I needed some Mountain time bad. I don't hunt deer mainly because I don't like being in the woods with people that shoot their guns once a year, matter of fact I generally stay the fuck out of the woods for those 45 days.
But it's been awhile given recent circumstances. So I went, city hunters or not, and bound and determined to have a good time and I did once I made up my mind that I would return fire if I got potshotted at.
Fuck man, every time I turned around Pops was there. We spent so much time in the mountains together fishing and hunting and getting away from our wives that there's damned few places I can think of that we haven't been to together.
I took a break here where me and Pops used to camp. He'd been hunting this patch of woods since he was 17 and I started hunting it about the same age.
You can tell it's been a few years since we've been here with all the deadfalls.
I ended up on the south fork of the Stanislaus at mid-day wondering if it was worth the effort to try to fish and realized what I stupid fucking question that was.
I grabbed my flyrod and box of flies and tumbled down the embankment until I hit water, then climbed out onto a boulder and realized that I had a box of dry flies, not my wet fies and nymphs I needed. I can basically cast a line, but I'm not enough of a flyfisherman to be able to match the hatch or figure out what insects are on the water that time of the year. Luckily I had a couple of San Juan worms and a couple of Wooliebuggers in my dry fly box so I tied on a San Juan and immediately got a fish on. First fucking cast. It was a scrapper and when I got it in it was a wild rainbow trout, not a factory fish judging by it's color. It was also about 5 inches long.
About 10 minutes later, I got a brown trout, about the same size. No shit, they were two of the smallest trout I haver ever caught seen in my entire life.
I spent another couple of hours casting, losing flies and missing strikes before I finally called it quits. I caught a couple of dinks, got some casting practice in, and learned that bifocals are now in order.
Here's the water I was fishing.
And then I decided to stop by an old friend and pay a vist - some ass-kicking scenery off Herring Creek Road. The Geological formation is called Trail of the Gargoyles and the scenery is fucking spectacular. I just took a couple of pictures because I could spent an entire day (did just that about 30 years ago) wandering around the rim taking pictures.
