Tenkara Bricolage: Long Overdue Catching Up!

After a long period of being solidly placed on the back burner, here's a short blog post to catch up a bit!

Each year I try to get out into the canyons either in late fall, or early spring, for a multi-day cold weather backpack trip.   During Thanksgiving break last year, I found a window of relatively mild (highs in the 40s and lows around 20) weather.  It ended up being a four-day solo backpack trip to one of my favorite spots in the canyons, and it was filled with peace, solitude, and hungry trout!  These kinds of trips really recharge my batteries and clear my head!

Out in the canyons with my Kifaru KU3700, packed full.

Long shadows fall early this time of year!

Standing beside my Kifaru Sawtooth, the best cold weather solo shelter in the world!

Camp.

Looking downstream toward my camp, a mile away.

Cooking up a hot cup of kasha for lunch.

One of dozens of late fall browns.

Early spring 2018 rolled around, and on February 24th the weather turned warm.  My frequent partner in the backcountry, Shawn Larson, joined me for a full day deep in the canyons.  It was an amazingly productive day, with hungry browns eating BWO emergers and midge patterns on lightly weighted nymph rigs, cast with a prototype of my weight-forward tenkara nymphing line.  This was actually the first day of fishing of 2018, and we had a blast!

Shawn, testing icy water.

Fishing one of dozens of bend pools.

A welcome patch of sunshine!

A face only a mother could love.  His, not mine!

Side by side Kifaru 14'r packs.  Mine is the Ranger green on the left, Shawn's is the coyote brown on the right.

Whipping up a pot full of potato soup, using my Bushbuddy stove.  This is the original Fritz Handel design, and this one was handmade for me by Fritz' successor, Jeff Tinker, in Alaska.

This is what it's all about!

Each guide season I end up saying "that was the busiest season yet!", and this year was no exception!  I had a great time guiding both tenkara and western trips for Royal Gorge Anglers, and my seventh year as a tenkara guide was one of my best.  It seems only yesterday that I was starting out in 2012 as one of the first tenkara-specific professional guides in Colorado.  Things have come a long way since then, and I've learned a lot about the fly fishing industry in the past seven seasons!  

Here are a few highlights from my 2018 guide season.  I actually start my guide season in mid-spring and it usually goes into October.  Here are just a few photos taken during those trips.

Then there was that little side trip called ALASKA!  This was the third year I've hosted a group of clients to Intricate Bay Lodge through Royal Gorge Anglers, which is a one-of-a-kind fly-in lodge situated on the shore of Lake Iliamna, Alaska.  Each year I accompany up to 9 clients during the opening week of rainbow trout season.  This week-long trip is spent flying out in bush planes or jet-boating across the bay to remote destinations on the Copper, Kvichak, and Gibraltar Rivers.  This is a mixed-bag trip featuring both western and tenkara fly fishing for huge trophy rainbows, equally beautiful arctic graying, and once in a while we even catch a dolly varden or two.  The lodge accomodations are wonderful, the staff bombproof and talented, and the landscape and fish are simply stunning!  This year I took a great group to Alaska, some of which I knew previously, and a couple of new faces that I had the privilege of getting to know.  Spending the day with good friends, in the Last Frontier, sight fishing for huge rainbows, is an experience every fly angler should have!  I'll be hosting the next trip to Intricate Bay Lodge on June 8-15, 2019!

Intricate Bay Lodge

Our capable Cessna 206.

Up close and personal with a sow and twin cubs on the shore of Intricate Bay.

First cast of the day on the Middle Copper River.

The second year in a row the Kvichak River gifted me a 28" rainbow!

Good company in the raft on the Middle Copper!

Relaxing at midnight in the greatroom at the lodge.

My good friend, Jake, with a dandy rainbow.

Releasing a giant on the Kvichak River.

The view of the eastern end of the Aleutian Range.

Lastly, in early August, I took a break from guiding to join my good friends, Shawn Larson and Eric Lynn on an epic 50+ mile backpack and burro packing trip into the Wind River Range of western Wyoming.  I'll write a separate blog post very soon about that trip, which will undoubtedly morph into a longer magazine article, but for now here are a few photos from that trip.

