Signature Streams of the Midwest's Driftless Area 2010

Signature Streams of the Midwest’s Driftless Area 2010

            Scattered across the Driftless Area, from Decorah, Iowa to Spring Valley, Wisconsin, from just west of Madison to the Rochester and Chatfield Minnesota areas, lie a dozen or so “signature” streams that gather publicity like  spider webs gather mayfly spinners in May.  

In some states, they would be considered “blue-ribbon” streams, Le Cordon Blue of trout waters, but we don’t have any designation like that in any of the states where these (mostly) spring creeks flow. 

            You may love them, or you may avoid them.  Maybe, like me, you’ll take in a chunk of some of those well-known waters whenever you get a chance, because they often harbor big trout and spectacular atmosphere and because they’re known quantities of high quality. 

Maybe, on the other hand, you’ll remember the old line about a New York nightclub, allegedly uttered by Yogi Berra, that “Nobody goes there any more. It’s too crowded.”  Yogi might’ve been right, whatever he was trying to say.  If you agree, you might be left to fish only 9,000 or so other miles of Driftless Area trout streams that aren’t the signature waters. 

            These signature streams share many attributes:   the classic Driftless look and personality of bluffs and limestone cobble, rich vegetation, insect, bird and animal life, strong populations of naturally-reproducing trout in large part.  Some flow through wider valleys and have more actively-farmed land than others. Grazing cattle within a fly’s cast aren’t uncommon.  Every one has had some, or much, habitat work done over the years, and most have been appreciably improved in stream health by that work and other nearby conservation practices. 

            If you visit a fly shop, the dry-erase board instantly gives you the lowdown on the nearby signature streams: what’s hatching, what flies to buy, water conditions.  From the nearby urban areas, anglers flow out and most of them seem to aim for these streams.  To find the best fishing on these waters, smart anglers walk and explore, to fish away from the weekends,  and aren’t deterred by wet weather other than electrical storms.

          So assume you have a relief map of the four states of the Driftless Area, like the one above, and start, say, smack at the middle of the 24,000 square mile oval.  Think of it like a clock face, the old fashioned kind with hands.  Where the hands intersect,  you’d find two signature streams everybody, just everybody, knows: Timber Coulee and the West Fork of the Kickapoo River.  Now move to the five-o’clock position on the 24,000 square mile oval.  There, you’d find Black Earth Creek. It’s no secret.  It’s been featured in Trout Magazine and almost every other national fly-fishing publication, showed up in John  Ross’ book, America’s 100 Best Trout Streams, and always makes the Midwestern Top Whatever lists.  You might move toward six o’clock and find the Big Green River, then to northeast Iowa  and find Waterloo Creek.  Continuing clockwise, you’d come to the Root River, Trout Run and the Whitewater River  in southeast Minnesota, then over past high noon to the Kinnickinnic and Rush Rivers in western Wisconsin.  There’s a bit of a gap along the northeast side  of the Driftless, where streams are less fertile and have seen less habitat improvement, but eventually some may be added in that area.   You could quibble with this list, suggest  a few others, but most  of these streams fit into most anglers’ perceptions of the high-profile cream of the crop. 

            And you could quibble with the assertion that the Kinni, Rush and Whitewater are Driftless streams, since they each start outside the unglaciated area and flow through it, as they have since the era they drained melting glaciers from outside the area.   But their bedrock, valleys and water quality all resemble the classic driftless steams so closely that it would be a quibble not worth debating.

            What do they have in common? 

            First, it’s the topography, the bluffs and the valleys.  They’re lovely in any season, but especially spectacular in spring and fall.  My favorite day on Waterloo Creek was in mid-October, as the autumn colors peaked and rutting bucks patrolled their territories where the hillside oak savannah and the valley-floor prairie met.

