Mist on the River: An Angler's Quest for Steelhead - Hardcover

Checchio, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312278667 ISBN 13: 9780312278663

Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books, 2001

Synopsis

As he says in the prologue to his book, Michael Checchio likes his fly-fishing on big western rivers where there are lots of mountains to look at, and where the steelhead don't come out of a hatchery but are born as nature intended, in the cold gravel of a clean stream. He finds all this and more up in British Columbia on his search for some of the last great runs of wild steelhead left on earth.

Steelhead, the great sea-run rainbow trout of the Pacific Northwest, have long been sought by fly-fishermen. To Checchio, they have become a powerful symbol for the last of the wild in the Pacific Northwest and are to the Northwest what lions are to the Serengeti. And like their cousins, the salmon, they are among the species of fish most threatened by the modern world.

A passionate fly-fisherman, Checchio discovered steelhead when he moved to the West Coast a little more than a decade ago. Fishing for ever diminishing returns of these magnificent fish in the rivers of northern California and Oregon, he dreamed of faraway waters in Alaska and Kamchatka, where he might find the last strongholds of wild steelhead remaining on the planet. Finally, he was able to take a dream vacation north to experience for the first time the steelhead Valhalla awaiting the fly-fisherman in British Columbia.

Michael Checchio has been praised by the fishing community as a passionate writer on the plight of the great outdoors and the steelhead trout. But this book is not written just for the fly-fishing fraternity, but rather to the general reader who has a love of nature and the outdoors, and a deep interest in the fate of wildlife and the future of the environment. Checchio's personal steelhead journey leads him on a quest toward rivers and landscapes ever more pristine and wild, providing illuminating sights and thoughts along the way.

About this title

About the Author:

