White Mountain Brook Trout and Bears

New Hampshire's White Mountains have long held a special place in my heart. Every time I go there I find something special. The last time I fished there was in 2015 (Brookies in the White Mountains). It has been a while. I've missed the place. To say it had been too long would be an understatement. In the case of the White Mountains, it's the place that attracts me more than the fish. It doesn't have the diversity of species that many other places do, or particularly large wild fish either, but it does have a handful of colorful native fish species living in some of the most dramatic terrain in the Northeast. The white Mountains are proper mountains. Big, rocky, steep, with a real tree line in places... they look like mountains, not like the hills that are mountains in most Appalachia. Granite. I love granite. In the past I'd gone to the Whites specifically to dig for smokey quartz, microcline, flourite, and other minerals in open cavities in the granite. I can't help but poke around looking for new prospects while fishing  any time I'm there now, but it's been even longer since I've been there specifically to dig crystals. I didn't get to dig on my latest trip either, but it was just wonderful to be there.

My mom, brother. old dog and I made the drive up in the rain but got to where we'd camp as skies cleared. The mountains were draped in fog and evening light, and the air was clean and cool. I could breath again here. We camped basically right on one of my favorite streams I've fished up there, and I was able to catch a few brookies before it got dark, but the next morning would be the start of the real fishing.
I was up before everyone else, including the sun, because I had a few miles to walk to get to my destination and they were all up will. After a a brisk walk, I reached the upper boreal zone and and isolated small aquamarine pond that contained one and only one species of fish, Salvelinus fontinalis. When I got there, a cow moose was having breakfast on the far side. It left before I could get close enough to get a shot, but it was a beautiful thing to see.

Being that it was summer and the surface water was quite warm, there wasn't much rise activity except over the spring holes. The springs themselves. seeping out of the ground around the pond, into tiny streams that entered it, and up through the bottom of the pond itself, were so cold that I assume that ground they were seeping from may well have still been frozen not that long ago. Just sitting down near one of the springs I'd get really cold even in a flannel and long pants with the sun on me. One seep I found was 38 degrees... fathom that. Only six degrees above freezing, in July! The larger streams further down in elevation were about 60 degrees and the surface temperature of the pond itself was 68, though just two feet down is was cold enough to induce shivers. The fish were deep, and it took me a while to get the message that they were so deep I ought to be fishing with a fair number of shot and just as slow as I could tolerate. I kept with a slow pick for almost an hour before I changed to a beadhead Hare's Ear Soft Hackle and two shot, and even that alone wasn't enough. Once I started counting the fly down for seven to nine second and slow figure eight crawling it along. That worked really well, and though I caught a ton of gorgeous fish, it was the two largest that got me really excited. See, this pond is big enough that it could circumstantially produce fish to, say, 18 inches, but it is at an elevation where the fish get a really short growing season. Too warm in late summer, too cold in the winter. Of course, were it lower it may get too warm for the fish to survive, were it higher it could ice too much for them to make it either. Trophies are relative, and for this little pond in the mountains these two fish were extraordinary trophies.

As the sun reached the upper end of the pond the activity dissipated and I headed back down slope. I fished the outlet stream of the pond and every other body of water I passed on my way back to camp. I caught brook trout in all of them. I encountered a little black bear at close range. I got some serious exercise too. The sloped down to some of those creeks are no joke, nor the brush you need to plow through getting up and down them.

(Beaver stick from Deboullie)

After I got back, we went for a drive to see some of the area that I've come to love so much. I really wished I'd had my camera on this trip, but it was being mailed back because it had a periodically occurring issue and needed to be replaced.

A while after getting back and having lunch, I set out to fish a couple miles of the stream we were camped on.

My dad and I had done well here when we'd been four years before and I'd already fished it just enough to know that it was about as good as it had been back then, but I wasn't prepared for just what I'd find.

For most of the long stretch I fished, I got the sort of steady pick of four to six inch brook trout on dries and wet flies that I'd come to expect from freestones in this area. They are gorgeous and aggressive fish, and most of the larger ones are fairly old because these streams don't have much in the way of food for these fish. The only baitfish are smaller brook trout and these streams don't have the kind of macro invertebrate populations that slower, warmer, muckier and sandier streams do. So these fish just don't grow that fast or that big.

Then, somewhat inexplicably, I stumbled into one 100yd stretch of water where the fish were just bigger for some reason. I'm not really sure why they were there, nothing above or below seemed particularly different from that stretch. But they were, and they were quite spectacular old specimens, likely 4 to 6 year old fish. They all took a classic Picket Pin.

I stuck to it for a while but eventually bored of bothering brook trout and headed back to camp to just relax for a while.

Not long after getting back there, a little male black bear showed up. He crossed the creek and headed up the other side, then doubled back and went back the way he came.

That night, my brother and I hiked up to the pond to see the night sky. Watching the light fade there, the stars and planets start to reveal themselves, and then the milky way itself, all while a hexegenia hatch was going one and brook trout were splashing all over the pond... that was just magical. Again... I wished I'd had my real camera.

The next morning I went back up again for one last blast in the pond. Really, I don't feel the need to explain how it went. It was... it was special.

Until next time.

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

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