February 11, 2024 – A (Flooded) Field Trip with the Silver Fox – SEPA Blueline

Someone's been hard at work.

Knowing another winter storm was coming, it did cross my mind to attempt to fish today.  I wanted to sleep in a bit, so I considered an afternoon trip to another approved trout stream with wild reproduction that would soon be off limits.  And then I got a text from Tom asking if I wanted to poke around a little trickle we have fished a few times with mixed results.  The fishing has declined since his first visits there, and I personally may have only caught two trout there ever, but where it is in SEPA makes it a bit of a unicorn and worth keeping tabs on.  We did not catch a trout today, but we spooked two who are hanging on despite rapidly changing habitat.  I landed a chub or two on a dry dropper, but mark this trip down as things you don’t see at home on the couch.  There was now another reason the landscape was changing.

No trout, not even in that bend pool, more rodent handiwork.

As we made our way to a hole known to hold fish, we started to notice that the creek was deep and slow.  A gander downstream, and we started to see the work of a beaver or two.  I would say close to 25 trees and many smaller saplings had been chewed down and dragged away.  As we continued to walk, it did not take long to find the lodge and then the dam.  Even with a rain free week or more, we were traipsing through marsh where there had once been brush and smaller trees.  No sign of the animals themselves, but they were probably resting after quite a busy fall and early winter.  We were running around taking pictures like little kids exploring the woods, but we did resist banging on the lodge to flush them out, so we did not act 12, at least.

Ambitious.  We did not knock at the lodge today.

We eventually tried to catch a trout again, and in the process saw a bit of good remaining habitat for them.  We spooked two wild browns among the chub life.  It is February, and fish are often inactive and deep in cover, so that means there are likely more fish in this one stretch.  We ran into more flooding and big changes upstream, so much so that we would not attempt a wade through a culvert that we had waded through in higher water in the recent past.  The water under the bridge was likely waist deep or more and mucky.  Still, it would provide a place for the smart fish to ride out the changes to the creek downstream.  The only problem is that if the survivors have moved upstream, they are moving into clearly posted land off limits to these two old men out acting like kids on a Sunday afternoon.  A unicorn with a broken horn, but technically still a unicorn that we will have to visit a few more times before counting it out for good.

One more bonus shot.