A nice Soda Butte Creek Yellowstone cutthroat trout captured with a camera lens aimed through grass.
I woke up this morning with a special place on my mind.
That place is a high, grassy bank on Soda Butte Creek in Yellowstone National Park. That bank is about 840 miles -- a full day's drive -- from my home, but it is always hovering around in my trout-addled brain.
I visit this special spot once or twice a year, and I guess that keeps it stuck in my head. I love this spot because it's often jammed full of beautiful, wild Yellowstone cutthroat trout -- some of them pretty big. It's a great place to cast a beetle or grasshopper fly along the bank and watch the trout come up in a rush and a boil. Sometimes the fish are sipping little mayflies or caddis, and the casts, the flies and the rises get more delicate.
But you have to stay on your knees to keep from spooking the fish. On-your-knees fishing is fun, as you can often see the trout, but they can't see you. If they do see you, they vanish.
This heady mixture of frustration, knee pain and rewards is addictive enough to make an 840-mile drive seem fast and easy. Yes, I'm jonesing for this spot -- and a few others around Yellowstone Country.
I started crawling through the streamside grass at this spot a few years ago. I wanted to get photos of the fish as they hovered over the rippling weedbeds and rose to bugs. I bought a polarized lens for my camera and started to get sore elbows to go with my sore knees. I'm a mediocre photographer, but the images still delight me.
My friend, Tony Overman -- who is a top photojournalist -- gave me a great tip about polarized lenses. Sometimes the lens doesn't seem to cut the surface glare on the water, but Tony told me to slowly rotate the lens to get a clear shot. It works!
Confession: I usually have to catch and release a couple of fish before I can set down my rod and pick up the camera. Luckily, this bank is about 300 yards long, so there is room for both happy addictions.
The world becomes tightly focused when you're crawling through tall grass alongside Soda Butte Creek. Bison dung -- especially fresh deposits -- can wreck a careful, painful stalk. But old deposits are not too bad.
Big beetles crawl and scrabble along those banks, and they often skitter over the back of my neck.
I now carry lots of beetle patterns when I fish that river.
I guess it's always a good idea to get close when fishing -- or photographing -- wild trout. Getting close has taught me a lot about trout and trout streams, bugs -- and the dung of large mammals. I now spend a little bit of almost every fishing trip trying to get a shot of a fish in the water.
Here's a local bass during the spawn:
Some waters aren't good candidates for fish spotting and photographing. The water is too cloudy, too fast or too deep. Sometimes -- as often seen on Puget Sound -- the fish are moving too fast. But other times, it's fun to turn into a heron and slowly, slowly stalk the fish.
I'm going to a favorite little Puget Sound creek some evening this week, and I hope to find little cutthroat and rainbow trout rising to hatching caddisflies. If I'm lucky, a few fish will come to my X-caddis fly -- and a few fish will rise to bugs under an overhanging tree branch. I like to drape myself over this branch and shoot photos of trout eating bugs. I've done this for a couple of years now, and I still don't have a great overhead shot of feeding fish.
But I'm working on it, and it's been a lot of fun.
And, as I aim my camera at those little, jewel-like fish, I'll think of those big, beautiful Yellowstone cutts that are just 840 miles away from my flies -- and my camera.
So.... It's time for another photo contest. Send in your favorite shot -- just one! -- of a fishing swimming around in a lake, pond, river, stream or saltwater. First prize is one dozen dry flies that work on Oregon's Deschutes River. Second prize is 6 flies and third place is three flies.
Send your entry -- just one shot! -- to me at [email protected]. The winners will be chosen on Aug. 2.
