Breaking News: Karma Works!

Alaska's worst enemy is finally getting his. Better think of a new name for the airport.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080729/ap_on_go_co/stevens_indictment

In the good spirit of things, here is an excerpt from his famous "Series of Tubes" speech given in a senate committee meeting.

"...Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got... an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.
[...] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material..."

Well Ted, I hope your series of tubes are ready for "enormous amounts of material" while locked up in Federal Pound You in the Ass Prison. Sayonara douchepump.

Some Badassness

It is really quite impossible to put words to the collective amount of mojo and trilobal we're going to smear all over the fabled waters of the North Umpqua. I can only describe it now in terms of whats been done and whats been felt, not what will be. For one, I have trilobal under my toenails, really, the shit is everywhere, I think there is even a piece lodged in my choad and I swear I tie clothed. The trimmed deer hair of muddler heads and other assorted spun wakers is much more manageable, but still, everywhere I go, it goes...static is a bitch. My fly boxes have likely never looked this nice, at least not from my doing. I have even started to put the bullshit into my flies that I personally don't think matters, like a piece of wood duck, or some pretty pheasant or a couple polar bear hairs, all done just in case. Just in case the fish really are as snooty as they are in my mind, like they are finning down there behind a rock and a fly comes into their window and they think, "ha, who is this amateur? he subbed schlappen for rhea? no fucking jungle cock? cheap saddle hackle tips? rookie." Really, this is what my mind has done with these fish, it's pretty fucked up since I'm the kind of guy who strips deer hair mice on the middle of a lake during a hex hatch, just cause, or fishes a big ass foam, rubber legged terrestrial through a hatch of sz. 18 BWOs...why, because it works. I am sure the same type of shit applies to the steelhead on the NU as to the trout of sconny, the fish usually don't really care if its ugly as long as its edible...usually. And that is the reason I'm spending 15 minutes a fly instead of 5. It's been this "just in case" reasoning. I'll look at a fly and think, 'I don't need to add the pheasant', then think, 'just in case' and I tie it in. Just in case the fish are thinkers. Weird shit man.

Above and beyond all that is the fact that I will be spending 7 days straight on the river, sunday to sunday. It won't really matter how many fish I move or hook or land. It'll kinda matter though, as much as I tell myself otherwise. The goal is to define the trip in another way, not by numbers of fish but by gained knowledge and the experience. Given the crew I will be spending the days with I can guarantee there will be knowledge to be had, and I'm gonna get me some. And on that river the experience is likewise guaranteed, my casting will improve as will my ability to read and wade that fucked up ledgerocky river. And that, ladys and stains, is the purpose of the post. To remind myself that it's not all about the fish. It's not all about the fish. It's not all about the fish. Though, I should say, my 25 year old mind has a severe issue with those sentences, it says, "then why the fuck do you have trilobal in your choad?" And I have no answer, except that it seems to me almost all the rickety old guys of fishing say or write that very thing...it's not all about the fish...and I have this feeling that there is a whole new dimension of fishing reality if you can get your mind to that place. So, I will try.

Disclaimer: If a steelhead eats my dry fly, the "it's not about the fish" shit will be a lost cause! Check back in a couple weeks for my reflection. peace out fools.

Couldn't make it up if I tried: part deuhhh?

I don't think I have put any Bushisms up on the blog yet, but this shit is just too good. Apparently after lifting the executive ban on offshore drilling, Bush got drilled by reporters on whether or not that was really the best way to achieve the desired result...less dependence on foreign oil, lower gas prices. I am putting up a couple choice excerpts from a Yahoo!news arcticle I read today...Bush needs to start writing childrens books...or something, he is a fuckin entertainer!

Speaking of the American Consumer:

"They're smart enough to figure out whether they're going to drive less or not. I mean, you know, it's interesting what the price of gasoline has done," Bush said at a news conference in the White House press room, "is it caused people to drive less. That's why they want smaller cars: They want to conserve. But the consumer's plenty bright. The marketplace works."

"You noticed my statement yesterday, I talked about good conservation and — you know, people can figure out whether they need to drive more or less," he said. "They can balance their own checkbooks." (balance their own checkbooks!!!)

This part is my favorite:

“It seems like it makes sense to me to say to the world at we’re going to use, you know, new technologies to explore for oil and gas in the United States … to send a clear message that the supplies of oil will increase,” he said.

