Woods Wanderer

Several times during the past month, I have gone into the mountains to fish small streams for wild trout. That’s what I usually do whenever I pull out my fly rod. But yesterday I did something different – something I haven’t done in years. I stayed in the lowlands and plied the relatively big water of the Missisquoi River instead, up near the Canadian border.

Shortly after leaving the muddy bank and wet wading into the murky waters of the slow-moving river, I hooked into a brown trout. An Adams fly did the trick. Then I tangled with the trout’s wily kin, missing most of them. Caught and landed another brown before too long, then watched daylight give way to twilight while being outsmarted by the rest. Good fun. But I must admit that I felt a little out of my element.

Yeah, yeah, I know how to read the river, match the hatch, and do that 10/2 cast made famous by A River Runs Through It. But that’s not my style. Not really. I’m more of a crawl-through-the-rocks kind of guy, more accustomed to crouching low and side-casting, usually on my knees, into a pool of clear, cold water only ten or fifteen feet away. Pagan fishing, I call it, because fishing for brookies in mountain streams is all about stalking the trout, immersing oneself in the surrounding forest and going a little wild in the process.

Unlike most fishermen, I prefer small water to big water. I prefer the diminutive brook trout to the larger brown or rainbow trout. That said, it sure is a lot of fun to work a foot-long fighter to the riverbank. A brookie will fight like hell, but they are usually not more than 8 or 9 inches, so my rod never bends over much.

So there it is. Soon I’ll go a-fishing again, returning to my natural habitat up in the heavily forested mountains, scrambling over rocks on a clear, fast-moving stream. But when the urge to play with the big guys strikes, I’ll be back on the wide river. It’s all a matter of priorities, I suppose.

Tags: fly fishing, rivers, small stream fishing, trout fishing

In 1990, I published a slender, olive green paperback called Tracks across the Forest Floor. It was my first attempt to write a nonfiction narrative about one of my ventures into the woods. Tracks went out of print a long time ago, but I included it in a set of six hiking narratives called Backcountry Excursions, released in 2005. That book has been nearly out of print for several years now. Well, in celebration of the 30th anniversary of Tracks, I have reprinted Backcountry with a new cover and preface. And a few fixed typos to boot.

Three of the narratives in this collection appear in other collections of mine, namely Loon Wisdom and The Great Wild Silence. Tracks and the remaining two can be found nowhere else. Just as important as Tracks, I think, is the 25-page narrative about a trip into northern Maine that I took in ’96 with my buddy Charlie, following Thoreau to Mt. Katahdin by water and land. We used a two-man sea kayak instead of a bateau and ended up hiking a different path up the mountain, but it was great fun all the same. And it gave me a reason to recount one of Thoreau’s excursions into the Maine Woods.

The real reason for reprinting this book is simply to keep it in print. Backcountry Excursions is now available at Amazon.com as well as the Wood Thrush Books website. Most of my readers are already familiar with this book, but now it’s out there for everyone to see how I got started, and what kind of critter I really am.

Tags: Adirondacks, backpacking, Green Mountains, hiking narratives, Maine woods, nature, White Mountains, wilderness travel

The news is all bad, especially now with the pandemic raging. Judy and I felt it was high time for us to spend a couple days in the woods away from it all. So we packed up our gear and headed for the Breadloaf Wilderness when finally there came a break in the weather, between heat waves and t-storms.

A few weeks ago I scouted the headwaters of the New Haven River, looking for a good place to camp. I found the spot just inside the Breadloaf Wilderness boundary where Judy and I had camped once with our granddaughter Kaylee. That’s where we landed.

Kaylee was 6 the last time we camped here. Now she’s 23. Time flies.

Judy sat on a large rock, taking in the sights and sounds of the wild forest. I sat nearby, writing in my journal. The stream flowed incessantly before us. A squirrel ran across a fallen tree bridging the stream. The sun sank behind the trees before we started dinner. Soon we were staring into a campfire, surrounded by darkness. Where did the day go?

We went to sleep to the sound of rushing water. A little later I awoke to that and the song of a waterthrush. While sitting on the big rock in predawn light, I watched another squirrel run across the fallen tree bridging the stream. I recalled camping farther upstream with my brother Greg back in the 90s, and remembered a dozen other outings in this wilderness area since then, by myself or with others. Time flies.

When Judy arose, I fixed her a cup of hot tea. She had a rough night. Sleeping on the ground is a lot harder for us 60-somethings than it used to be. So late morning we packed up and hiked out instead of staying another day.

On the way out, I recognized a patch of ground beneath a copse of full-grown maples that had been a clearing when I first hiked through here. That was back in the 80s. Seems like a lifetime ago. Yes indeed, time flies.

Tags: backpacking, Breadloaf Wilderness, camping, mountain stream, the passage of time