Life at the Lake

TOO EARLY FOR TROUT?

My small lowland lake

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Is it too early to think about trout? Water too cold to catch one?
This was the nature of my thinking about a week ago. I took the temperature on Thursday and found it to be 44 degrees F.

Nearly a year ago, on March 6 (my dead Father's birthday), it just happened to be, I put out a bait off my dock and caught a nice rainbow. I didn't take the temperature, that day. Suffice it for me that the trout consented to hit, get played out, and be set free. The season had begun.

This year, February 20, I bothered to take the temperature first. Nice day, with a warm sun beating lightly down, the water temp was about what I had guessed it to be. And I was rewarded in my impetuousness by a fine 11-inch rainbow. It didn't fight much, though. Too cold an environment, I guess.

It is my practice to catch one fish, then quit for the day. (Unless there are special circumstances, you understand, and often there are.) Next day, and a bit longer wait, another trout of about the same size. And the following day another—this one a good fighter, a couple of inches longer, and a jumper. (They don't call them rainbows for nothing.) The fourth day, another, bigger one yet and no sluggard.

Yesterday was so windy, the lake laced with whitecaps, I did not fish. I am due for some failures and did not want that windlapped lake to so easily provide me with one.


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SNOW GEESE

A field of snows

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Yesterday, on our morning two-mile walk with the dogs, we heard a tremendous chattering—almost a roar. Its source was out of sight, but we instantly recognized it as coming from a huge flock of snow geese, perhaps several thousand.

We looked to the sky, but it was empty of all except for a few wispy clouds. The roar continued. It came from the fields along Pioneer Highway, which are adjacent to the mouth of the South Fork of the Skagit river and comprise a vast delta. So we had to use our imaginations.

Last year about this time, when the big migration to the North was underway, the sky was filled with the geese. Too many to count. This year we waited for them to take wing and finally gave up waiting and continued on with our walk.

Later, Norma drove into Mt. Vernon for some shopping and saw many cars pulled off onto the shoulder, many people from them wielding binoculars and spotting scopes. Cameras, too.

They were watching the fields clotted with snows. Aptly named, they will be gone in a few days, and the fields and skies will be barren again.

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MORE ON THE BIG LANDSLIDE

Selected portion of the picture shown in Blog 272. Note the trees (alders) sloughing down the bank from the sandy area near the top. This will continue, up and down the slide, until bedrock is reached—perhaps miles to the Northwest

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Originally—long before any living body's memory—the slide was less than half this size. Now it is twenty or thirty times this big. What happened? Well, it was a gradual unraveling, caused by water leeching over the top of the hillside—where unstable soils in the form of blue clay and sand deposits from the time of the receding glaciers—provided an ideal situation for massive earth-wasting events, commonly called landslides. And of course winter floods added to the likelihood of a major slide.

In the mid-Sixties, a dedicated year-round steelhead fisher, my partner and I headed for the Oso water on a mild Saturday morning. We crossed the bridge at Cicero and saw the river was very low—at mid-summer level. Odd, that.

We thought no more about it until informed later of what had happened. A huge landslide had taken place at Steelhead Haven, near Hazel, and the river had been blocked for minutes or a few hours. Then the dammed river's force hand broken through the earthen barrier and the river had formed a new channel to the South, tearing up some small summer cabins and shacks, and leaving some of them unreachable on the North side of the river.

Much debris came drifting down the river while Ed and I tried to fish it, amid the increasing gray of the water. Finally we quit. Later we read in the Seattle papers about the slide and, next day, or next weekend (I don't remember which) we drove to within a long walk of the river, and there we privately viewed the devastation.

What a mess. Only that "mess" was to increase many times over the coming four decades.

Other causes contributed, too. Gradually some of the river's five species of salmon and early and late runs of winter steelhead became greatly diminished. Hit particularly hard were the vital summer Chinook salmon. These were important to both commercial white and tribal fishers. But they were vital to the health of the river itself.



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