the fish and early autumn angling pilgrims in greatly reduced numbers. There are stories to be told here of festive mornings and evenings, but they seem to have been washed downstream, or are buried deep in the riverbed. Part of this is just to catch a little of the spirit that might still linger along this lonely stretch of river.

I think we struck out on getting down to Wallace – unless the road down is the gated road (open, by the way) that seems to have a private-property look to it. A steep, downhill walk/slide landed on some tough-to-fish water – and a huff-and-puff climb out. Until I can get some maps with older names on them, Wallace will remain accessible only by boat. Van Fleet describes this water as a holdover spot for early run adults – and it fits perfectly. It is neat water, classic long steelhead run, except the bottom is all one meter and larger diameter boulders – with a ledge that drops a careless wader right into the good water and over the waders. Morphologically, the run is interesting and it looks fishy as could be…. further exploration warranted…

Next up is Stanishaw and the access was easy after a false start down a rough slope (will see how bad the poison oak sets in!). Again, long, classic broad run that is perfect swinging water. I’m glad the access turned out to be relatively easy – this is a good one to put into the standard itinerary for this stretch of river.

We also found our way down to lower Rock Creek (after another poison-oak, sliding false start) – again, a relatively easy, though steep descent to classic broad fast water over coarse substrate. The half pounders were really on the grab here and more than once I was able to quickly follow-up on an initial strike with a come-back cast and get the fish. This may be Eyese to some, not to be confused with the Ice Cream riffle above the second bridge (unless I got Ice Cream’s location all mixed up twenty some odd years back).

Amazed that we did not get an adult to hand all day, though AJ thought he had one on in the Hotel run and I had a meaty tug in the tailout at the top of Green and coulda been. And some grabs at lower Rock (Eyese) that I will never know.

Towards the end of the day I handed over my two-handed Skagit set-up to AJ and rigged up another 2-hander with a more classic long belly floating line – WOW! I had to relearn my casting. The Skagit line makes it easy, though requires lots of stripping. The full belly line doesn’t need stripping, but needs timing and authority for proper casting, especially when lifting a weighted wet fly out of the water. Might have to get back to my long lines and put away the skagit crutch until winter sets in and they’re needed to lift small, wet birds out of the water.

The days are getting short! We were off the water in near darkness at 6:45 and the sun was off the water at Eyese around 3:30 or so. Yikes! All-in-all a satisfactory day for half pounders and a day of fishing textbook fly water. We joked that each run we visited was Figure 1, or Figure 3, etc… Couldn’t ask for better water to swing a fly in ….

addendum: I think Wallace could be accessed from the Stanishaw run by walking upstream – might be a bit steep and brushy, but could be very reachable after all.

Around this week 25 years ago I first started fishing this water regularly. Memories, stories, droughts, floods and through it all this place has changed remarkably little. No stories today, just a pleasant October day on the cusp of a storm. I knew the fishing would be tough today and I had to go to another river to find biting fish. Still, though, this is the place where fly fishing for steelhead really began for me.