TRAVELINGWITHTOOLS

This road trip that I’m two weeks into has thrown some curve balls at me, but has also provided some really interesting audio/visual encounters.

The curve balls started with the overheating problem that I encountered climbing the Sierra Nevada on day one. Which seems to have been resolved with the new fan clutch and thermostat that I installed in Reno.

Somewhere between leaving California and arriving in Wyoming, the motorhome got a good drenching in a thunderstorm. While I was resting my tweaked knee one day at Lake Viva Naughton, I noticed that the rain had found a new place to seep into the paper mache wall material that they build these piles of junk with. Up front on the right side of the cab-over, a new bulge had appeared and the wall skin had pulled away from the channel that joins the side to the top. A two inch gap was opened up, just waiting for the next rain to fill up the wall and further dissolve the crappy Luan material.

Great.

The next day’s forecast was for rain ALL DAY. Fortunately, I had a couple of tubes of unopened sealant on board, so I got to wobble on a ladder with a shaky knee, scrape out the old sealant, and re-caulk the whole seam, top to bottom. So far, it seems to be holding.

While I was waiting out the rainy day, I watched some interesting wildlife shenanigans out the window. A white pelican was paddling around just off the beach, looking down into the water for its next meal. Then I noticed a large bird on the shore, watching the pelican. It was a bald eagle, the first that I’ve seen on this trip.

The eagle took flight and winged it westward across the lake, just after a seagull had found a dead fish floating in the water off the beach, and started pecking at it. How did the eagle not see the fish? They are scavengers, after all. Maybe he already tasted it and found it too far gone for his liking?

The pelican, being alert and hungry, noticed the seagull and flew over to see what was up. The big bird immediately scooped up the fish, which was not small, rotated it 90 degrees in its mouth, and slid it down its gullet. As it flapped and kicked its way off the water, I had to wonder, how much excess carrying capacity do a pelican’s wings have? A three pound fish has got to be a substantial percentage of the bird’s empty flying weight!

My last day at Viva Naughton was spent fishing the short stretch of public water below the dam. It was difficult to find out exactly where the private property line was before I hiked in, but there is basically only a third of a mile of public water to fish. There is a posted fence with a ladder over it that delineates the boundary. I found some info online suggesting that you could pay for access on the private stretch, but there was no detail on where or how.

When I arrived at the parking lot by the dam, there was only one truck, but I could see 5 or 6 anglers on the water. I assumed some of them came from the downstream side and were on the private section. Since there were no signs preventing fishing in the outflow from the dam, I started fishing there at the head of the stream. I could see two anglers in the next fishy looking stretch below me.

A couple of small rainbows came up to eat the PMD nymph I had hung off the back of a foam hopper, but I was expecting a much bigger fish to be lurking in the seam of the big back eddy. I couldn’t entice one though, so I went downstream and passed by the couple that were casting into a decidedly un-fishy looking stretch of wide, flat water. It reminded me of the Henry’s Fork in Idaho, the Ranch section that is wide and slow. But the reality is, there are plenty of big fish in those wide flat stretches.

I walked a fair space below the other two anglers before stopping and scanning the water for fish. Which only took half a minute; several good size fish were finning in the grassy shallows, occasionally rising to eat a bug. Well this looked promising! I struggled for a bit trying to find the best casting position to target the risers, without spooking them. I got no takes on the PMD patterns that I started with and tried a few variants. While I targeted the 3 or 4 risers, the other couple of anglers departed, so I crossed the stream to cast from the other side closer to where they had been, which was more favorable with the breeze that was coming upstream.

I finally changed to a rusty spinner pattern, and that did the trick. For the next few hours, I was able to fool most of the fish that I cast to, netting five or six, I think? They were all healthy and colorful specimens, in the 15-18 inch range. A pretty satisfying day after all. The fish were still rising when I left, but they had changed bugs and I couldn’t figure out what the right fly was.

I also saw an animal that was a first for me. When I spotted the motion, I initially thought it was a coyote, with shaggy tan-brown fur. But I quickly realized the shape was all wrong, it had short powerful legs, and it had a wide flat body. A badger! How cool, it was really big, and they have quite a ferocious reputation, so I used some extra caution when strolling along the bank where it had been rooting around.

The other critters of note from that day were the cattle. I had to walk closely around some that were in my path, bounded by a fence on one side and a thick stand of willows on the other. It may seem ridiculous, but I’ve been much more cautious around cattle since reading about hikers in the Swiss Alps being attacked by cows. And in New Mexico, there’s been a problem with feral cattle attacking hikers in the Gila National Forest. I don’t want to tangle with 1000 pounds of live beef! And there was at least one intact bull in the mix.

One of these cows on the Ham’s Fork was really not into me at all; it spooked and actually bounded off running, all wide-eyed, as the other two calmly chewed their cud. Later, as I was walking to fish another stretch, a brown gal followed along my path, munching the grass at the water’s edge. After dumping a large stream of poop into the waters edge, she eventually decided to cross the stream next to me, and trudged through the knee deep water to meet some of her compadres. There was much bellowing. I heard some sounds that I’ve never heard from cattle before? After a while, this particular brown cow, who I came to see as the ringleader of her gang, decided to cross the river again, but this time she picked a deep section, and I swear she swam across, though I didn’t think it was that deep. Why didn’t I take a picture? Ever see a cow swim before?

Part 2 of Sights and Sounds in the next installment…

Have you had any exciting bovine encounters? Tell us about it in the comments below!