“The president doesn’t have a magic wand,” the president added. “You can’t just say: ‘Low gas!’"

Well, there you have it. The president does not, I repeat, does not, have a magic wand. DAMN!

hey! it's a jpeg!

this blog is useless without pics! someday, lads, i will jump back into society with a splash, start working again and buy a gotdam digital camera, but this day shall not be that day. in the meantime i have a really nice brother who took a pic of the carp fly i spoke about a couple weeks ago. i should, however, issue a statement of partial retraction on the whole "its the fly that matters" thing with the carp. I was back to the spot a week ago and didn't hook a fish. a friend was with and he hooked two, one on a little san juan worm and one on a small rubber legged squirrel nymph. the fly that slayed em the week before got only a few follows and one take. so it apparently isn't as magical as first thought. it is still a damn good fly though so here it is!

there are two small differences between this fly and the one i used...1) on my fly the larva lace is brown and 2) i used rusty orange rabbit for the wing instead of what appears to be hackle fibers.

Couldn't make it up if I tried!

This is exactly why you should shop at Wal-Mart. I would say there is a pretty decent chance this dude could make some money off of this fiasco.

Wal-Mart customer bitten by rattlesnake hiding in plants!

Golden Bones

I definitely missed the camera yesterday. Decided to do a little carping yesterday afternoon. There is a little slough pretty close to home that I learned about last year, it was full of carp every time I went last summer but I never actually hooked anything. After yesterday I am pretty willing to blame it all on fly selection. I had this sneaking suspicion that some of the bonefish flies I had tied up for Belize would maybe turn the trick. One pattern in particular looked especially juicy, it has a little wood duck tail, brown larva lace body, rusty orange rabbit strip fir (no skin) tied in as a wing and bead chain eyes. It's tied to ride hook up and the beadchain is pretty light so it will stay suspended with a slow twitch strip. The water was about two feet higher than any other time I've fished this spot, but I think that made it a bit easier. I could wade in the grass and use it for cover, which made it easy to stay pretty close to the fish. I took up a nice casting station about 10 feet from the edge of the grass where there was a nice open casting lane with fish periodically cruising past about 15-20 feet away and several others hanging near the surface within 50 feet. I started with the fly described above and had follows immediately. When I finally got it in front of a likely cruiser the fish turned hard and came right up behind the fly about 20 feet from my position. I could see the fly in front of the fish and gave it a few mini strips, then watched the fish open its mouth and inhale, a strip set and the game was on. This was a very lackluster fight, the carp just rolled into the grass and dogged around for a bit, but I'll take it. I spent 20 minutes more at that spot then made a move about 30 feet down the shore to another station. Shortly after moving I got into another fish, a situation very similar to the first, but the fish fought much better. This crazy carp had only one eye, the left eye looked as though it never developed, it was just a tiny ring of head flesh, freaky looking. I tried some other patterns for about an hour and got nary a follow. Tied the magic fly back on and within 10 minutes hooked and landed another. This was the most satisfying fish because of the distance, it was at 35-40 feet and I couldn't see his mouth on the take. I saw a pec fin flare and the fish rotated about 10 degrees, so I set up and he was there.

One thing I found very interesting in all of this is that the fish were hooked within 50 feet of one another, there were loads of carp (~75) and the behavior didn't change much throughout it all. Since the slough is only about 200x70 feet I was expecting the whole slough to be abandoned or completely shut off after catching a fish. An article I just read in a dirty fly rag by none other than Whitlock himself said something about chemicals released by carp when they are caught causing the others nearby to quit feeding. In my limited experience this does not occur to any extent. I was thinking that maybe since there in a bit of a high profile spot (there was a family on one end of the slough fishing bobbers for 'em) that they are used to smelling the fear chemical so they don't get as bothered by it. Another thought was that there is slight movement to the water carrying the chemical away, so within ten minutes it was mostly gone. Who knows? I did notice that for 5-10 minutes after landing a fish other carp would come over to apparently scope out what the hell was going on. They would come over close, sometimes in groups of 4 or 5 which seemed a little abnormal, they were moving a little faster than normal and wouldn't follow the fly. So maybe this was the effect Whitlock wrote about, but like I said it only lasted 5-10 minutes so it was easy to wait them out. Regardless of carp chemicals, stinky willamette mud, crazy families fishing to eat those pigs and one dead log of a fight, it was a fucking banner outing. First three carp on the fly in four hours of fishing, given the multitude of hours I spent out there last year, I'll take it and run.

