Sometime in late October Donnie and I realized that we had several days in a row free.. Considering how often THAT happens, we quickly got some food together and hooked the camper up and headed to Arkansas to fly fish on the White River for a few days.
The drive over was beautiful, as we entered the Ozark mountains we were treated to the full flush of fall... Oranges, Reds, Yellows, Greens... all in their full natural glory. The sky was so blue.. the weather was perfect....
The river was slow, no generation during the day.... of course I could go into the whole "minimum flow" thing here and bitch about Trout habitats, power companies and how exactly they wield their power.... but really and truly it comes down to you and me and our ridiculous consumption of power and our lack of empathy for the environment... But I wont go into all of that here...
So back to the river, slow, clear, and trout everywhere. The fishing was good and I caught several nice Rainbows. No trophy Browns this time as the Brown trout were busy in their "Redds" making baby Browns. This was the first time I had ever seen a fish nesting and to tell you the truth it didn't look very cozy, like what you think a nest would be. Ice cold, shallow, fast-running water is where they chose to be, in a bend in the river that was so shallow their backs were out of the river glistening in the sun while they scraped the river bottom with their bellies making oval shaped dents in the rock. You could tell exactly where the fish had each nest because the algae was gone from the rocks... that and fish bigger than footballs were in each one. It was quite a sight!
Donnie and I had a really good time in our camper on the river... The weather turned pretty cold during our stay (down into the 20's) so we would fish the morning, come eat a hot lunch and warm up and then go back out until dark and fish again. Of course, being in the mountains means dark comes early so we would hike back and eat something else yummy and hide in our nest.
We had so much fun. Donnie tied flies... We played Go FLYFISH (who gave those to Donnie? We can't remember but we had so much fun playing that... after a few nights of that I could properly identify and explain several new flies when we were at the fly shop, so thanks!) We snuggled, watched a few movies, I read lots of Brautigan to Donnie from "Trout Fishing in America" of course and we generally had a really good time hiding from the world.
Looking back on the timing of that trip I am so thankful we took the time to do it.. it of course is fantastic practice for our retirement career of travelling the country, camper in tow, and having extended stays at trout rivers while pretending to be camp hosts...I think that's the greatest idea in the world... to host at trout camps and get paid to do it... of course the other part of that whole deal is most of those places have short stays...unless your working!
Top picks for me include: Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, Washington State, Oregon... of the list goes on and on. After the kids are out of High school good luck finding me is all I can say. I'm going to have long grey hair (dreaded of course) wear way too much Turquoise and write about fly fishing and the environment.. and maybe how one could just possibly save the other.
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