An early start

The calendar said that I was still enduring the last weeks of winter, but the thermometer read in the high sixties, and during my evening walks around the property with the family I realized that there was more green than brown covering the hillsides that ring our ranch.

Those environmental factors taken together could have - maybe should have - meant that it was time to get to work.  There's plenty of things that need doing on any old ranch property, this one as much as any other.  The chicken coop is looking ragged and needs planter boxes built to keep down the dust and the feathers.  The orchard that experienced 80% die-off last year is primed for replanting.  There's at least two woodpiles that need to be stacked, and there's couple days' worth of tractor work needed just to clean up the front of the house after the last storm.

Naturally, given everything that I could be doing, I chose to go fishing.

Our ranch sits in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, at about 2600' in elevation.  Most winters snow covers the ridges around us, but we only get a dusting once or twice a year.  I can watch Spring visit the rolling hills outside my kitchen window and also watch as Spring climbs the mountains around us.  I can get in trouble doing this because on days like this particular day, it feels like mid April.  Driving into the higher elevations quickly makes it clear that it isn't.

In spite of this, I drove into the higher elevations.  Of course.

I went prepared this time.  I brough a 2wt euro nymphing setup and a single box of small, nondescript nymphs.  I count that as a mark of experience since in many prior years on days like this I have gotten caught up in the Spring-like feel of the day and brought my small stream dry fly rod and a bunch of #14 Adams and Elk Hair Caddis.  Those days all ended fishless, and in my younger days that tended to blunt my enthusiasm somewhat.  This was going to be different.

As I drove through the 4000' elevation it became increasingly apparent that it was still Winter.  There was only the barest hint of green on the hillsides as the earliest and smallest grasses and weeds began to emerge.  What deciduous trees remained in the massive Creek Fire burn scar were leafless.  The air, warm as it was, smelled cold and damp and lifeless.  Outside the truck, there were no birds in evidence.  No gnat swarms, no mosquitos, no mayflies - everything had that wintery lifelessness and the light of the afternoon sun was still thin and yellow-hued.  In this part of the Sierra, you can experience that whiplash of Spring back to Winter in the space of a 30 minute drive.

Most of the creeks I crossed as I headed up the mountain were running a little high and off-color.  Nothing like runoff, yet, but not optimal.  Most were too small to effectively fish without a dry fly, being so shallow and rootbound.  You'd have to approach them with short, precision casts if you could fish them at all.

After a while I reached one of the larger creeks in this area.  This creek is essentially a miniature version of the creeks higher in the Sierras that I fish in the Summer.  Its headwaters are somewhere near the crest of a granite ridge that tops out at under 8000'.  Thanks to the lack of trees, you can actually stand on the road and look at the cut in the rock that marks the track of the creek through that granite to its origin.  This ridge is precipitously steep on the eastern side and the water it sheds drains eastward into the river, 8000' vertically but just over a mile horizontally, below.  The creeks in the true high country that are fishable in the Summer originate well above 10,000' and tumble more slowly over the course of many miles and in a generally westward direction, into the same river.

All of that aside, this creek was running clear.  Clear in that mountain sense where you can see individual rocks and roots in the riffles, but when you come to the deeper pools the water takes on an aquamarine hue in the center.

I fished a #12 Pheasant Tail nymph with a heavy tungsten bead through the pool.  The edges, where the seam of the current was visible as a series of undulating shimmers in the surface of the water, yielded nothing.  That same fly dropped into the main current as it passed a large sunken granite boulder was immediately taken by a strong fish.  This fish ran through the length of the pool, diving deep.  The power of the run and the reluctance of the fish to jump made me think that it was a Brown, but was the fish came to hand a few moments later I saw that it was a wild Rainbow, somewhat subdued in its coloration due to the shady nature of this hole, but iridescent and as shockingly colored as any wild Rainbow when exposed to the last bits of the afternoon sun as I worked the fly loose and released the fish.

No other pools upstream gave up any fish but it was classic trout water.  This was the kind of stream that would be perfect for a 3wt and a #14 Adams or BWO in mid May or early June.  And as I drove out, I saw that the course of the stream flattened and deepened downstream of the road, winding for almost a mile on a long shelf of gently sloping land that abruptly disappeared as it sloped suddenly to the river almost a mile below.  A mile of trout stream to explore is a lot of water.  What I could see from the road looked to be a whole day's worth of exploration, maybe more.  And that didn't touch the portion of the creek that ran upstream of the road.    

Driving back home was like driving back into Spring as the softeness of the grasses and the sweetness of the air intensified with each foot of elevation dropped.  It was still Winter up high, but Spring was not far off here.  The snowpack being what it was, runoff would probably be light this year in the higher elevations, and as I drove into the yard I was already planning my return to the creek when Spring had come at that elevation.  

That was just a few weeks away.