Second, it’s the riverine habitat, high-quality, cold and fertile.  Stream projects on most of these streams have stabilized banks, sloped vertical edges to gradual vegetated banks that absorb the power of  floodwaters.  You’ll find overhead cover of a  variety of types, a key need for larger trout.  In these waters,  zillions (a truly scientific term, of course)  of scuds and mayflies and caddis thrive among ranunculus and elodea, a rich biomass as part of a healthy coldwater food chain.

Third, it’s the opportunity afforded by the first-rate trout fishing. The Big Green is renowned for offering very, very large trout for anglers to pursue, but almost every one can offer up a wild 20 inch brown, and some have very healthy native brook trout populations. Exploring the Root or Black Earth Creek reveals a variety of habitat types and significant numbers of spots where large trout live.

In Wisconsin’s  Driftless Area signature streams, most of the trout are either naturally-reproducing browns and brooks, or stocked trout spawned from feral fish,  brought into a hatchery each fall and stocked at the fingerling stage after special rearing efforts help them keep their wild characteristics.  They may start and grow slower than domestic strain stockers, but they survive and carry over well in the wild.  And it’s likely in coming years they will be needed less and less as stream habitat continues to be improved.    “I’ve been amazed,” says WI DNR Fisheries Biologist Dave Vetrano, who during his 30 plus year career has been a key actor in the effort, “at how quickly these streams can recover. You can measure it in years, not decades.”

            Fourth—and most important to many who are enchanted by the area--it’s the  aesthetics, the atmosphere you can soak up on every minute of every outing.    As Jim Humphrey, long-time trout fishing writer and the unexcelled appreciator of the attributes of Midwestern waters, puts it, “it’s not the fish, it’s the atmosphere.   For example, take the lower Kinni—the Gorge.  It has this spectacular atmosphere, though you can find better fishing in other places.”  The Gorge, or the Canyon to some people, offers several hundred-foot-tall limestone bluffs, weeping limestone where springs seep out and create fantastic rock formations, oak savannahs along the river. 

            “You need to appreciate the shimmering of light on the water,” Humphrey counsels. “These are places you lose track of time, where the richness of the experience can overwhelm you.  Just a transcendent experience.”  

            He’s getting at something key about these waters there: we each have fished  trout in places of less-than-transcendent beauty, places where you can concentrate fully on the fishing because the surroundings are austere, or unappealing, or frankly ugly.  One might surmise Humphrey would rather fish smaller fish in these Driftless surroundings than a leviathan in a post-industrial Holocaust site replete with chunks of concrete and protruding rebar, as many anglers do in Lake Michigan tributary streams.   But he wouldn’t have to settle for smaller fish there.

            Two less apparent factors are crucial, one historic and one much more rooted in our time. 

            Historically, most of these waters owe a key part of their health today to foresighted conservationists back in the 1930s who started thinking of ways to stop widespread soil erosion that was killing both agriculture and drowning the streams in a flood of sediment.  Led by visionaries like Aldo Leopold in Wisconsin and Richard Dorer  in Minnesota, they reforested denuded hillsides, worked to stop awful gully erosion, installed contour strips for hillside crops. Every generation since has moved conservation efforts forward, to the point that today we look at watersheds across the region as sites for widespread, multispecies habitat work.  Helping the effort have been several key USDA programs, including flood control dams up high in coulees, crop set-aside programs like the Conservation Reserve Program, and funding for stream restoration, says Vetrano.

            It can’t be assumed that many farmers don’t care about their lands, either.  Throughout the Driftless Area, plenty of grazing lands edge these streams.  Some are beaten down and overgrazed, but others illustrate that working lands and healthy trout fisheries can co-exist where landowners have a strong stewardship ethic, says Iowa DNR Trout biologist Bill Kalishek of Decorah.  Waterloo Creek is a great example. Another is Bohemian Coulee, which flows into Timber Coulee near Coon Valley, Wisconsin, where miles and miles of grazing land edge the stream, teeming with healthy brown trout. 