Why I Kill Trout

A while back I posted an article on my blog entitled “Cañones de Invierno”, which was a trip report from the cañones this past December.  In that article, I talked about catching, killing, and eating brown and rainbow trout.  I posted photographs of trout sizzling in a pan on top of a wood stove, and of those browns and rainbows grilling on top of some scraps of iron on a pile of glowing coals in an open fire.  While reading Facebook posts today, I found one where my partner on that December cañon trip, Eric Lynn, explained when and why he and I kill trout in the backcountry.  Eric, thank you for your explanation!  I’d like to expound upon what you wrote.

Eric Lynn with a brace of brown trout, ready for the pan.

I kill trout and eat them.  However, there are self-imposed limits to this, and more often than not, I strictly adhere to a catch-and-release ethic.  When, where, and why I kill trout is dependent on a number of factors.  I have chosen to live a disciplined life on many levels, and my tenkara is no different.

First, I never keep fish unless I’m backpacking, period.  I’m not quite sure why it bothers me to do otherwise, but there’s something about backpacking, spending one or more nights out in the boonies, and celebrating the fact that I’m totally self-sufficient, that makes catching and eating a trout or two acceptable.  Much of my wilderness backpacking is done to reconnect with my paleolithic roots, and I devote a lot of time practicing bushcraft, hunting, and fishing to hone those ancient skills so important to keeping myself safe and well-fed off the land.

Freshly caught trout and miso soup, cooking over hot coals in the backcountry.

Fellow backcountry hunter, and renowned hunting ethicist, David Petersen, wrote that fly fishing (which tenkara IS, in case you wondered) is little more than “hydraulic hunting”, a point of view shared with sporting writer, Steven Bodio, who Petersen quoted in his seminal book, Heartsblood.  In that book, Bodio talks about “the occasional killing and eating of trout as a means of reminding ourselves of the ancient visceral connection between human and fish, predator and prey…” 

This connection with ancient food procurement, buried deep in my genome, is important to me.  It’s why I hunt elk, mule deer, pronghorn antelope, dusky grouse, snowshoe hares, Merriam’s turkeys, and cottontails.  It’s also why I hunt and fish in the some of the most strenuous ways possible, backpacking and burro-packing deep into Colorado wilderness, far from any bail-out my pickup could provide.  It’s a hard life at twelve-thousand feet.

Brook trout, pine squirrel, rice, and tea.  Living off the land!

Second, the fish I kill and eat the most are brook trout, with exceptions in canyons where there are so many brown trout it could make your head spin.  The brook trout in Colorado’s streams need to be killed and eaten.  The fact that there are hundreds of miles of brook trout streams in Colorado, all filled with 7-9” fish, make it a literal buffet for the backcountry angler, since Colorado Parks and Wildlife offers liberal daily limits on squaretails.  Non-native brookies can put the hammer on native greenback cutthroats and, as nature writer Ted Williams has said (quoted by Petersen in Heartsblood) regarding the problem with brook trout in Rocky Mountain National Park, “Biologists there are trying to eliminate non–native brook trout to aid the comeback of threatened native greenback cutthroats.  Releasing a fish that needs to be removed from the ecosystem is worse than Zorba the Greek’s unpardonable sin of not going to a woman’s bed when called…”

A nice 12" rainbow from a tiny creek.  This one lived to swim another day.

Third, size matters.  I simply won’t kill a trophy trout, and “trophy” is subjective.  In the brook trout streams I frequent, a “trophy” fish is anything over nine inches.  The lower elevation semi-desert canyons I call home hold some amazingly big brown trout, and any fish there over a foot long lives to swim another day.  I’d rather chew cold elk jerky for supper than grill a ten-inch brook trout.  The big ones stay.

This one stayed in the canyon, as most of them do.

So, there you go.  That’s my take on “catch and munch” versus “catch and release”.  It’s a moving target, but it always boils down to letting the trout call the shots, and staying true to your ethics.  If those trout happen to be nine inch brookies, build a small fire, get out your grill or pan, and live off the land!