Weminuche Wonders

Posted on August 6, 2012 by Alex Krebs
Back country brown trout

Backcountry brown trout – Dinner

You would be hard pressed to find many fly fishermen who hadn’t at least heard of John Gierach. I remember when I was nineteen years old and just discovering fly fishing (it is one of those things where “discovered” -past tense- would suggest you have figured it out, which no one has). During my first summer of fly fishing, when it took me two months to make my first catch, John Gierach was a hero. He was a hero because I could live vicariously through his experiences. I might not have been catching any fish, but John sure was, or at least he said he was.

There seems to be debate as to whether or not I moved to Colorado for the fly fishing (because of ole’ John himself) or because it was my girlfriend’s idea. Regardless, I can now live out my own glorious fly fishing experiences rather than reading someone elses. In fact, I can even write about my experiences so that I can live vicariously through myself; an endless loop of happiness. Someone probably should have told John to shut up, who knows how many more people flock to Colorado now just because of him? I wonder if fishing with John is as pleasant as I picture it being…

Beyond the confessions, I remain fishing by myself most days. I love to fish with other people, but all too often find myself with more drive than my partner or playing the role of the babysitter. I’m still trying to talk Emma into fishing, but what if that actually worked?

Emma and I recently went on a little backpacking voyage with the dogs. There is a lot of wilderness to explore from Durango and you would have to live two lives to see it all. Either that or be one of those crazy ass long distance runners -24 miles before noon, count me the fuck out!- You can count me in on these small streams though! I almost always bring my rod on backcountry outings in a frivolous effort to find virgin trout. It was on this most recent trip that I realized John probably did catch all of those backcountry fish after all. I also learned that you can actually catch fish on a stimulator pattern (which until now, was always the fly I never took seriously, in fact, I thought I was getting my leg pulled for the past 6 years. The “STIMULATOR” would make a better cologne or condom name, and besides that, I couldn’t tie them worth a damn at first). I am generally a catch and release guy, but when it comes to overnight backcountry trips, eating a fish for dinner can really be a treat.

I remember my first self-planned backpacking trip into the Smoky Mountains with a good college friend. We were going to hike 50 miles, carrying waders and eating fish and couscous along the way. Words of wisdom: 1) Never be sure of catching fish 2) Especially where you have never been 3) NEVER bring plain couscous as your only backup. I may not have lost a friend on this trip, but I sure deserved it. One thing is certain, I’ll never eat couscous again in my life.

Things have changed slightly since that misadventure, for one I have graduated to a yellow belt in the martial art of fly fishing, and two; There are actually fish in these small streams big enough to eat (if you don’t catch them or see them, they simply don’t exist). My girlfriend and I were camping 6 miles deep somewhere in the Weminuche Wilderness area (where?). The first pool I cast into was right next to the campsite, which generally means no fish, that prenotion couldn’t have been more wrong. I caught and missed a few good sized wild browns, all on a stimulator pattern. Moving up I caught wild rainbows and the high of my life as I realized my dreams coming true. Sometimes the universe just seems to align for us at specific moments and then like an eclipse is gone. Those are the moments we live for. Fishing was followed by a dinner of brown trout, a deer in the meadow, an elk in the timber, a black bear too close to the tent, and a snowshoe hare. It was as if they all thought I was building a giant fucking boat or something. And then my girlfriend and I got into one of those nothing arguments, sometimes my skill in saying the wrong thing at the wrong time impresses me, and the eclipse was over… until the next morning when I ate brown trout for breakfast.

Dog Pack

Packing in camp!

Posted in Fishing | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Pheasant Stew

Posted on December 3, 2011 by Alex Krebs
WIA Fields

My brittany in a WIA field.

When you buy a bird dog, a lot of things cross your mind before and after arrival of the new family member, among the more pleasant thoughts: birds. It might be more practical to think about the immediate months before you; those filled with booster shots, wet floors, chewed up hands, lack of sleep from having to go outside middle of the night, etc. I don’t have any kids (fortunately), but I imagine there are at least some similarities. I can definitely think of a few differences, like instead of vomit on your shoulder it is licks in your face. There is also the obvious benefit of being able to kennel a dog when you can’t watch them. Another difference; imagine a two month old baby that can run around and actually get into trouble, what would such a creature do with so much dexterity? Get a puppy and you’ll find out, better yet; get a Brittany pup.

