Red Trout Streams

Today's trout outing with Asher began well, with a cool sidetrip to Upper Whitewater Falls and a few hours of catching trout and exploring the East Fork of the French Broad River. We knew we might be battling weather, though, and on the way from the East Fork to the North Mills River, we hit a massive thunderstorm, complete with heavy hail, and even had to pull over at one point because the rain was blinding.

Not long after arriving at the North Mills, we ran into seriously muddy water, and the bite disappeared complexly when the muddy water come. We still hit several spots along the creek, both for the sake of learning more about it and with hope of finding better-colored water. I think it would have settled out fairly quickly, and maybe we should have hung around, but it seemed like we needed to move on while we had the time, so we drove more than an hour to the delayed harvest section of the Tuckasegee River, only to find even muddier water and no one else even trying to catch trout.

Knowing Great Smoky Mountains National Park streams wouldn't be muddy and figuring that Deep Creek's brown trout might be a little more aggressive with the higher flows and very dark skies, we decided to fish the final few hours of daylight at Deep Creek. When we arrived, the stream indeed looked good; however, another big thunderstorm arrived with us. We tried to wait it out, but the sky kept flashing and rumbling as the evening progressed, so we decided to call it quits for today.

We'll begin again tomorrow and see what we find!

Smokies Rainbows -- Sort Of

While it's true that no trout have been stocked in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park for several decades, I have no doubt that the fish I caught in the park yesterday afternoon were products of a fish hatchery.

With the water low, the sun shining brightly and the fish in their mid-summer doldrums, we opted to fish lower Little River, where smallmouth bass and rock bass might also be options. No doubt the 11-inch rainbows that ate my Fuzz-E Grub were stockers that had moved upstream from Townsend, not that wild fish that better characterize trout fishing in the park. That was OK. They were fun to catch, and I did also manage one little smallmouth in a short afternoon outing.

We also fished higher in the hills, but I'll write more about that later.

Strange Crowding

In many places fishing close to other anglers is unavoidable. Either the fish really concentrate, forcing everyone to fish together, or there are simply a lot of fishermen relative to the amount of available water.

Neither is the case in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where fishing pressure is comparatively light for trout waters and the fish spread themselves over thousands of stream miles. Still, when Nathaniel and I pulled into one of dozens of streamside pulloffs and were readying our junk, another car with three anglers in it pulled into that exact pullout, seemingly resolved to start fishing in the exact same place.

We chose to let them have that spot and to pick another, this time parking at a trailhead and paralleling the stream a few hundred yards before stepping into the water.

Somewhat to my amazement, we hadn't been fishing 15 minutes before a solo angler who had just arrived walked past us on the trail and stepped into the creek only about 100 feet in front of us. Not wanting to fish right behind someone else we got out and walked far enough  upstream that he wouldn't have to be fishing immediately behind us either. Twenty minutes later, when he leapfrogged us again, we decided to call it an afternoon.

I'll acknowledge that both spots offered easy access and that by hiking a little or choosing a choosing a smaller flow we could have almost guaranteed having waters to ourselves. In fact we fished for quite a while in another small creek with no trail beside it and had it to ourselves. Still, we probably drove past 30 miles of stream yesterday, and those four fishermen probably represented a third of all the anglers we noticed. It just surprised me that they wanted to fish so close to us.

Strange place to be crowded, at least from my point of view.