Mochael Checchio is the author of A Clean, Well-Lighted Stream, a collection of fly-fishing essays, and Sundown Legends, a book about the American desert Southwest. His sporting essays have appeared in Gray's Sporting Journal, Fly Rod & Reel, Trout, Flyfisher, and California Fly Fisher. He lives in San Francisco and when he is not steelhead fishing, he is thinking about it.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Mist on the River
SUMMER RIVER, WINTER RIVERI FIRST CAME TO THE North Umpqua River by way of the Oregon desert. The desert can come as a bit of a shock to someone who thinks that it does nothing but rain in the Pacific Northwest. Fully two-thirds of Oregon is a sagebrush desert steppe. It was August, and I felt like I was being slid into an oven. I was on a cross-country trip, driving from Montana to the Cascade Mountains, having just left Yellowstone Park behind me. Earlier that summer I had quit a good job where I lived back East just to take a year off so I could fly-fish for trout in the Rocky Mountain West. I had never fished for steelhead before, but it seemed like a good idea. Now I was looking for a river that flowed into the Pacific Ocean.I drove to Bend, where the desert meets the high Cascades. Climbing west toward the plateau at Diamond Lake, I passed from a forest of skinny lodgepoles into much denser stands of Douglas fir. The desert air suddenly grew cool and refreshing. I climbed steadily into this fir forest and then began a descent down a shady, tree-lined corridor. Suddenly there was a spraying river next to me on the right. There it was, the North UmpquaRiver, racing swiftly through a canyon in dancing riffles and fast pocket water.The North Umpqua had a forest reflection that was equal measures of Douglas fir and Oregon sky. It was a small and tumbling stream where it emerged below Soda Springs Dam. By the time it reached the campgrounds at Boulder Creek and Eagle Rock, the rushing pools had spread out and the runs were more clearly defined. I crossed over a bridge, the river now on my left, and looked at a shallow cobblestone flat sweeping around a bend that I would later learn was a spawning redd for chinook salmon. The river continued to flash through the trees below the highway's steep grade. Just above the Dry Creek Store, the North Umpqua dropped hundreds of feet below the highway, and it was a long, precipitous plunge off the embankment to the river. A mile below Dry Creek, the river swept away unseen around a long horseshoe-shaped bend, and when it came back into view the sight was every bit as dramatic as upstream, with the forest river frothing in rapids and plunging pools. In the mileage below Apple Creek, the North Umpqua continued to rush in whitewater chutes through dark basaltic rock shaded by immense stands of Douglas fir.Four miles or so below Apple Creek, just around the corner from Island Campground, an old trestle known as the Mott Bridge crossed high above the river. Off to the right, Steamboat Creek came in, the largest tributary in the canyon. The North Umpqua doubled in width below Steamboat Creek. I didn't know it then, but I had come to a series of famed pools known as the Camp Water.Upstream of Mott Bridge, Surveyor Pool lay in the shade of Douglas firs that were the size of mature redwood trees. The river poured over a bedrock of black volcanic basalt. Immediately below the Mott Bridge, in the eponymously named Bridge Pool, the river cut a deep channel between reefs of ledgerock. Well downstream the river passed in a smooth glide over two very jagged, sharp reefs known as Sawtooth. Just below Sawtooth, among streaming riffles, lay two small pools known as Hayden's Run and Sweetheart. A few yards below them was the Confluence Pool marking the spot where Steamboat Creek came into the Umpqua. And below this was the reefbound run known as the Station Pool, so named because a Forest Service station had once been set up directly across from the pool on the north bank. Because it was situated just below Steamboat Creek, a major spawning tributary, Station Pool was probably the most productive pool on the North Umpqua.Below Station, the river fanned out into streaming riffles and a brief whitewater rapid. At the head of this rapid, a narrow chute tried to contain the currents of the upper Boat Hole. As the riffles and whitewater calmed down and played themselves out, the Boat Hole broadened into a wide flat of forest-green water bending around an expansive gravel bar, one of the few gravel bars on the river. It was a magnificent green pool, the largest pool on the Umpqua, a great convex mirror of sky and forest.The water of the Boat Pool passed by like a bolt of cold green silk, and the river began to slide over a series of submerged reefs. These brown bedrock reefs formed the Kitchen Pool, so named because they had once been directly in line of sight ofa kitchen tent in the first steelhead camp ever established on the river, the one set up by Major Lawrence Mott on the south bank, back in 1929. A steelhead lodge had later been built on the site of the old tent camp, but it was gone now, no trace remaining.Below the tailout of the Kitchen Pool, the current passed into a narrow opening of ledgerock that formed a half-collar around a pool known as the Fighting Hole. Below this, and running for several hundred yards downstream, were three separate and