New Water and The Importance of Hemlocks

The Eastern North American forest is not what it seems. If wilderness is defined by an absence of human change, scant few small places in the northeast can truly be called wilderness. less than 1% of the eastern forests are the same old growth that should be here. 99% of the east was cut at some point, and has since been replaced either by urban sprawl or second-growth mixed forest. Man came and decimated the North American forest, then sort of let some of it come back, though with the addition of new plants and animals. What we are left with in CT are places that are wild, but are not wilderness. It takes but an hour's walk to tell the story. Stone walls that once delineated property lines still stand everywhere, in various states of decay. Parcels that stopped being farmed later than others boast relatively new growth, young trees packed so tightly together that one can barely attempt to walk from one side of a re-claimed farm field to the other. In other places, white pine was planted intentionally in a grid like pattern, creating very unnatural feeling tunnels between the lines. What the woods of the Northeast were like when the puritans first arrived here is something I can barely imagine, because we left none of it untouched and didn't do a particularly good job of learning about what we were destroying. This isn't to say that the humans already here weren't having lasting impacts on the forests... indeed they were. Native Americans were not perfectly in balance with nature. In fact, Native Americans were doing things almost akin to slash and burn well before we got here. They cut forest to farm. They burned forest to enhance hunting. They favored trees that produced useful goods over trees that didn't. They cut large areas to live in and develop in their own manor. By the time most European settlers arrived the native population had been killed off by disease brought by the first rounds of explorers, and the changes made by the previously much larger populous had already started to be hidden by new forest growth. Of course, nothing those native peoples did remotely compares to the destruction wrought by industry. If you think about it, it is quite miraculous that genetically diverse populations of native fish survived, and that we didn't destroy riparian zones and fluvial habitat to the extent that non-native salmonids wouldn't be able to survive here. One of the key ingredients in the survival of wild trout streams in CT are hemlocks. They aren't necessary: I have come across a number of healthy wild brook trout streams without hemlocks. But most good streams have them. Hemlocks provide year-round shade, and that really is the key. Beyond being a sign of a good riparian habitat along freestone streams all around the East, hemlock tend to make up my favorite types of forest. Hemlock don't shy away from steep terrain or rocky ground. The cool, moist shade they provide hosts all sorts of lichens, mosses, and fungi. Mountain laurel and rhododendron often aren't far off. Ferns may be numerous, some of them evergreen. I adore mixed forest with lots of hemlock and steep, rocky terrain. It should come as no surprise that the presence of such forest is much of what made me fall in love with my home river.

Last week, Mark Alpert and I found ourselves on another CT watershed with a lot of hemlock, moss, and mountain laurel. And it was unsurprising that the streams those woods were concealing held wild trout.

Though Mark used to fish the large of the two streams when he was in school, he had never fished this stretch. I had never fished any of it, and neither of us had fished the tributary I really thought would be a gem. Actually, we had started the day further west in a stream with brown water and way too much ice. Knowing when to leave is a good skill to have. The walk in to the new spot was a bear compared to many walks to CT streams. Large tracts of preserved land have kept this area relatively wild, though it has had it's problems with water usage. There was no direct trail and the hill was long and steep. It felt good to have to work a bit to get to the stream but them actually be able to fish it, unlike the stream Alan and I had tried earlier in the week. Of course, we discovered later that we easily could have entered from a much closer parking location. I'll never regret a walk in the woods though. Especially not woods as beautiful and dark as those. 

The first hour or so working upriver was fruitless in terms of fish moved. There were a couple "maybes", on "probably", and a bunch of "I thought it was for a second"s. But then I hooked up. Somewhat to my surprise, it was a holdover rainbow, which threw the hook not long after it started to fight. By that point I was already right at the tributary I wanted to explore, so up it we went. Brook trout were expected, and they were in there. I got a little brown too, which wasn't out of the question but also not what I expected. 

Satisfied that this was a stream to come back to during the spring, we went back downstream and plied the dark, cold water river a little more. Immediately above the tributary was a long pool with a great run dumping into it. Somewhere in the middle, I stuck a large fish. I was pretty excited with the thought that this could be a quite large wild brown trout. I'm not going to lie, I was a little disappointed when the pale color and bent dorsal revealed it to be a holdover. It was a nice fish, regardless.

Then, in the same run I had lost the rainbow in, I found what I was looking for. I now had two streams to add to my list, and two streams I definitely need to come back to, both cloaked by the shade of hemlock.