The future, in some places, will be found in managed grazing along restored streams.  In other places, circumstances will permit native prairie restoration or Conservation Reserve grasslands adjacent to streams.  One of my friends never calls his favorite restored stream valley, rimmed by native restored prairie, by its assigned geographic name. He just calls it, “Paradise”.

            That habitat work has been experimental and changing.  Floods have washed out habitat work in some places, but have also showed where it could withstand raging waters.  As watersheds healed, clogged springs reopened and flowed again, reducing water temperatures and making drought-resistant base flows.

            Wisconsin DNR fisheries biologist Dave Vetrano was surprised when the impacts of stream restoration on the West Fork of the Kickapoo began to show up in those reduced temperatures and increased flows. “We thought back then that on these streams, maybe we could have a brown trout population with some natural reproduction.  Now, we’ve got healthy brook trout fisheries in some of them.  Maybe we just didn’t set our sights high enough.”   

            There’s no doubt states’ fisheries conservation efforts have benefited every one of these signature streams, especially over the past 30 years.   They couldn’t have debated browns versus brooks if they hadn’t conserved watersheds and restored the degraded habitat.  

            Rooted more in our time is the need for access to these waters.  Once, it seemed, anglers were welcome to walk along most every stream on the angler’s path.    Those unofficial trails reflected a community’s recognition that it was OK to walk streamside, even on private lands.  More  recently,  more landowners posted their land and kept anglers out unless they had the right to wade the streams themselves. Today, active streambank easement purchase programs are well under way in Wisconsin and Minnesota, and Kalishek happily reports that Iowa has just begun its first concerted easement purchase effort and devoted $1 million to the task.  Efforts are also beginning  to work with land trusts, counties and other entities on acquiring public access rights along streams.

            There’s the formula for signature steams: dramatic topography and geology, beguiling scenery, first-rate fishing, habitat restoration and access.    It’s  no wonder so many of us are so smitten by these waters. 

           

Book Review: "An Entirely Synthetic Fish" by Anders Halverson 12-17-10

An Entirely Synthetic Fish, By Anders Halverson

Yale University Press, New Haven, 2010, 288 pages, $26.00

            Down in my basement there’s a 1925 map of my home county in northwest Wisconsin, showing its lakes and streams and the species anglers can find there.  Just after the end of the logging era, the land was almost treeless, covered with endless stumps and exposed rocks.  Its streams were dramatically changed from 45 years before when logging first began, and much of its trout habitat degraded. 

            But that 1925 map of Washburn County, the “Heart of the North”, proudly extolled the number of streams where an angler could find not only the native brook trout, but also stocked rainbow and brown trout.  Little did I know the rainbows were there as a result of a half-century of effort to distribute and propagate them across the world. 

            Anders Halverson’s recent book, “An Entirely Synthetic Fish: How Rainbow Trout Beguiled America and Overran the World”, is an entertaining study of the history of stocking this hardy and enterprising native of the northern pacific rim.  Its philosophical challenge, an opportunity for self-examination for those of  us who fish trout in the Midwest or elsewhere, is the more intriguing.  If you read  it and wonder about your own trout angling preferences and what they mean ecologically, he’s probably accomplished his purpose.

            Halverson, who describes himself as a journalist and  Yale Ph.D. ecologist,  reviews the development of trout propagation in this country, a movement that sprang from the European “acclimatization” movement which thrived during the early 19^th century’s colonization efforts.  Briefly put, acclimatization meant when colonists came to an area, they strove to eliminate native species and replace  them with others they knew and could use: buffalo were replaced by cows and sheep, prairie chickens and sharptail grouse by Chinese ring-necked pheasants, and native fishes by rainbow (and brown and brook and other) trout.   I understood acclimatization when, after finding my way through invasive gorse bushes to chase “naturalized” or “wild”  brown and rainbow trout in New Zealand, I read about the early British settlers who aimed to make the country “the most English place outside of England” by bringing their familiar plants, animals and birds.