After a year of training my dog and moving across the country, it became apparent that hunting for pheasant no longer had to remain a dream. Of all the game bird species, pheasant were somewhat difficult for me to really get into. Something about them screams human; the homogenous agro-business landscape and non-native game species combine to make an ecologist such as myself a little squeamish, but they are one hell of a game bird.

Even though I now live in Colorado, the drive to pheasant country was still a grueling one at eight hours, one way, for two days of hunting. I didn’t have a chance to do any scouting so I decided to register for a private land access event that got me into more than 50,000 acres of prime homogeneous CRAP (not to be confused with CRP, the good stuff). Do you know where your Kellogg’s cereal comes from? I do, it looks like a more sterile environment than a Petri dish filled with isopropyl alcohol. I wonder how many teenagers in the bread belt loose their minds in vast fields of corn or wheat after eating psychedelics … doesn’t sound fun. Either way, I was able to find some decent looking CRP lands next to some cut corn. I hunted the opening day of pheasant season primarily in these CRP lands and didn’t see a single bird. I could hear distant wars commencing as armies drove roosters out of large corn bunkers, but noticed most of the solo hunters and their dogs weren’t turning much up. That first day, I didn’t see a single pheasant!

On a hunch, the following day I went to a few WIA (Walk In Access) areas 25 miles south of my previous day’s hunt. With so many hunters around, I got up at three in the morning to be sure I was the first arrival at the field of choice. The chosen WIA area had a “river” running through it that I planned to hunt after walking the edge of cover next to some cut corn. When I got close to the so named river, the lack of noise struck me as most interesting. I figured a lot of things in Kansas (I was pretty much in Kansas, you get the picture), if not most, were different, and a silent river just seamed to fit. A dry sandy one however, is what I found. Filled with tumble weeds eye high, I tried anyways. After three hours had past since shooting hours began, and a drive team combed through the middle of the WIA, I decided to leave, discouraged and tired I walked back to my Subaru. Then, with my hands in my pockets and my dog goofing off, a rooster flushed right out from under my feet. I missed and then cried a little bit, hoping my dog wouldn’t notice, not that he noticed the pheasant… Good Work Team! Right after that I tried to find him for a second flush but didn’t see where he landed, mistake number two. My pointing dog gracefully flushed one tight sitting hen (He’s a pup I remind myself) and that was enough to keep me in the field. I crossed back over some cover that hadn’t been hunted yet and found a lot of roosting rooster sign, you know, sleeping cocks. Right around this area my dog caught scent of a bird and tore off, I knew what he was going to do, and after my GPS tracker lost signal at 350+ yards (so much for 7 miles of potential range, these dog collar companies love to exaggerate their length) I saw two pheasant gliding off in the distance (he’s just a pup I remind myself) before he gets back to me, I flush another pheasant, but couldn’t tell if it was a rooster or not. This time I saw where it landed and went in for a second flush with my dog, this bird knew what was going on though, and flushed wild at about 50 yards, so much for that one.

Opening days shouldn’t be like this, it must be a bad year. That is what I kept telling myself, and it turns out 2011 is a bad year for pheasant, reports of an 85% decline are floating around now that the first weeks of the season have passed, let’s hope for more rain next year!