Gear Revisited

Way back, during the leeches infant stages, I wrote about salmon fishing with bullshit gear and half-heartedly vowed to not fuck around with the wrong tools for the job. Like with most dipshits I clearly need more than one self-imposed ass kicking to learn a lesson. As I was rigging the jig rod for a trip down a local river for steelhead I glanced into the gear box to see what was lying around in the way of jigs. I had two, one big ass lead head with no paint and one quaint little pink headed jig, just what I was looking for since I would be tipping it with the ever legendary pink worm. The problem was the hook, it was a sickle hook, one of those stupid angular things notorius for straightening...it has happened to me once already this winter and I watched as it happened to someone else as well. So as I reached down and grabbed that stupid fucking jig, I thought...you really shouldn't put this stupid fucking jig on. But I did anyway. We launched the boat shortly thereafter and as soon as we cleared the bankies, Kari flipped the bobber out. About 15 seconds later the bobber went down, I was sure she was snagged but when I looked back the rod was bucking hard. Then there was a 10 pound CHROMER out of the water. I survey the surroundings, see there is no logical place to land the fish and drop the anchor. The fish came up real slow and calm like between the boat and the bank and I thought...we need to get the fish in the boat before that stupid fucking jig hook bends out. So I grab our net, useless from the boat with its 1 foot handle, and jump into the water. My fat ass does not slide smoothly into the water when I get in, its more like a small astroid impact. So about a half second after impact the fish screams straight downstream and then was gone. Instantly I thought, STUPID FUCKING JIG! I was really hoping the line broke, though I'm not sure if I would have felt any better, but then I saw the jig was still there, grabbed it and what I already knew was re-confirmed. Now, when shit like this happens you know its not the end of it. The image of that straight hook is pretty well singed on the minds eye and you can't really see or envision anything else. This is detrimental to ones mojo. We fished the rest of the day, mostly swinging flies, then we fished Saturday evening on a small coastal stream for steelhead with methods not to be disclosed, then we swung flies yesterday at the river where the stupid fucking jig incident occured, all the while taking the mental beatdown and knowing I brought all of it on by tying on that stupid fucking jig in the first place.

Cacti Country

Howdy fellers! I been bravin the heat down in Tucson, AZ for the last 4 days. No fishing, not much of much at all. Kari had to come down here for the National Environmental Health Association conference and I got to play tag along since her place of emPLOYment couldn't spare any extras. We are in the Phoenix airport now, enjoying some nice tall Dos Equis before we board for the last leg. I can't fuckin wait to get back and outta this heat, broke a hundo every day, but the humidity was 15% tops, so it wasn't so bad...much better than I thought actually. The desert was pretty incredible, the number of plants and animals able to make it there was astounding, as were the Saguaro cacti...the largest one we saw was about 35 feet tall, with several in the 20-30 foot range. These things are apparently able to suck up over 200 gallons of water in a single day of rain, enough to sustain it for a year, thats strategy at its finest. I saw one little trickle of a stream, the only water...aside from the pool...that we saw in the whole of our stay. The conference, well, thats a whole'nother story all together...if I am feeling bored I will tell ya more about it, but don't hold your breath.

On a much brighter note, I fished a Portland area river last Saturday...swinging again, finally. Towards the end of the day (about hour 9 of 13) I hooked up and landed a little fuckin gomper steelhead, chrome as heyull and about 23 inches long, the smallest Oregon steel yet, but gotdamner he tasted fine! Probably going out again tomorrow, levels on area rivers are finally coming into shape and they've been kickin out fish...I'll keep ya posted.

lunch

The picture is terrible cause all I have is a cheap ass 1 pixel camera on my phone, but use your imagination and you'll get it. Bottom left: satueed morels and onions with parmesan, bottom right: sauteed king boletes with tomatoes and parmesan, top mid: boletes with fresh onion and mozzarella...all served on fresh local bread, quick broiled and consumed in rapid succession. try it!

troutin' and redneckin' it

In the past week I've been out twice for native resident cutthroat in small coastal streams. Prior to those outings I didn't think resident cutts over 10 inches were a real possibility, but I stand corrected. The first day we landed four over 10, the largest about 12". On dry flies and little baby 3 weights it was a blast. The second day we caught no large fish, but still managed quite a few in the 8 inch range...fun to be out troutin' again nonetheless.