            Starting here with propagation of the McCloud River strain of rainbows in northern California about 1872, the fish were stocked across the nation by the U.S.  Bureau of Fisheries’ “fish trains” for half a century.  Trout from refrigerated tanks would be stocked in whatever stream looked promising.  The opportunity to replace native trout stocks decimated by overfishing or habitat loss, as  in my own home streams in northwest Wisconsin, met a concern that American men needed outdoor opportunities in order to continue to be manly and eager nation-builders.

            Eventually, rainbow trout would be stocked on every continent except Antarctica and would, ironically, become a target for tourists visiting from the areas whence they had come.

            The darker impacts, as we have learned, were the decimation of the remaining native fish and the reliance by fish managers on hatchery trout, mostly rainbows and browns in our area, to provide any trout fishing at all.    And as we have moved forward in trout and habitat management, many have agreed that it’s preferable to restore habitat than sink your available dollars into continued stocking efforts.   It might surprise you, or not, to know how many states still rely primarily on stocked trout rather than habitat restoration efforts to provide recreational fishing.

            Cutthroat trout in particular have suffered from the stocking, both from rainbows that interbreed with them and brooks that out-compete them.  And cutthroat restoration efforts have often prompted vicious battles among anglers, some who want to restore the natives and some who want to preserve hard-fighting rainbows.   But  it also affects brook trout, the native char in our Upper Mississippi basin.   Because some anglers prefer larger brown trout over brookies, management sometimes favors brown trout where we could reasonably expect brook trout to thrive.  Where will we set our sights?

            Well-intentioned resource managers and others endorsed stocking.  John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, endorsed stocking trout in California’s mountain lakes because it would create a constituency for the wilderness areas.  Here in Wisconsin, Dr. Increase Lapham, one of our earliest conservation leaders and resource scholars, endorsed stocking carp in the Mississippi, saying, “The day will come when the people of the state will thank the  men who have introduced and planted this extra fine species of fish.” 

            Other ecological impacts of rainbow stocking, as with many fish transfers, have only in recent decades become evident.   Stocking of trout in mountain lakes has been done by horse-hauled milk cans, by airplane a helicopter, f or decades.  Fisheries agencies assured the public those lakes were  sterile and the stocking would have no impact, and visiting backcountry anglers sought them out.  But recent studies have shown that the yellow-legged frog population, adapted to those “sterile” lakes over centuries, had developed no defenses to the stockers and were easy prey.  Now, California is stocking some lakes but removing trout from others by gillnets.

            Halverson’s book, easy reading but well-footnoted for those inclined to further  study,  should intrigue the angler who wonders why we have this variety of fish in our waters, how they interact and what impacts they have on their environment.  That angler will better understand how we got here, and be better informed as we ponder where we are going. 

Over the Hill and Still Skiing (Volume One, Dec. 16, 2010)

As a kid, my idea of a great way to spend a winter afternoon consisted of curling up behind the couch with a handful of cookies and a volume or two of the World Book Encyclopedia.  Things changed, thankfully.

Getting out from behind that couch was one of the better moves of my life.  It led not only to downhill skiing, but to snowshoeing and cross-country skiing.  And with those extensions on my feet, there are no boundaries except time to keep me from exploring and experiencing our winters.

We may owe one of our sisters for prompting the change.  She and my younger brother and I, at the start of my 10^th winter, took advantage of foot of early December snowfall to head off to a steep hill in a nearby pasture.  She carried an ancient pair of home-made skis that had hung in our garage and we’d never seen in use.  My six year old brother, Joe, and I pulled the toboggan and trailed along.  As the sun lowered, she put her   snow boots in the single leather straps, held the bamboo poles, and headed straight down the hill. 

