Rockin' The Sacramento

I had a new experience today. Asher and I fished a pretty section of the Sacramento River with a live metal band playing the background.

You might guess that wasn't planned.

We stopped by a fly shop in Dunsmuir, California and asked advice about a spot that would provide a decent look at the Upper Sacramento but in a fairly short time window. A helpful person in the shop suggested the Dunsmuir city park. Though not exactly wild feeling, it offered a good representation of the upper Sacramento's water and produced quite a few fish, and it was very close. He said it could get crowded, but he didn't think it would be bad mid-afternoon because the best summer fishing, by far, occurs early and late.

What he didn't realize was that a festival, complete with vendors and live heavy metal music, was taking place in the park. We parked well up the hill, walked through an atypical river crowd, and heard plenty of drums, guitar, bass and screaming vocals as we fished. I also noticed the air sometimes smelled a lot like the concerts I attended in my teens and early 20s.

I have to admit that I like bird sounds and solitude better, but it certainly was interesting!

Useful Daydreaming

The line between my work and play has long been more than a little fuzzy, but lately it would be tough to separate daydreaming and doing my job. A few days ago I mentioned the Rebel Trout Trek, which my 10-year-old son Asher and I will be taking together this summer. Because summer lodging fills up early in many of those cool Western mountain places that we'll be visiting, now is the time to make reservations. Because one stop leads to another, I sort of needed stops laid our fairly well in order to start reserving rooms. Therefore I've been doing a lot of gazing at Google maps and reading about places like the Madison River, California's Eastern Sierra and various little lakes in the Colorado Rockies. And being pretty bitten by the trout bug, I can't really read about places like that without finding myself doing more than a little daydreaming.

Although I've been planning this trip for a while, and the whole route has been of my own design (with valuable input from friends who have fished some of the same waters) I don't think it has quite sunk in how many "bucket list" places Asher and I are going to get to sample in a few weeks. The river names are legendary. Madison, Big Hole, North Platte, Deschutes, Sacramento, Owens, Provo... Just to name a few.

Of course, I don't expect my bucket list to get shorter. It'll actually get longer because of the regions we'll see only quick samples of and the waters we'll pass near enough to learn about but not have time to fish. That's not a complaint. In fact it's a good thing. Next time I'll know better what I want to see more of, and I'm guessing it will be a more targeted trip back to one or two of the areas Asher and I will visit this summer.

There I go again. I'm more than four months out from this summer's travel, and I'm already daydreaming about the next trip!

#RebelTroutTrek