Redneckin' it, or, doin it dirty mcdirt style: Went to Foster Dam on the S. Santiam two days ago to try to bank a steelhead for the table. The river is finally starting to fall a bit and there are no shortage of fresh fish around, I know this because the yocales slayed on em...unfortunately I live too far from confederate flags and monster trucks to be a yocale myself. I hooked one and lost it rillll quick like, while the boys huckin their 1 oz. bobbers with 1/8th oz. jigs seemed to be raking them in with abandon. Steelhead must like the smell of oil, confederate flag dust and bud light all mixed together.....?

morels and boletes oh my!

Well friends, the lack of camera certainly was a stinger this weekend. Your lucky I don't think a picture is worth a thousand words, cause there should be about 10 of em going up now and being that there isn't it would take a lotta words to make up for it. So I'll try to keep it within reason.

We pulled into Camp Sherman at about 3 on Saturday afternoon. The campgrounds on the Metolius had a few people in them, but weren't terrible. Still, privacy was not an option along the river. We got to lower bridge, where I wanted to camp, and Kari decided she didn't want any part of 7 AM generators and relatively constant camp company. So we just kept driving, took some backroads to forest hwy 12 and found ourselves a super nice, free and completely empty camp along a nice little creek. We parked and decided to stroll around, look for shrooms and pick out the best site for camp. We were about 20 minutes into our mini-foray when Kari found a morel, a nice natural apparently associated with some young Grand Fir. There were a few nice freshies and some blown out, dried out oldies. I was surprised to see naturals as low as we were and was actually looking for King Boletes when she found that first morel. We foraged for about 2 hours that evening and came back to camp with about a dozen nice morels and 8 nice boletes, even though there was obvious sign that the commercial pickers had been through for the boletes already. That reminds me now of how fucking annoying it was to know that we were playing clean-up the scraps behind the commercials all weekend, everywhere we went. I can't wait to, hopefully, someday find an untouched area for boletes and burn morels, I think it would be quite epic....though I should quit whining, now.

The following day we started with a another mini-foray near camp, got a couple more naturals and one or two boletes. We also flushed a ruffed grouse, the first I have seen in the cascades. It was about 20 feet away in somewhat dense young fir. I had forgot how much I thoroughly enjoy that split second of surprise, with a twist of adrenaline for good measure, that you get when a ruffed flushes...I kinda wished I had a gun because I instantly thought of grouse and morels on the camp stove, but that would be plain old overindulgence. Maybe he could have at least flew into a tree and killed himself, then I couldn't very well just let it rot? Overindulgence would certainly be trumped by resourcefullness and minimization of waste...no?

We spent the remainder of the afternoon in the GW burn, once again playing clean up behind the commercials, but the beauty of the burns are that the commercials can pick and pick to their hearts content and barely put a nick in the morel population. In about 5 or 6 hours the two of us pulled 7 pounds, while finding only three or four individual trees that didn't already have footprints surrounding it - to see the little spots like that, that hadn't been touched, was astounding. Even the areas where they had obviously picked yielded a few beauties right next to bootprints. We tried as best we could to maintain self control and take only the large morels but we definitely took a few minis, it was hard not to do. Imagine stepping around a tree and seeing 20 or 30 morels, all of them too small to harvest, and in the mix there are nice cut stems from the commercials. Do it around about 5-10 trees without finding a harvestable morel and like I said, it's tough not to cut at least one, a morel you would have definitely left had it been standing next to a three incher, but at the same time needed to quell the frustration and boost the moral (cheap pun intended). A unique (to me) observation in the burn was finding them around hardwoods. We were in a pretty boggy area near the head of a small stream and there were what appeared to be big cottonwoods. I had no idea cottonwoods grew that high and am still weary of saying that is definitively what they were, but I spent a lot of time earlier this spring staring at cottonwoods and am pretty certain that is what they were...anyways, there were loads of morels along the root lines. We were balance beaming it along down trees to save us from sinking knee deep in dirty ass fire mud. At the base of the standing trees you could walk around them on the root system, then jump on another down tree and follow the maze to the next standing tree. This yielded A LOT of shrooms and it was pretty fun, except for this one time, I reached what appeared to be a dead end to the balance beam maze and had already come over some really dicey shit that I didn't want to do-over. As I was standing on a down log, part of it buckled and I just about dumped my whole bag (this was at the end of the day, on the way out) of morels in the mud. I got lucky and somehow managed to keep the bag inhand, the morels in the bag and my balance all at once...a disaster very narrowly avoided.

