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Towing

Spent the day at Camping World getting the Jeep rigged to tow.
We took the bicycles, dropped off the motorhome and the Jeep, then rode to a motorhome dealer to sit in a Bounder and talk about it for awhile.

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Yellowstone03

Christie and Ken left. Judy and I stayed and fished some more. Pebble Creek was still running about the color of coffee. A different afternoon storm blew out Slough for a few days, so that was out. We fished Soda Butte upstream of the confluence with Pebble. Soda Butte is getting pretty small at that point, so we didn’t expect much in the way of fish size. We were very wrong. Back to fifteen inch fish and more. From up on the bank, I hooked one cutthroat from the tail of the opaque fast water rushing into a small pool. I set the hook. He dropped back into the pool below me to consider the situation. I could see him clearly as he hung there and shook his head a couple times. I wasn’t applying any real pressure, I was just keeping the line tight until we each decided what to do next. When I saw this fish, I knew there was no way I would land him. I was looking down at an underwater locomotive. The head shakes convinced him this was a situation he needed to resolve, so he bolted back into the current, blew back up the stream, and snapped the line like it was nothing. I understand those little tiny hooks dissolve and fall out within just a few days, so we shouldn’t have done him any damage. But watch out next year. I know right where I’m going to fish. I’ll tie on tougher gear too. This would be a great fish to catch. Judy and I moved to Indian Creek. We fished. More brookies. We were fishing at the pool at the confluence of the Gardiner and Obsidian when the noisy family from Wisconsin showed up. Judy moved on right away, fishing her way up the Gardiner. I was catching fish. I stayed a little longer. The Dad was annoying. He was doing lots of instructing. Mom was quiet. The two little kids were stuck with Dad. The teenager was different. He kept apart from the rest of them, and was quietly going about his business, trying to figure out how to catch a fish. They didn’t know where to fish or what to fish with, so they were catching nothing. I got to chatting with the teenager. He had never seen anything like the place we were standing in. He was awestruck. But he wasn’t catching any fish. He let me tie on a local fly for him, coach him a little, and give him my spot. I waited until he landed his first fish before I moved on upstream with Judy. We left Indian Creek, bound for West Yellowstone, back to Grizzly. Judy, Annie, and I floated the Madison with Rick on Friday. We did well. I now have electric stabilizing jacks. I was disappointed, when we first got Shamu, to find out that the leveling system consisted of manual stabilizing jacks. You have to go around to each one and raise or lower it with a hand crank. It is a slow proposition with a lot of cranking. It’s tough on my back. Well I fixed that. I bought a very strong cordless electric drill, with a ten inch extension and a three quarter inch socket. I still have to go around to each stabilizer to raise and lower it, but it takes only a few moments at each one. No back strain. The drill is strong enough, that I can do a significant amount of leveling as well. A great solution. Judy and I had one of those magic moments fishing. We had been focused on fish and water for hours, when we looked up to see the two thousand pound bull bison grazing peacefully, tail quietly flicking, a few yards from us on the other side of the stream. This is a stream that is all of eight feet wide at that point. We continued on our fishing way. He continued on his grazing way. I kept a close eye on that quietly flicking tail for any indication he was anything other than completely contented. Except for that guy in Carbondale, I thought I was “solar man”. Not so. The camp host at Pebble has us bested. We have two fifty-watt panels on our roof. We’re good for water and electricity for about a week. By then we’re getting pretty low. Ray, the camp host has two seventy-five watt panels on his roof. He has fifty percent more power than we do. He stays out for four months. If you’re doing it, you may as well go big. I checked at Camping World later, and now they offer one hundred fifty watt panels. I haven’t joined the big leagues yet. We drove back and forth through the Park. We got caught in a big moose jam as traffic stopped to see him. We didn’t get any bear jams. We got bison jams, elk jams, coyote jams, pronghorn jams, deer jams, and believe it or not, a great blue heron jam. A guy had a tripod set up on the side of the road with a long lens to capture a good shot of a heron standing in the water on the other side of a small lake. Six cars locked it up to stop to see what he was looking at. We saw bald eagles and osprey flying by with fish. We saw a mixed herd of bison and pronghorn. We got to hear immature horned owls with raspy squeaking calls at night at Pebble. We saw Christie’s trumpeter swans on the Madison inside the Park. I have a favorite trail to run outside the Pebble Creek campground. It is a little too steep, but it is a great lonely trail that runs north into the Beartooth wilderness area. I run as much as I can, alternating between running and walking as I have to, until I start to get tired. About a mile and a half is all the farther in I get. Then I do the easy cruise back downhill to the campground. One day Judy and I were sitting on the bridge over Pebble creek and got to visiting with two kids who were just coming down off the trail. They had encountered an adult grizzly bear while they were hiking out, right on the trail, within two miles of the campground. The grizzly bear left the trail and they got to hike the rest of the way out, unmolested. I thought of myself running alone along that trail, nothing but shorts and shoes. Not even a can of pepper spray. I decided I’d rather run on the road the next day. On the way home, we stopped at another desert lake park. We camped with the pelicans and pronghorns. For two weeks, I got to fish every day. Some days we caught a lot of fish. Some days we barely caught any. But, again, thanks to Brian that one day, we never got skunked. Judy fished great. She started her flyfishing career later than I did, so she hasn’t had nearly as much practice as I have. The whole time Judy was there, she fished even with me. She caught as many fish, and as big fish as I did. The big brook trout of the trip was nine inches. The big rainbow was seventeen. The big cutthroat was nineteen. The big brown trout was probably six inches. And one mountain whitefish. It was a good trip. Except I didn’t get enough fishing.
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Yellowstone02