In a failed effort to give up and call it quits (I drove way too far and thought about this trip way too much to give up empty handed). I found a couple of small patches of CRP and stray sunflower to hunt. The first patch was about an acre in size, and split half way down the middle by a dirt road. At the parking flat there were the remnants of a successful hunt; an assortment of rooster bits, about five in total. This is a great sign that birds were here, but a good indicator that there weren’t any more hanging around for the next hunter (escaping hunters is like an extreme sport for pheasant, some of them wear helmet cameras as they dash away from whizzing lead, but most of them prefer not to partake if possible). After working the first stretch of cover to no avail, I crossed the road and went into a super thick drainage. My dog couldn’t get in front of me in this stuff (or just didn’t feel like it, not sure he knew what we were doing the past two days, hunting or going on walks, we were both about to find out the answer to that). As I climbed out of the ditch after crisscrossing through, out pops a rooster. In disbelief I watched as the rooster jumped up and started running, Come to find out, I was also proceeding to shoot the rooster on the run, and before I new it I bagged my first pheasant! Unfortunately this one came without the help of my dog, but I let him find the dead bird and praised him as if it were the right kind of thing to put in your mouth.

While driving away from this first area to the other small strip of cover (this island actually had trees growing in it!) another hunter pulled in where I just hunted. As I would want someone to do for me; I told him I just finished hunting that cover. He decided to stay, and I know he didn’t get any roosters. The next strip of cover was on the opposite side of the cut corn field and I could still see this guy hunting the cover I just ran through. Now I was hunting a peninsula of thick native grasses that escaped from the neighboring CRP land, running out into the sea of cut corn. I had a gut feeling that no one had hunted this yet (it was hidden amongst the private land) and just knew there was at least one cock in it. I zigzagged through the peninsula starting at the wide end and working my way towards the tip where it not so gracefully transformed into corn sea. As I neared the tip, my dog got this look in his eyes and went for the goods. Unfortunately, he did not put up a point, but pheasant are hard for young dogs, and for all I know this rooster flushed wild. Lucky for me, I had unknowingly put myself in between the bird and his path to better cover (the large, private CRP field behind me had ideal vegetation). This was a big rooster, and he flew right along my field of view so that his body was positioned lengthwise towards me, perfect. That rooster had a 21” tail and half inch spurs.

I’m not sure if you could say my dog helped me on this hunt, but I can say it wouldn’t have been worth going alone, and I think he and I both learned a thing or two about hunting pheasant. I would rather shoot one bird that my dog pointed than shoot a limit that he flushed, but that’s just part of the growing experience! This spring and summer, I hope to have pigeons that I can use to train him on, come next fall we will be a little more prepared and might even get enough training in to do some waterfowl retrieving!

First Pheasant!

First Pheasant!

Posted in Hunting | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Another First

Posted on September 8, 2011 by Alex Krebs

My Brittany’s first grouse!

Walking down a dusty ridge road in Southwestern Colorado with my dog and two grouse on my back, I realized it was all worth while. Easier than I had expected, owning a bird dog paid off. Its not everyday a twenty-two year old longhaired freaky person apply for a gun dog, but it happened to me and I’m pretty damn thrilled about it here a year later.

I had purchased a Brittany thinking I would be hunting the limited ruffed grouse populations in North Carolina, but knowing someday I was going to move somewhere a little better for the sport. Well someday ended up being only seven months and now here I am in Colorado. It’s interesting to look back a few years and see how your dreams have materialized, if you can’t do that now, I hope you can at some point soon.

A year of working a new bird dog pup with no land, limited funds, and sparse bird work is worth its own blog entry, so I’ll spare you all the good stuff and jump to the point. The job I moved out here for was temporary and involved me working on a ranch. Half the time I was there, my workplace was at 9000+ feet in elevation, outside of De Beque, Colorado. This was ranch and BLM land, but the roads into it were all private. No one goes to a ranch to hunt blue grouse, and the habitat was perfect. I was mapping aspen stands and fifty percent of the time I was mapping, I was on the ridge top edge; perfect grouse habitat. I was able to have my dog in the field with me, so we got a lot of grouse exposure, but at the same time I was working my job and not my dog.

Fiddle (my dog) didn’t point but maybe one or two grouse all summer, and we easily saw more than fifty birds. Regardless I kept my confidence that the opening weekend of blue grouse was going to be successful, even though I was no longer at the ranch and expected to see a lot less birds.

