Wild Freestone Rainbows

I have a thing about small stream wild rainbow trout. I don’t know if it’s due to having spent most of my fishing time in places where they are scarce, as in my native Pennsylvania or whether it’s more about how beautiful the places are where I have been fortunate to fish over wild rainbows. Places like the high gradient streams of the Southern Appalachians or a select few of the freestone spring creeks of Central Wisconsin with their golden sand and gravel bottoms and glassy, unbroken flows.

Or maybe it is the fish themselves. Muscular and compact little trout with a slash of scarlet war paint down their flanks that grab my elk hair caddis from the surface and turn and vault from the water and clear a three foot wide mid-stream boulder with ease. I enjoy catching all three species of wild trout that I have access to that doesn’t involve buying an air ticket, but I like the little bows best of all. They seem somehow, well, wilder to me

On the western edge of Pennsylvania’s Allegheny National Forest along US Route 62 south of Irvine but north of Tidioute, a number of short, very small streams fall off the steep mountainside, cross the highway and join the broad Allegheny River. While I’m not sure they are there any more (they may have been driven out by increasing stream acidity and competition from brook trout), at one time several of these dinky rills held reproducing populations of rainbow trout. I used to plan an entire day’s fishing around these little creeks with their equally little fish. They seldom exceeded seven or eight inches and most were closer to five or six, but there was just something about catching these miniature, red-slashed rockets out of the steep plunge pools of the tiny flows. I couldn’t get enough of it and would often stay on these streams to the exclusion of waters where there were more or bigger wild browns or brook trout.

In the mid-80’s, the company I was working for sent me down to their satellite plant in Charlotte to train the folks there in how to use the new-fangled (at the time) computerized manufacturing control system that was being put in place company-wide. If I wasn’t already hooked on the little rainbows, being proximate to the tumbling streams of the North Carolina Blue Ridge where as a rule, wild rainbows dominate the fisheries, cinched the deal. I soon found that from Charlotte, I was only a three to four hour drive from some of the best of these waters. Streams with wonderful, enchanting names like the South Toe River, Lost Cove Creek, Sassafras Creek and many others. I was over there every free weekend, gladly getting up at 4:00AM so I could make the drive and hike in the requisite mile or so on the well maintained trail system of the Pisgah National Forest.

Once I was on the water, I went nuts. It was wild rainbow heaven. I’d hike in and fish two and sometimes three streams a day, covering a couple miles of each (I was younger then, but then again, so were you..) and flinging elk hair caddis, the old cork McMurray ants or a simple Humpy into every likely pocket and run. I would lose track of time and wait too long to hike back out and often barely make it back to the car before dark. I scaled cliffs; I fell off of one and broke a finger. I got lost more than once. And I caught hundreds of the little bows. I even got a handful that made it past the 10 inch mark on the tape. I had a ball. Every time I went back home to Pennsylvania, I told my bosses that while it was going fairly well at the plant, it was obvious that I would need to go back for several extended visits. Extended as in months and months and months. The folks at the Charlotte facility were eager to learn, but it was going to take a while. And it did. It took an additional 15-20 new streams, several hundred dollars worth of gasoline, two new fly lines, a hundred or so lost flies and two new pairs of hip boots before I was confident they had learned the new system well enough to go it alone. Then I came home. I told the guys at work that it was a hardship to be away from home for so long, but that my Dad had always told me that any job worth doing is worth doing well. The bruises on my backside from falling off slippery mid-stream boulders and the ache in my thighs from climbing near vertical trails coming off the creek told me I had done a good job..

The years flew by. I stayed in Pennsylvania and fished mostly for wild browns and brookies. I hadn’t forgotten the little wild rainbows, but the available fishing for them around home was deteriorating and where it was still pretty good, there were a lot of other guys on the creek. So, I contented myself with what was around, which wasn’t bad. Pennsylvania had and still has some of the best small stream fishing in the East for wild browns and brookies. A few more years went by and the next thing I knew, I was getting married and moving out to the Midwest. Whoa, let me slow up a second here. It wasn’t instantaneous and one day I was fishing out of Charlotte and the next, I was married and living out in the flat lands. There was a lot of stuff that happened in between, but very little of it had to do with wild rainbow trout.

So here we are in our new home within a three hour or so drive of some of Wisconsin’s better freestone spring creek trout fisheries. I started to research and explore a bit and found, to my delight, the wild rainbows and I were about to meet again. It was time for more bruises and maybe, if I tried hard enough, another broken finger. And little silvery, finned rockets with a red slash down their flanks.

The West Branch of the White River clips briskly over a bed of glowing tan sand and multi-hued fine gravel as it travels in its corridor of birch, pine and high grass bog on the western edge of Wautoma, Wisconsin. I don’t think I’ve seen a more beautiful trout stream. In fact, I know I haven’t. All through the five mile length of the stream, wild browns and a scattering of brook trout hold under the grass hummocks and fallen logs that anchor the stream bank. But the dominant fish of the West Branch is the wild rainbow trout, an anomaly of sorts in this region of brook and brown trout waters. Hurray! I was back in business. The first decent April day of our first year in the Midwest, I made a beeline for the West Branch.

In coloration and shape and certainly in the berserk way they fight, the wild bows of the White River system are fairly close cousins to their Blue Ridge and Pennsylvania counterparts. But they on average run just a little bit larger, perhaps due to the fertile nature of the stream. Fish of eight to nine inches are pretty common and there are enough fish up to 12 and occasionally 13 inches to keep the anticipation level high.

When I arrived for the first time at the West Branch, I stood on the bridge and just looked at the stream for what must have been close to five minutes. That isn’t like me, not at all. But it really is that beautiful and, well, fishy looking.

Soon enough, I snapped out of it and started to work my way upstream with a Parachute Adams. Within the first dozen or so casts, seven or eight young of the year rainbows, two or three inches long blew the fly out of the water like a kernel of popcorn exploding.
I didn’t mind. This is a sign of a healthy wild trout population.

Up around the second bend from the bridge, a log about the diameter of a telephone pole had fallen in the stream. Over time, the water flowing by and under this obstacle had dug a pocket about 18 inches deep in the gravel. Good place for a bigger fish. I flipped the Adams upstream and let it drift along the edge of the log. It went bobbing along, its little white calf tail post nodding in the flow. Then it disappeared in a swirl and I set the hook. Nine inches of feisty and angry rainbow trout vaulted from the water and landed clear up against the far bank of the stream, a leap of what had to be six or seven feet as the crow, umm, trout flies. Then, he zipped back across and tried to get back under the log. I raised the rod tip and slowly guided him to hand, and turned the fly from his jaw and sent him on his way.

I broke out in a big grin. I was back with my favorite small stream wild trout. I really love the little bows..