Part 3
Day 2 is when the snow hit.
We went to sleep the night before and knew we were in for a bit of snow, nothing much really ... until we awoke at about 1 AM with the tent roof resting about 1 foot above our faces! It was quite hilarious really, Jay was the first to notice this abnormality so he woke up and proceeded to remove the snow from the roof of the tent by pushing up. Josh, who was sleeping the closest to the wall that the snow fell to woke up convinced that a large animal was attacking him (which is a pretty normal response to a very weird noise just outside the tent)!
All in all, we woke up twice more that night to relieve the tent of snow strain. When morning hit we were most concerned about getting our cars out of camp (a solid 2 miles from a paved road).
After a lengthy morning of shuffling gear, getting breakfast and tying some flies we decided to fish Blacktail ponds for the morning, and then spend a bit of time on the Snake. The weather was pretty miserable, which had our hopes up for baetis.
Unfortunately, we arrived at Blacktail Ponds only to find the Cutthroat population was pretty decimated. What was the true cause we don't know, though later in the week we heard rumor from some others that the spring creek had been heavily poached (very sad day). All I know is that a 1/4 mile spring creek that usually holds 200 fish, was at best holding 25. We made the best of what we could, but the saddest factor of all was that the baetis were rolling off like some sort of odd "reverse rain" (see the video, just before the camera ducks underwater and you'll see the blanket of baetis). Had the fish numbers been there, we would have no doubt been in baetis heaven!
We had a couple of fish on, landed a few, then we decided to head downstream to the main current of the Snake River. The Snake turned out to be a good time, mostly catching smaller fish in the 12" range on dries.
All in all, I wouldn't consider the day a loss. With the morning's events it took us until about noon to get on the river, so we mostly decided to make a day of fishing and testing out the camera equipment to see what it could do. While the fishing may have been pretty poor, we did get to see Greg's Canon 5D Mark II camera do some pretty excellent performing with the underwater camera bag.
We also took advantage of the nasty weather, and Greg got some great arial shots of Jay casting at the end of the day.
© 2009 Greg M. Cooper
Gotta make lemonade out of lemons right?
-Jeff