The golden rule with a new pointer is that you Do Not Shoot a bird that he Didn’t Point! If you know a lot about grouse hunting, then you understand the frustration of not shooting a flushed grouse. If you do not know a lot about grouse hunting, ask yourself how often you see grouse while hiking the woods. A day spent looking for grouse only to see your dog forty yards away chasing them off is the same as spending a year working on something… only too hike the last mile and see the work fly away. Its part of the game though, and you keep your confidence because your dog needs it and this is a team. If you didn’t keep confident, you would quit and there is no quitting in bird hunting.

Hunting is one sport, even above fishing, that involves a good deal of detective work. You don’t pass opportunities to talk to the jackass that thought no one else would be on the road while he was off pre-baiting for martin. No, because you didn’t think anyone else would be on that road either! I got a lot of good information from that old timer. He used to hunt setters in this area, two pointers that led to my success of the weekend, and damned if that old man wasn’t nicer than hell to share them with me. I saw grouse in both places he told me to look, and the one that was a good hour and a half out on dirt roads was the ticket.

People of my generation, myself included, think they can figure anything out with the internet. Well the only problem with that is no one shares a treasure map and most old time grouse hunters don’t even think about the internet, so you won’t find them on your favorite gun dog forum. It may be a little easier out east, but not here. Here it’s different: this is the land of vastness after all. Get deep enough into the San Juan National Forest (which boarders other, equally vast expansions of national forests, wilderness areas, and BLM lands) and there you are! This is the kind of place where a second flat tire can leave you wishing for a shit creek paddle. God forbid you had to get towed out of here. If you have never had to patch a tire and resurrect it with a hand pump, you have no idea how much those damned cigarette lighter pumps are really worth, even if the motor does burn out after filling two tires!

Once I arrived to this “sweet spot” (which was referred to as “now that’s some good grouse hunting there”) I just about turned around. All the grouse I had seen were not in this kind of habitat (we aren’t talking the difference between tulip poplars and maples here). There were no aspen here and the ridge the road followed was composed mostly of gambles oak.

I drove the road to the fire tower and talked to the ranger who said it was a road generally known for its grouse hunting, but that she hadn’t really seen many this year. I decided to scoot back down and give it a second, closer look. I ran into two elk hunters and asked them if they had seen many grouse. They had seen two, and after miles and miles of hiking. Finally, I almost ran the game warden off the road while reading my gazetteer (a good way to make a decision is to kill yourself reading a map while driving) and we chatted for a moment, he told me to hunt the damn thing so I did. I will never regret that decision, and I almost passed it up, why?

Fifteen minutes into our hunt my dog went on point, I looked up and saw two grouse standing in the middle of the road. Finally a chance to shoot a bird while my dog was pointing (even if by sight). I had to run at the birds to get them to flush and when I took one down my dog went nuts, no hint of gun shy whatsoever. We must have seen six or more birds that day, and when we were walking back through some shorter gambles oak my dog pointed another bird. I walked in and this grouse game from the top of the ridge and glided down in front of me. So proud of my dog, this was a scent point!

In case you were wondering, grouse do taste like chicken…

"Grouse!"
Posted in Hunting | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Cutthroat Mesa

Posted on August 30, 2011 by Alex Krebs
"Grand Mesa"

Unforgettable campsite.

Changing careers and locations is becoming a lifestyle for many individuals in today’s economy. My experiences have shown me that regardless of how new to an area you might be, possibilities are abound. This is true even for those outdoorsmen who are just passing through. Finding the secret spot or learning the secret pattern can be frustrating and time consuming, but ultimately rewarding. Figuring it out yourself may also lead you to knowledge that will stump the long-term locals.

Before you can find the perfect pattern, you have to find the perfect place. Moving to a new state, let alone a new area, brings with it challenges of finding the local gems. You can look at a map and generally get an idea of what gets more human traffic based on the difficulty of access, but it really comes down to going there and finding out for yourself. When you find the perfect place, you often don’t realize how nice it is until you’re a few hours behind the wheel away. I have been in Colorado for a year now, and can easily recap my personal struggle with “figuring it out” at The Grand Mesa.

