Scouting Out a New Small Stream

Today I decided to visit a stream I've been eyeing up for about three years. It is not particularly easy to get to being down a veritable maze of back roads and un-mapped trails that often dead end at someone's private land. Today I negotiated the labyrinth and finally found water. I was going to make a few casts here and there, but there was a lot of ice and the water temperature was hovering just at freezing. The only thing keeping it from freezing during the first couple hours of the my outing was motion. Even though the air temperature was in the mid thirties ice crystals formed on my boots and line. Slush formed around sticks floating in slow eddies.

Before I even rigged up my rod  I met some new friends.

After the deer and I parted ways I began waling water. When I'm fishing a new stream I cover a lot of water and don't always cast much. I look for riffles, deep pools, and rushing pocket water. I look for hatching insects or, in their absence, I roll stones and pull out woody debris to see what's crawling on it. If the stream is small enough I walk quickly and try to spook some fish. This stream today was not small enough for that, far too much flow. So I looked for potential habitat. I found plenty. Unfortunately the cold water ice, and slush probably prevented any feeding from whatever trout may have been there.

Despite the skunk, which I was expecting anyway, I was having a tremendous day. I covered a lot of ground and saw some really beautiful things, including this 15ft deep spring hole. If it were connected to the stream I would not be surprised if it had a bunch of brook trout in it.

While riding through a field at the end of the day, I spotted something interesting: a line of very large animal tracks. I saw them while riding at a pretty good clip. I had to whip back around to have a look, and what I found was amazing. Large track with a 3 3/4 inch width, some with splayed toes, the first three (in softer earth) with claw prints and the rest without any sign of claws.They had three lobes on the pad, signifying a feline origin... I am quite confident that these were mountain lion tracks.

Very splayed toes

That was a pretty spectacular find to end the day, topping of seeing lots of natural beauty. That all makes a decent recipe for a fish-less day that is still just awesome!