distinct chambers of ledgerock known as the Upper, Middle, and Lower Mott Pools. From where the trees plunged down to the steep south bank, all the way out to the Mott Pools at midstream, the bottom bedrock of the river was a confusing labyrinth of rippled ledges, shallow channels, and uneven rock chutes.The river passed into Glory Hole and the Gordon Pool, and as it rounded a bend, its volume rose noticeably. High on a bluff on the north bank, the Steamboat Inn perched above the river in the shade of massive sugar pines. On the opposite bank, even higher up on a foot trace on Maple Ridge, a hiker could gaze down through the trees at the roaring waterfalls beneath the inn and listen to its thunder filling the gorge. Around the bend and below the falling whitewater lay the last of the Camp Water pools: Upper and Lower Maple Run, Jeannie, Abernathy, Upper and Lower Takahashi, and Knouse.I drove on past the Steamboat Inn, and through the screen of trees had a good look at pools that I would later come to know as the Ledges, the Tree Pool, Divide Pool, Williams Creek Riffle, Log Pool, Discovery Pool, Split Rock, Burnham,Pulpit, Archie Creek, Coleman Creek, Cougar Creek, Bogus Creek, Rattlesnake, McDonald's Pool, Wright Creek, and Fairview. There were many more pools farther downstream, miles of them: Rip Rap, Fox Creek, Boundary, Susan Creek, the Honey Creek Riffles, Huckleberry, Baker Wayside, the Salmon Racks, and Famous Pool, to name some of the more prominent. There were parking pullouts alongside the road and scramble paths leading down to most of these pools and runs.I found the North Umpqua uncommonly beautiful. A thick forest of Douglas fir shaded the canyon, cooling the summer breezes. The Douglas firs towered above the river and were as thick around as old-growth redwood. The river ran over ledges of black basaltic rock, and it made a beautiful music down among its boulders. The North Umpqua in its canyon had perfect pitch. Wild blackberries grew in abundance along the north bank, releasing their perfume into the forest-scented breeze.I knew that the North Umpqua had a great tradition. I was aware that Jack Hemingway, the eldest son of the novelist Ernest Hemingway, had called the Camp Water, those pools directly below Steamboat Creek, "the greatest stretch of summer steelhead water in the United States." The famous fishing lodge on the river, the Steamboat Inn, was practically a shrine to steelhead fishing. The North Umpqua had been Zane Grey's favorite river. He had named the Ledge Pool, or the Ledges, and local fishermen had named the two Takahashi pools in honor of the author's Japanese field cook.While it's good to stand and watch a river, it's always better to fish it. And so I pulled tackle and waders from the trunk of my car and rigged up. The North Umpqua was full of summersteelhead, and it seemed a crime not to try and catch one on my first day.I found the rubble bottom and slippery bedrock ledges very tricky wading at first, and I fell in several times. I won't ramble on about the hours and days I spent trying to catch my first steelhead. Anyway, they say that steelhead are fish of a thousand casts.For days steelhead flashed all around me. They leapt out of the water and shook themselves in the air. It unnerved me to see trout the size of salmon. There had been nothing like this in my fishing experience. All around me, fly-fishermen were catching steelhead and I wasn't; I would watch a struggling fish leaping crazily at the end of an angler's line, and I would turn into a manic-depressive.Every morning I would come down to the river and go through the same motions. I knew the drill well. It became a ritual. Cast ... strip ... cast. One step downstream, and repeat. A familiar rhythm set in, and my mind would begin to wander. I believe I was sitting in a bar in San Francisco having a beer when the steelhead grabbed my fly.There's no mistaking the solid yank of a summer steelhead. It's quite different from the gentle tap of a trout. The strike came as a great surprise. It was as if the hand of Zeus had reached out of the river.My rod bowed under an incredible weight. A great throbbing creature seemed to pass up the rod and into my arm. A steelhead shattered the pool's surface, splashing and spraying droplets of water all around. It jumped a second time, flashing silver in the sun, and ran twenty yards of line off my reel. How Imanaged to hold on to that wildly erupting fish I'll never know. I had never experienced anything like it in trout fishing. But after a fifteen-minute fight, I slid my catch over near the bank to admire her, an iridescent henfish still bright from an ocean that was more than a hundred miles distant. The steelhead's back was dark green and speckled like a trout's. Its shining sides were tinged by a vapor of rose that seemed to be awash in a silver luminescence. Within the pink cast on the shining armor was an almost invisible lavender mist that contributed to the general iridescence.Imagine a tiny trout that is born in a mountain river backed by giant Douglas firs. The tiny smolt disappears into the blue Pacific and returns several years later as big and heavy and powerful as a salmon. This fish leaps waterfalls and swims up sunlit rapids to get back to this spot in the river, only to run afoul of a novice steelhead fisherman from New Jersey.I am staring down in awe at my first-ever steelhead. Gratefully, and with the utmost reverence, I release the magnificent fish back into the river unharmed. And yet the North Umpqua will not willingly release me. I cannot even begin to calculate the damage that has been done. After such an afternoon, on such a gorgeous river, I am the one who has been caught. 
