The Day it Rained Brook Trout

It was hard not to smile as I walked up the narrow footpath, slowly scaling the steep ridge, in between the thick swaths of rhododendron. I stopped to wipe the sweat off my forehead and peered through the mountain laurel, about 150 yards down a steep hill, where the stream was roaring below. Endless plunge pools, car sized boulders and a large waterfall were all visible from the old logging path. My mind was filled with memories from over a decade ago, almost two decades at this point, when my father first took me to this creek. While much in my life and the surrounding area had changed greatly since that day, this stream and backcountry section of Pisgah was relatively the same.

I had fond memories fishing this stream from dusk till dawn with my father as an 11 year old boy, back when I carried a spin rod more than a fly rod. An old timer who taught my dad to fish told him about this little blue line and my father fished it religiously every Monday when he was off work in the afternoons. I snapped back to the present and looked up at the overcast skies, the menacing looking dark clouds that threatened to pour rain at any minute. The Southern Appalachians are often referred to as a temperate rainforest, but the last few years had seemed like the opposite—we had been plagued with severe droughts and hot weather. The stream had lost a significant amount of its flow since I first began fishing it in my younger days.

I had been waiting for a day like this for a long time. Some recent rainfall led to decent flows, and the water was slightly murky instead of crystal clear like when I visited two months back. My last half dozen visits here had been frustrating, long hikes in resulting in fewer and fewer fish, spooking the larger brook trout before I could even get a cast off. Today would be different though. The weather, water levels and other conditions where all in my favor today. The only thing working against me was time, but it usually is, and there was nothing I could do about the limited daylight. I thought of a quote an old timer told me years ago when I complained to him about how the older I get, the more life’s responsibilities took away from my fishing time. He replied, “When you’re young you don’t care about time, when you’re old you realize time doesn’t care about you.”

The Meadow of Despair

Already 3 miles up the ridge, I had another 2 to go before I planned to descend down the ridge into the stream and start fishing. My mind wandered back to other fond memories on this stream and the surrounding tributaries.

• A wonderful day with a dear friend who’s a finance wiz and on occasion humors me by joining me on a long trek to these long forgotten places.

• A hot summer day years ago when another friend of mine and I caught so many trout we lost count within the first hour. I smiled to myself thinking of how I had downplayed the hike in and we spent over an hour trudging through what I dub “the meadow of despair,” which has so many briars it will make even the most motivated anglers second guess their dedication.

• The time I convinced a friend who’s quite risk adverse to access this stream from the headwaters, a 2,000 ft elevation drop in less than a mile. We must of stopped to catch our breathe 2 dozen times when attempting to get back to our vehicles.

The roar of thunder brought me back to reality and looking at my route on my phone, I realized I had almost passed the point where I planned to descend into the stream. I looked cautiously down the ridge and for a brief moment, second guessed why I had chosen such a difficult stream to access on a day when my ankle felt weak, my bruised heel was flaring up and I didn’t feel too spry. I heard my dad’s voice in my head as I descended the ridge, “Son, do you want to be a pretender or a contender?” My good friend the Transylvania Waders voice also came into my head “You aint no basic city bitch, are ya”?

With those motivational quotes playing in my head, I dropped down the steep hill and a half hour later was standing ankle deep in one of Southern Appalachias finest native brook trout streams. As I was rigging up my rod, I couldn’t help but smile to myself at the plunge pool in front of me, with trout rising every few seconds at the various bugs hatching all around. My first cast resulted in 3 decent sized brookies all racing to my fly, competing for it. Within the first 10 minutes I had caught 5 trout all around 8” and I continued moving fluidly upstream. With declining daylight and the amount of prime trout water ahead of me, I casted in each pool just 1-2 times, ensuring my casts were accurate, mending my line so the rapids didn’t impact my drift and more importantly, being careful not to put my line or shadow over the trout to spook them.

After catching well over 30 trout, I began head hunting; skipping the marginal and “B” pools and solely focusing on the deeper plunge pools with the habitat to hold trophy sized brook trout. The last 30 minutes resulted in my largest trout of the day up to that point, a colorful 10” brook trout, which was a trophy by Southern Appalachia standards. My focus was broken when I noticed a figure on the bank about 50 yards ahead of me and my heart sank- did another angler hike in above me and I was fishing behind them?

I took off my polarized glasses and squinted my eyes—it was a tall lanky figure dressed in overalls, with a straw brim hat, carrying a woven basket. It dawned on me he wasn’t an angler, rather a good ole boy picking Ramps from the side of the mountain, above the stream. I waved politely when he looked over at me, probably even more surprised to see an angler back here. “Welp, I aint never seen another soul this far up the creek.” I smiled and replied with the same line. After 10 minutes of chatting, he informed me his family owned the private inholding of land surrounded by Pisgah land on all sides. He had hiked down from 3 miles above and immediately gained my respect. “I used to fish for speckled trout as a boy and my pa would fry em up for dinner.”

My ears perked up when he said he hadn’t seen a brook trout in person in decades. Watching wearily from the bank, his eyes lit up when I pulled a colorful 6” spec from the depths of a small waterfall and held it in the water until he scrambled over to where I was. Watching the old timer, a relic of times past and reminder of the folks and families who used to inhabit every ridge deep in these mountains, I smiled to myself. He watched for the next few minutes as I pulled another half dozen trout from the falls pool as rain began to slowly descend and soak us both.

Minutes later it became a downpour right as I hooked and subsequently netted a foot long, male southern Appalachian brook trout. “By gawd son” were the last words out of his mouth as the lanky feller scrambled back up the ridge and was swallowed by the rhododendron that created an impassible wall above the creek. I packed up my fly rod and began planning the difficult, but rewarding route back to my car, parked off a forest service road 10 miles away. As the heavens opened up and the little stream began rising quickly, I smiled to myself for the final time that day.