I needed a damn beer after the day in the burn so we made a quick stop in Sisters on our way out and went back to camp. Why we didn't have the beer in camp already is another story. We have been changing our ways lately with regards to camp food. It used to be brats, brats, brats and maybe a hobo dinner (taters and hamburger wrapped in foil, for you out of the loopers). This weekends vittles included....night one: one fresh bolete sauteed in butter for an appetizer, then shell noodles with leek, the first days morels, garlic and alfredo for the main course. day two: breakfast was a big egg scramble with a ton of veggies, lunch was veggie wraps with hummus, dinner was vegetable red curry over jasmine rice, thai style. day three: b-fast was avocado and egg sandwhiches on filone, and lunch was more super duper veg wraps with the previous nights curry sauce. Those of you who know me from my previous life will wonder what the alien has done with Thomas. This is a new leaf and I must say I like it.

Well that pretty much wraps it up. The third day of picking was pretty uneventful, aside from the huge string of relatively non stop expletives once we learned what the flagging tape meant. It was sign left by the commercial pickers so their crews wouldn't hit the same spot twice. EVERYWHERE we went for boletes was flagged, and I got pissed, then I got home and looked in the bags of shrooms we had and realized what a choad I was being. I certainly don't think I own the forest anymore than they do, or at least not by any rationale I am ready to delve into on here, and realize that they are trying to make a living picking mushrooms while I am getting some to eat and share with friends and family. Lets just hope that we're not ruining something else by overdoing it. Maybe the science will actually get done at some point in the near future and they can regulate the industry prior to any major eco-impact. But thats likely nothing but a bunch of hope. And what is hope, but a mind-made concept, anyways? (<--- i told you i would get existential on your asses!)

-SL

fyi - 1307 words, only about 1 and 1/3 pictures worth, thank me for that fools!!!!!

request granted

Upon the request of thee faithful reader, it is time for a post. My digital camera shit the bed two weeks ago. Seeins' that my writing is, well, my writing, I rely heavily on the photos for content. Without the fallback I've been a little weary of throwing anything on here. Not only are the photos my content crutch, they also tend to keep me on task. So I am heretofore (maybe?) issuing a declaration of certain incongruency.

The out of doors has been fairly uncooperative with me lately, still. I did manage about a pound or two of morels from a burn two weeks ago, with plans to head back this weekend for more morchella and some boletes. But, the snow is supposed to creep down to 4000 feet tonight through tomorrow. 4000 being the magic number I had in mind and previous experience with snow morels has me weighing other options. I know there will be shrooms to be had, so we'll go and see what gives.

Fishing: About once a year I take a fairly substantial hiatus. This is not planned. The only general rule of the hiatus is that it occurs at a time when steelhead are less catchable than most other times. I've been giving the recent break a lot of thought though, regarding the whole catchability issue. The rivers are still high with the snow still in the mountains and all, but said rivers are all dam regulated so while they are high they are almost continuously "fishable" color-wise. So why I haven't gone out and tried is starting to baffle me a bit. Fact is, steelhead are at least fairly predictable, and when the water is high I truly believe there are far-less swingable runs or pockets, which should in turn make fishing the water easier? Sounds right anyways. Regardless of water levels, it is time to go swinging. The involuntary twitches and self-imposed mind games are pretty much in full effect, a true sign that the hiatus must end.

Last time I said something about juicy posts and eye-candy to come. Unfortunately I mustn't make the same claim again, for the eye-candy acquire-er is out of business and the whole writing issue I explained above. This weekend should provide something to babble on about here at the leech, be it shrooms, fish, existentialism, redwingsuckism, or otherwise, I'll try to shave down the size of the post to post time-gaps. Thanks for reading.

-SL

3 weeks

Sadly, with not much to report in the way of morels and fish, 3 weeks have gone by. The last four morel outings have yielded about 10 total. The fishing has been nearly non-existant, with the snow melt and all. The local locales are flowing in the trees as the dams prepare themselves for the deluge of snowmelt rolling down the mountains. The riparian morels near home are on their last legs and most of the fires are either dried out or covered with snow. But the morels are still finding some favorable conditions in a few burns and the spring king boletes ought to be starting soon as well. This weekend will mark my first trip this spring over the cascades, we will be scouting and, hopefully, picking morels in the burns and maybe some spring kings, if luck is on our side. But the fishing, sadly, will likely have to wait a bit longer. I have been pretty excited to get out the floating lines for summer steelhead, but as I mentioned, rivers in the the trees make things a little tricky.

All has not been lost though, one of the morel trips and a coastal hike yielded my first two batches of oyster mushrooms. I had read some mixed messages regarding the flavor of the oyster. One bulletin board post likens them to bacon, while a book I read compares breaded and deep fried oyster mushrooms with seafood. On my tongue, I definitely got the bacon message, which was surprising. These were consumed sauteed and mixed with veggies and scrambled eggs. We also gave them a try breaded and fried. I thought they tasted like fried mushrooms, hmmmm?, but the texture was reminiscent of some seafoods. Tasty little morsels though, without argument.

I also made my first trip to Silver Creek Falls State Park yesterday. This is a spectacular piece of earth. I highly recommend all who live in or visit Oregon go there. My mind could hardly comprehend how the little stream above and below the larger waterfalls was the same water within the falls. It just didn't add up and seemed like there was a mysterious water addition right at the brink of the waterfall. Words, especially my jumbled prose, will never come close to describing whats there, so just go see for yourself.

With luck there will be much juicier posts soon, with eye candy and the like. Til then, stay upright.

The madness continues...

It's full blown morel mania on the leech homefront. I won't bore you with all the mushroomy talk, but if your interested go here: http://www.cascademyco.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=658

Last night we had stuffed morels for the first time, we used sauteed morel stems, rice pilaf, chives and leek. You mix all that good stuff with some mayo (a fav of the leech in any dish!) and some cream and some parmesan and anything else your taste buds desire. Stuff the caps with said mixture, saute on all "sides" (they are mostly round, but you can turn them into oval-squares if your careful) and bake at 375 for about 10 minutes. I threw some cheddar on the top of a couple of them and it was magnifico. We pretty much guessed at this recipe and it worked well. A couple variations on the stuffing could help the total flavor experience (most stuffed morel recipes call for crab stuffing, SNAP!), but for try #1 it was a success.

Last Week #2

Saturday was probably the most recreationally productive day of the week. It was a dissapointing day hatch-wise, we only saw 2 or 3 rises, and it was pretty slow sub-surface as well, but the quality made up for all that....

Last Week #1

Last week was relatively slow when stacked up against the one before it. However, it was not without highlight. This unemployment thing is great, I can't imagine what it would be like to actually be on unemployment, like I could be getting paid for this madness?

Anyways, tried to round up a few more morels close to home. Only went out one day due mainly to shitty weather, picking morels in the rain gets old really quick. It seems like the blackberrys somehow increase there affinity to my pants, and likewise my pants seem much worse at keeping the blackberrys off my skin. Waaaah, waaaaah. While on the forage I saw a couple noteworthy things, one being this MASSIVE trillium, I don't know how big these usually get but this one dwarfs most of the others I've seen this spring. Granted it is a small backpack, but the flower is about 2-2.5 ft tall.

A little further down the "trail" that I wasn't on I saw this Verpa conica, edible but apparently not too coveted.
Last but not least, a nice fruiting of what I believe are Turkey Tails. I think I've seen more of these than any other mushroom this spring. Always on dead trees, usually dead and down, and sometimes on stumps.

Jackpot!

Some friends of the leech found themselves knee deep in spring gold! Awesome find!!!

Round 1 of the yearly drying operation here at headquarters, trying a new method this year. Used a dehydrator last year...this batch still has a day or two to go, but so far so good and it doesn't smell nearly as bad as the dehydrator.

Good days....

Well it got cold. Not cold enough to freeze and whither the morels overnight, but probably cold enough to have restarted the morel season at a certain elevation. Its likely that the low stuff was spared from complete destruction, but probably was slowed way down and anything that had started popping above 1000 ft is likely gone. Nonetheless, we knew that there were morels to be had, so we went and got 'em. Went back to the same place I got the first haul late last week. We pulled about 3-4 more lbs. on Saturday and about 1 lb on Sunday morning (picking in the snow!). We scouted Saturday for some similar locales but found nothing. So yesterday afternoon we opted for some river bottom cottonwoods to finish out the day. We are happy we did!!!

Scouting the coast range

Saturdays take

The blacks on the top half are from the same coastal spot and the esculentas on the bottom are from "a" river bottom (whatever you do, don't ask where "a" river is)

Some art, courtesy of Kari...I wanna eat this picture

So right about now, there are about 7 lbs. of fresh morels in the fridge. Being that it's April 21st and I didn't even find one last year until May 13th I would say that it's looking like a good spring!

Bon Appetit!

Mega...

Morels today. The shit that needed to align, hath aligned. Gonna try to get more before the weather freezes them out this weekend (let us hope that this doesn't really happen, cause I left a lotta babies out there today).

Here is the whole haul,

my first quad,

and the days all stars, which I may turn into money...hmmm, dilemma.

note: I am not eating (or selling) the raggedy ass curled up one in the bottom right corner, it was just a really cool morel, massive and starting to rot...had to get some pictures of that one. It was growing in a flat spiral under a big piece of fir bark.

Consolation prize!

Hunted morels for about 4 hours yesterday. Spring was well on its way here, several knee to waste high nettles, lots of old, mangy Verpa bohemica. Everything looked right, but, not a single morel was found. Luckily, I chose this spot because it was very proximal to some good steelhead water. I figured I might get lucky and get an early summer on the swing, if nothing else get some practice casting my new-to-me Sage 6126. I was fishing a type III and a sz. 4 Purple Green Butt, traditional style. I worked one large run and had several trout grab the fly, even landed one native winter steelhead smolt, chrome and fired up on its way to the ocean. I moved down to fish one small tailout before calling it quits and about halfway through, in the middle of the swing I got a great grab and it stuck. It felt like an old winter should, no screaming runs but it did have a lot more power than I would expect for a spawned out hen. She was good sized, maybe 31-32", had some minor wounds on her body just in front of her tail, from digging a redd I'm sure, but was in otherwise excellent condition, especially her fins. I was expecting it to take some time to revive her but as soon as I pointed her in the right direction she was gone with power.

A bonus fish like that is tough to beat!

Holy Money Quote, batman!

So, I am close to done with my first Haig-Brown book. Several times in the past year I have found myself wondering, why in the hell am I not reading Haig-Brown? I mentioned this to my friend John and he was kind enough to loan me Fisherman's Fall. Anyways, there have been several excellent sentences in the book, but this is one of my favorite.

writing of the sources of peoples' fascination with fishing...

"Highest among them I would place the impossibility, for nearly all of us anyway, of achieving anything approaching complete and regular success, in spite of the delightful delusion that success of this sort is never far away."

Thats good stuff.

Will I ever learn?

When the time is not right for something that depends on the right time, it is best if you just wait for it. Trying to make it be the right time is not humanly possible, for one cannot feasibly make the last two weeks warmer or wetter. In fact one cannot feasibly do anything to the last two weeks at all, except think about it, which is by definition not doing anything to it, but doing something of it. Nonetheless, I thought by knowing (without really knowing) that there were morels where we hunted them, that somehow one or two would appear. Unfortunately, nature was there to firmly put me in my place.

We spent about 15-16 hours over the last three days foraging river bottoms laced with cottonwood and maple, and a few mini-stands of fir and cedar mixed in, with nothing to show for it, aside from the large mental scar that is left behind. The scar forms slowly, very slowly, and doesn't become apparent until that one moment when you firmly call it quits and head for home. During that moment all the certainty you had that the morels were there winds itself into a mass of misinformed thought in your mind, you try to shrug it off to the "learning curve", but despite your best efforts it instantaneously solidifies during the nano-second of thought in which you accept that you will go home empty handed. The scar that is left behind is all consuming for longer than it should be, you poke it at, feel along its foreign edges for some clue as to how you let this happen. But there is no "clue", just a scar. Learning from the scar is the crucial part, I think. To make sure you come away from it with knowledge rather than a general distaste for its creation is key, in fact it may be the key.

Nonetheless, it was very nice to be out in the woods and it was not without some new experience. For instance, this may have been the first time ever that I mostly lost interest in fishing. There was an excellent trout river within sight or sound all weekend, yet I found myself nary thinking of pursuing the trouts. Instead my eyes were fixed on the duff, looking for a springtime secret to be poking its head out of the fallen leaves, when I did look up it was only to search for the next patch of promising ground, a big old growth cottonwood, or a freshly fallen fir.

To say that the weekend was a total loss on the morel front is a stretch. On the way to the hunting grounds on Friday I noticed a curious shape sprouting up from some mulch under a fence that creates the border of a road ditch and a front yard. Upon closer inspection we found loads and loads of morels had fruited in an apparently new (last summer/fall) area of landscaping. On the way back through that evening we stopped in and knocked on the door. I should say now that I had written off consumption of "landscape morels" for fear of undue exposure to unknown substances (the bark is often treated with undesirables and people have been known to lay down the pesticides in such areas) so my interest in these morels was initially academic. However, after yet another day of finding no true morels in the woods, I thought it would be worth checking into the large fruiting of mulchies that we saw. I was hoping to hear that they used organic mulch and didn't use pesticides, in which case I probably would have harvested the lot of them. However, upon speaking with the residents I learned they used the cheapest mulch available (I must admit, after hearing this I was still thinking of eating some of them) AND they had recently spread a very strong herbicide over the whole area. That pretty much put an end to any thought entertaining ingestion of these treats. So, some pictures and admiration of their akward beauty would have to do. I must say though, this find did nothing but accelerate my sureness that at least some morels would be found, which in the end only led to a bigger, more subtantial scar.



All that aside, these pictures are still very fun to look at! Enjoy!

Excuse my language, but FUCK YEAH BEYATCHEEES!!!!

got eeeem!!!! first morel of the year has been banked (<---- this is a triple pun!, never mind why, far too advanced for you), and is awaiting ingestion!

DISCLAIMER: eating the mushroom on the right side of the photo is not suggested...the verpas have been known to cause loss of muscle coordination, among other things.

also, for anyone who might care, i found the morel, the conica and another smaller morel that i left behind within about 4 feet of each other. left the smaller one behind, going to get a set of time-lapse pictures, will post here.

oh yeah, fuck yeah beyatcheees!

I did it once, and I will do it again

Sorry to get political on your asses again, but I just can't help myself. The wolf issue in Idaho is a real shitsandwich. Upon the wolf being de-listed Idaho, Wyoming and I believe Montana as well now have full control over their respective wolf populations. This is relatively good news but assuredly won't last long. Here are a couple money quotes from a CBS News article...

"Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter told The Associated Press that he wants hunters to kill about 550 gray wolves. That would leave about 100 wolves, or 10 packs, according to a population estimate by state wildlife officials."

and from the Govna' himself...

"I'm prepared to bid for that first ticket to shoot a wolf myself," Otter said earlier Thursday during a rally of about 300 hunters."

I would also like a share a brief excerpt from a related article put out by a local news source in Idaho (the "He" in question is the head of the Anti-Wolf Coalition)

"He says it is ruining the ecosystem, and kills wild animals and livestock not just for food, but for sport."

So, apparently, Wolves have sports! I am sure the large number of wild animals and livestock being killed were just a side effect of this years wolf olympics. I guess they hold them on the years with the most dipshits talking about wolves in the news.

Breaking the Hex(es)

I got lucky this Monday. The first summer steelhead was hooked, landed and harvested on March, 31 this year which puts me about 2 months ahead of last years mark. Apparently, according to a friend, I was "double hexed" (trout fishing = 1 hex, nymphing = 1 hex) but still managed to catch the damn thing. The steelhead juju is on my side, hopefully to stay but I know better, so I will take it while I can. This 29" hatchery hen took a sz 8 possebugger on 4x on the business end of a floating DT6 on a 5 wt rod, definitely the lightest gear I've landed a steelhead on. She cut deep, dark orange and ate like some exquisite french dish I don't even know the name of. Her eggs were minute, about a cup of volume total, and her stomach loaded with small nymphs. She was one of only about 500 fish over Willamette falls, which if you think about it, is akin to a needle in a haystack. There are hundreds of river miles (combining all the possible tribs and the willy itself) that those 500 fish could be in, so I suppose to say I was lucky to find her would be a gross understatement, really fucking lucky would be a little closer to the truth. Anyways...porn time!

Where's Waldo?

Blood in the water = food on the table

The boat's name, forever appropriate (we hope)