My first trip to The Mesa was rushed and filled with the awestruck excitement of all those accomplishments which mark a male’s progress through adolescence. This was going to be my first time fly fishing in Colorado. They say the average guy peaks in sex drive at the age of eighteen. I would argue that this is because of the new found glory of fly fishing. That would be a lie of course because the number of nineteen year old fly fishermen is just short of zero.

Either way, I was there, not sure exactly where, but at The Grand Mesa. I knew there was something better out there, but without a better map it would have been a shot in the dark (quite literally) to go any further and daylight was running low. I fished a lake with a nice gravel boat ramp, camping ground, and paved walkway around it. My introduction to fishing in Colorado could have been more picturesque and tranquil in an ephemeral pond on the side of a barn. Ok so it wasn’t that bad, and I even saw a weasel of sorts run along the bank and caught some rainbows.

The next go at The Mesa I had more time to spare and paced my fish drive as much as possible; not at all. I took my forester down a 4×4 road, through a stream set under some typical high elevation vegetation in the region (aspen trees and subalpine fir), and there I was, at The Grand Mesa. This time with three days to spare, my dog, my tent, my 6wt and 4wt rod, kayak, and fly tying equipment. I might have forgotten food to some extent, but when you’re in the zone, food seems to come second after coffee and whiskey.

When I first arrived, there were already trout rising. How big, what kind, and how many was indeterminable and beside the point. Trout rising are kind of like winning lottery tickets blowing by in a hurricane; yes, they exist, and yes you might catch one. I can sometimes fish all day long and finish with a bad taste in my mouth for the water I was on, only to see a lonely rise, instantly the place becomes a treasure. Each new stream brings with it a new chapter of entomology, geology and spirituality. The amount of text in each chapter is generally in direct correlation of the fish present / fish caught ratio.

This seemingly exclusive lake at The Grand Mesa offered much more than I could have imagined. I fished rising trout on still water for 12 hours before I really nailed the hatch. No it wasn’t the callibaetis that were in the air like clouds of locust. It was the midges (chironomidae), largest I had ever seen. I went to work tying up some size sixteen black adults, emergers, and pupae, all to no avail. Each time going back to my car and then rushing back into my kayak. Finally under the observation that these guys spent a long time emerging, I got the pattern. After a day and a half of pounding the water and tying flies, combined with the occasional attempt to kayak with my dog, I nailed the hatch. Now I was catching fish left and right, each cruiser became a victim to my fly.

My success was eventually greeted with some typical high elevation weather and I called it the quits, I had solved a puzzle and that was better than catching any number of fish. With desire satiated, I retreated back to the dog and the campsite for whiskey and a storm show. This is where I learned why they called cutthroats cutthroats. Did you know it actually looks like their throats have been cut? Actually now that I think of it, all the species of trout I know have the most obvious names.

Posted in Fishing | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Fly Down Talk

Posted on August 13, 2011 by Alex Krebs
Eastern Turkey

A beautiful foggy morning!

It was exactly how I had dreamed, which rarely happens. Days spent drifting off in the preseason, debating my setup locations and going through the works, obviously with successful images of calling in a large tom taunting me. Many would argue that I am one of an obsessive personality. My response would be that it’s not an argument but an accepted fact. Aside from that, my obsessions seem to pay off eventually.

I have spent my own fair share of time trying to forget about time and live in the moment, mostly when I’m down and in a rut. But maybe I’m so obsessed with the things I enjoy because they bring me back to an even more primal comfort than the thought of timelessness can offer; true timelessness.

Perhaps my daydreams of calling in big toms or my reminiscing on the challenges and successes of previous ventures distract me from the pangs of being so momentarily detached. Why should I be here now and hard at work? I’d rather be under a tree listening to gobblers on their roost, or not listening to them for the matter that they may not be there… at least I am.

Daydreams are generally deceiving, and by our own faults. It’s always nice to paint yourself a pretty picture just so long as you don’t end up with jewels in your eyes. How often do you accurately preconceive a foreign place just by description? How often do you find yourself in the discovery of success just as you had pictured? Not so often. For those who would debate the spiritualqualia of hunting, the transcendent moments of success, failure, or timelessness that the rest of us experience just seem too important to be selfishly hoarded. However the moment passes and we realize that it is something which cannot be shared. Even in the presence of our kin, the qualia will become lost in perception and translation, it’s ours forever but only for a moment. We can go about recounting the experience with those that were with us, but our experience is just that; ours.

