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The 2009 Trout Season
Opener
Five of us just returned yesterday from our 23rd annual
trout season opening day visit to Camp F-Troop.
Fly-fishers Gary and Brett Peterson, and bait-slingers
Todd Puleo, Brad Isles and I enjoyed a sunny, warm,
rejuvenating weekend up in the mountains.
Long ago we gave up the habit of wrestling the crowds
around the big pools under stocked trout stream bridges
on opening day for the carefree and liberating practice
of wandering fisherman-free wild trout streams deep in
the forest.
We slept in until 9:00 o’clock and then sat around for
an hour and a half munching bagels, sipping hot coffee,
and sharing laughs, stories, and fishermen’s lies.
Sometime after 10:30, we crammed our backpack coolers
with lunches and cold beverages, grabbed our fishing
gear, and headed out in two vehicles.
Leaving Brett’s Subaru down by the bridge where Redtail
Run pours into the Allegheny, we piled into Todd’s SUV
and drove to the top of the mountain. From there we
hiked in on an old Game Commission fire trail past the
twisting grapevines, dense mountain laurel thickets, and
cool white pine and hemlock groves that constitute
good-looking habitat for ruffed grouse and wild turkeys
and then clambered down the steep slope into the hollow
where the south branch of Redtail flows west to east two
miles upstream from the river.
Todd caught the first fish, a fine and colorful wild
native brook trout beauty, and I caught the second, a
smaller replica of the first. We didn’t catch many,
though, because the water temperatures under 50 degrees
made the fish sluggish and the feeding slow.
But we didn’t care. We hiked and fished and hiked and
fished downstream, temporarily careless of the world,
with sunshine streaming through the boughs above our
heads, down to the confluence of the north and south
branches, where two small waterfalls drop into the deep
green pool that marks the beginning of Redtail Run
proper. A sandy beach there leads up to a rocky
shoreline under the dark shading hemlocks, and a huge
fallen log lies parallel to the stream. We settled onto
the log, opened our packs, and shared lunch and leisure
deep in the calm and healing forest. Lunch locations and
life destinations don’t get much better than that.
Good luck out there. And have a great week outdoors.
~ Don Feigert, 4-20-09
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