I was AWOL. I'm a bad boy.

So yeah, I made a run for the hills.
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.

 

 

So that was where I've been. Looking at weird rocks, breathing air that ain't never been breathed before and embarrassing myself with a flyrod.