It’s not a complete loss to tell the story of a hunt. If anything else it gives others something to dream about doing while at work, and writing it down helps me remember, as if I’d ever forget my first turkey.

Now that I live in Colorado, thinking about those spring mornings in that private holler in the high Southern Appalachians wrenches a tear. The culture of those mountain communities resonates throughout the granite bedrock and up through the leafing oaks and tulip poplars. It’s almost as if I can flip a switch in my head and be back there in those hills on that morning I harvested my first turkey.

The debris of the forest drenched with fog shed their dew onto my boots as I walk through the darkness up to the knob of a ridge along a barbed wire fence. My headlamp hits the fog like a whitewall. I setup on the edge of a grassy corridor through the red oaks and buckeyes, not far from a large field. Aware of the previous day’s rain, I’m hoping for more limb talk within a reasonable distance from my setup, if only for the nearby fields they were gossiping in the day before, basking in the precipitation.

The yin and yang of beauty in these mountains is a beautiful thing to witness on a foggy morning, many times I have been socked in on the peak of a mountain only to miss the beauty of it all. Maybe that is why it kept happening to me, something wanted appreciation and it wasn’t the sky or the next mountain peak. Sitting there then, I noticed the beauty of my daydreams come to reality. The gray, often dreary fog was now beautiful in its role of springtime. The mayapples quivering with the chill of each dewdrop falling from the trees above, the spring beauties were whiter than ever in the blue morning smoke (kind of like a white dog running in the snow; you only thought he was white) and the variety of songbirds treating me as though I were unnoticed. Then it happened.

The sound penetrated the fog and cut through the silence, all of the sudden there was a tunnel of excitement blocking out all other perceived senses; a gobble, not 150 yards away. Time slowed down as my heart raced, and then I realized, I’m in a bad setup for this bird.

At this point, my tunneled concentration melts back into the morning and I am immersed into this experience. Was I the missing puzzle piece or was the turkey? I’ll never know, but for that moment the puzzle was complete.

I changed my setup to face the other direction on a tree that was big enough, or so I hoped. The best thing I could find without crossing the fence and making too much noise had my movement restricted to aiming only at my left. I gave three tree yelps…gobble. I waited for five minutes or so and gobble, he was still on the limb, not that I expected anything else. I waited. I gave a few calm clucks… gobble. He was off the limb and getting closer, my heart pounded and seemed to reverberate through the tulip I was set up on and shake free some dangling dew tears. Then I hear her, another hen, another one, not me but someone else. She’s off in the other holler beyond the oaks and on the other side of the fence… gobble. HE was on the other side of the fence, hopefully circling around to get to me. Aware of my obstacles to my right, I had to move, but he was so close, maybe 100 yards. It was my only choice. I squeeze over the fence, getting snagged on my baggy camo and making a lot of noise. Setting up under a perfect tree I let things rest a bit.

By now the fog had lightened up and draped over a snagged log at about 50 yards away. The lichen on the trees grow heavy on this moist ridge and the green-gray of nature’s paisley added something indescribable to this setting. I let out a couple of purrs to let tom know everything was ok, and that I was still here. After some time he let out a gobble on his own accord and was getting closer, coming in to the hen of choice, AKA me. I let out three excited yelps… GOBBBLE.

Those were the last calls I would make that morning. I knew tom was coming in to me and so I just waited. The time went slow and my heart beat fast, but then, coming out of the fog over the fallen log about 50 yards away from me he peered his blue and red head. He hopped off of the log and took the grass corridor, maintained by grazing cattle, another 10 yards in. He stopped, strutted for another 5 yards, and came in closer, this time ducking behind some trees long enough for me to prepare myself for a shot. Tom strutted once more and came out of the trees, let down his feathers and reached his head up for one last time.

Just as I had dreamed.

Posted in Hunting | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment