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Showing posts from September, 2020

Hope Springs Eternal

From this photo always speaks to having hope.  It's from the Isle of Skye from a trip Bobbie and I took in 2017, when people could travel.  It was from a hole in a rock wall ruin of a house that this single, small strawberry grew and produced a single berry.  Yikes, I though that sometimes I was having a hard time (COVID all around and all and the current GOV), this plant has lived in a harsh environment and succeed in producing a berry.   Way to go. These times are the toughest that I ever remember occurring in my lifetime.  The government is headed by a gangster, thug (take your pick) and has led to people dying (by their lies and inaction) and at the same time removing the medical and financial safety nets for times like this.  History will not be kind to what is happening. People are resilient, but there are many that will not recover to what existed before.  The historians in the future will categorize this administration with that of Franco, Mussolini and Hitler.  We now know

Fly Fishing For Native Trout (in the east anyway)

In the Mountain west there are a lot of areas with native wild trout, but the east is a bit different.  The mountains are lower, the temps are warmer and the headwaters are much smaller.  We have native wild trout but this all results in them being much smaller.  Yeah, you can find bigger beasts hiding out in some deeper pools, but for now I'm focusing on the mainstream trout that are found in most of these areas. Let me set the scene for you.  The head waters range from about 2300' to 5000' hight.  There are no high mountain valleys as the mountains are old and worn down from millions of years of erosion.  The resulting topology is that of streams creased into a network of drainages scattered throughout the Appalachian range.  The streams are almost always at the bottom of these V shaped drainages with few flat spots for slow waters.  What you find instead are rounded boulders where silt has created pocket water pools spaced up the elevation gain and the banks covered with