Bill and I stayed at Grizzly RV Park in West Yellowstone and went on a float trip with Rick the guide on the Madison River. Bill, the trout hoover, sucked up all the good fish before they even got to me. I caught some, but nothing like all those beautiful rainbows he caught. Next day, we moved on to Indian Creek campground in the middle of the northern part of Yellowstone, about an hour from West Yellowstone. This is brook trout territory. We fished the Gardiner, Obsidian, and Indian creek. We caught and released hundreds of little fish. Nothing bigger than about eight inches. We had so much fun there, we stayed and fished all the next day too. After that, we moved on to Pebble Creek campground and fished Soda Butte creek. Yellowstone Cutthroat territory. Good fishing. Beautiful scenery. Caught fish up to about fifteen inches long there. Friday, Bill left for home, and Judy showed up. We fished some more. We stayed at Pebble fishing every day. OK. Let’s back up to the beginning of this trip. Becky and Brian and family left to go camping in Yellowstone the day before I left for this trip. This whole time, they have been ensconced at the Madison Junction campground seeing how dirty their kids could get. They did well. A Ranger even told Tony he had won the “Dirtiest Kid in the Park” competition. Next, Christie and Ken drove down from Washington and met up with Becky and Brian. They all camped together at Madison Junction. On Saturday, Becky and Brian and the kids, and Christie and Ken and the kids moved over to the Pebble Creek campground with us. The kids played in the creek. The guys fished. Judy had volunteered ahead of time to cook a big campfire stew while everybody was there. On the day they all arrived, the Park declared a total fire ban. So the campfire stew got cooked on the stove in Shamu. Then the thunderstorm hit. Of course the fishermen were pretty far out in the meadow when the rain started. The rain didn’t matter much, but we paid attention and got out of the water when the lightning started. When the wind hit, we were already headed back toward the campground. When the hail hit, we found a gully to hide in. Hiding behind the bank of a gully worked for a while, but as the wind shifted, we lost any advantage there, so we headed across the field again. The weather can change from very hot to very cold and wet in a hurry. Judy brought the car out as close to us as she could, but by the time we got to the nearest road, it didn’t make much difference anymore. One of us actually got in the car for the remainder. Two of us declared it unmanly to accept a ride and walked the rest of the way back in the rain. So back at the motorhome, we had campfire stew on the stove, three very wet fishermen each getting into something drier, and all the kids moms and wives, inside out of the rain as well. We now know that eleven people can fit inside Shamu and eat dinner. It can be a little loud with five kids all having fun or conversations or both, all at once, but a good time overall. The rainstorm that night blew out Pebble Creek, which flowed chocolate colored mud down to Soda Butte and blew that out. Soda Butte ran down to the Lamar and blew that as well. The next day, Brian, Ken and I went fishing again. We went far enough downstream on the Lamar that is was still running pretty clear. The fishing wasn’t very good that day, but thanks to Brian, we didn’t get skunked. Becky and Brian left for home. Christie and Ken stayed another day. All the local streams were still blown, so Ken and I drove over to Slough creek. It was running clear. Slough is an unusual creek. It is slow and deep as it winds through an open meadow. We fished our way down it and raised a few fish. It is a pleasure to watch Ken fish. He is so thoughtful, focused, and patient. And he has reflexes too. He hooks a lot of fish. The really unusual thing about Slough is that one bank is always higher than the other, and you can walk the high banks, scanning the pools for large fish lurking in the clear water of the deep pools. Sight fishing. You can go find a fish, creep along the bank through the grass and bushes to a spot upstream, and cast a fly that will drift back down to him. As it does, you can watch the fish to see how he reacts to it, rising out of his deep water to come to the surface and inspect it, refusing it, reconsidering….. It is agonizing fishing. But Ken did it. He tried one fly. Lost it. Got the lunker to come to the surface for the tiniest fly he had in his arsenal. The fish refused it, reconsidered, refused it again, then turned around and bit it. Well handled. An extended battle. A sixteen inch rainbow. That was the fish-of-the-day.