One of the country's loneliest stretches of coastline begins somewhere north of San Francisco and extends all the way up through Oregon almost to Portland. Blue sea and white surf contrast with deep green forests and weathered gray barns. Here folks live in small coastal towns and rural hamlets, and their livelihoods depend on logging, fishing, farming, dairyranching, sheep herding, and occasionally pot smuggling. America's best vintage wines are grown in vineyards inland. Along the fogbound coast, Victorian gingerbread homes and white New England fishing settlements sit atop ocean palisades. The forested coastal mountains are drained by a labyrinth of purling salmon and steelhead rivers. That part of the region lying in California has come to be known as the Redwood Empire.Close by the Oregon border, California's Smith River meets the ocean amid the majesty of coastal redwoods. This is a steep and lonely region of cold summer fogs and winter rains. The Smith drains the Siskiyou Mountains, one of the few ranges in the western United States that runs from east to west. Like California's Coastal Range, the Siskiyous are entirely free of glacial ice. Somehow the advancing glaciers of the last ice age missed them. Rivers born in the Siskiyous, rivers like the Smith, and the Chetco, which is just over the border in Oregon, run with exceptional clarity where they have not been logged. The Smith River flows either emerald or jade depending on whether it has rained, and it is always the first river in northern California to drop and clear after a heavy storm.I have driven six hours from my home in San Francisco to be on the Smith River. It has been five months since I caught my first steelhead in the North Umpqua. The Smith has become my winter steelhead river of choice. I discovered it shortly after moving to northern California. I was a trout fisherman gone wrong. I had given up my first love in order to pursue steelhead. I still loved trout; but steelhead filled me with wonder.At Jedediah Smith State Park, I found myself looking at frothing creeks feeding into the Smith River from an unspoiled forest of Douglas fir, western hemlock, cedar, and old-growth redwood. Redwood National Park in California was created out of three existing state parks, Jedediah Smith being one. The Smith's magnificent redwood forest has never been logged. The Smith River itself has never been dammed. It is the only river of any consequence left in California not to have a dam on it. In autumn, the sylvan stream hosts vast runs of king salmon, and these are the largest king salmon seen in any river in California. In winter, California's biggest steelhead arrive, brutes weighing up to twenty-five pounds.Everyone living up here seems to be either a fisherman, a logger, or a pot farmer. Or a prison guard. California's maximum-security penitentiary at Pelican Bay is close by. I stop at a wide spot in the road that comprises the entire hamlet of Hiouchi, which is just downstream of the forks of the Smith. There is a combined gas station-and-mini-mart, a rather mildewed motel, a bait shop, and a cafe. The mini-mart seems to be the town's cultural center. You can buy fried chicken, corn dogs, cold beer, beef jerky, and fishing tackle inside. Hanging on the walls are eye-popping mounts of steelhead and Chinook salmon of mind-boggling weight. Next to the door is a wall covered with Polaroid snapshots of fishermen who are standing next to their dead catches suspended from a rather fierce-looking grappling hook attached to a scale in front of the store. I don't see any photos of fly-fishermen releasing fish."Can anyone suggest a good spot on the river where I might be able to wade and fly-fish?" I ask the room. Everyone staresback at me as if I have just announced that I am to be in a performance of Swan Lake.The Smith is ideal for bait casters, hardware fishermen, and terminal tackle-jockeys. It is the river of the slinky, the Spin-'n-Glo, and the lead pencil. It is a hard river to fly-fish. It is not a particularly easy river to wade. Its currents are deceptive and so strong they can sweep a fly out from under a steelhead before the fish even has a chance to see it. The Smith's winter-run steelhead are bottom huggers; unlike summer steelhead, steelhead in cold water will not travel far to chase a fly nor swim off the bottom to grab one that is fished anywhere near the surface. Heavy-grain shooting heads or sinking fly lines are the order of the day on the Smith, and these are not always pleasant to cast.The steelhead in the Smith River are hard to hook; even harder to land. The river has three forks. All but a mile of the North Fork is closed for fishing. The Middle Fork of the Smith, the shortest branch, is a rather swift stream due to a rather steep gradient, and full of rapids. The current rarely has a chance to slow down and kayakers will do better in here than fly...

About this edition

• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0312278667
• ISBN 13: 9780312278663
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256