It was one of the spectacular sights of our young lives.  Our sister flew downslope, unhindered by any restraint, skill, or judgment.  But when, beneath the snow,  the grassy hillside gave way to plowed furrows, her skis stopped suddenly and she flew upward and forward in an incredible swan dive.  She landed head-first and lay in a crumpled heap in the snow. 

“Duke, Joe, come here!  I’m hurt.”  She said between moans.

We, of course, thought it was a hilarious scene, and laughed and whooped on the hilltop. 

But it must have been serious, because she didn’t even bother to threaten to kill us.

Eventually, we rode the toboggan down the hill, making ambulance siren sounds until we reached her.

Her forehead was bruised and bleeding, and her arms were oddly bent beneath her.  We guessed that the situation was indeed serious. I trudged off home to get our Dad

while Joe sang Christmas songs to our sister.  When she returned from the hospital with casts on each of her broken wrists, she had almost two months to remind us of the event.

But the accident led to our parents getting us real ski equipment the next season, and turning us over to a real instructor at the tiny three-rope-tow ski hill six miles away.  And now, 46 years of skiing later, I think I’ve concluded that winter is, well, all right. 

My mentor turned out to be a little Scandinavian carpenter who was in his 60s and skied beautiful swooping Christiania turns without poles.  He already had skied and ski jumped for four decades, and he skied downhill until he turned 88 before he switched over to cross-country skiing for his last 2 winters.    

My sister eventually healed from her injuries and became a smooth and disciplined skier.  But she never, ever would let herself get out of control after that December evening.

Somehow, both my brother and I found our way into ski patrols at Midwestern resorts, treating skiers and snowboarders who had been injured.  This will be my 33^rd years of patrolling in the western part of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.  Perhaps it’s a sort of penance.   Sometimes I wonder, but in reality it’s kept me out there and involved and skiing became one of our family’s favorite activities.

And being out there has given me some of my favorite places, and put me there at the best of times. 

Lots of people take up a sport such as football, basketball or soccer and find they can only do it part of their life.    Though I dabbled in a number of sports with results ranging from forgettable to painful to merely mediocre, skiing and snowshoeing have given me sports I can master, and plan to enjoy all my life.

My wooden snowshoes have given me the quiet wintertime gift of walking along dark-flowing rivers, of flushing grouse bedded under the fluffy snow, or seeing wolves, deer or turkeys in their home turf.  I can make my own trails or follow others, and get back and away from the sounds of snowmobiles or traffic.  A couple of times, perhaps, I took too much advantage of their freedom and got far out in sketchy weather, or went through the ice of a creek that should have been better frozen.  But those challenges didn’t detract from the overall feeling of self-reliance and adventure the activity gave me.

Cross-country skiing came a little later, a gift from my soon-to-be wife, and we

have enjoyed moonlight skis and evening outings with our spaniels running alongside and occasionally on, our skis.  Five Birkebeiners and other long-distances cross-country ski  races gave me a chance to train hard as I wished, develop techniques and friendships with other long-distance skiers, and gratefully hang up the skis after the each late February marathon from Hayward to Cable.  

Even though I no longer ski the xc marathons, that last Saturday in February you will always find me outside—often on a downhill run in the UP—just standing and thinking of the way the sun glints off motes of powder snow filtering through the red pines on the hills near the Seeley Fire Tower on the Birkie Trial.  The memories of its beauty overwrite those of the pain, in muscle and joint,  of the 35-mile race.

After a lifetime of activity and varying degrees of extra weight, my knees were giving up the struggle.  The past several years, they hurt when I did almost everything, from skiing to walking in the woods to wading in streams.  My balance suffered and it was painful to move quickly to catch myself when I tripped or slipped.  It wasn’t that I couldn’t do things, but that the price I paid was becoming too high to enjoy them.

Last winter, I underwent successive total knee replacement surgeries, and missed the first ski season since 1963 for hospital stays, therapy and regaining my function.  It was a struggle, but worth it.  My doctor tells me I may have to give up skiing double-black diamond mogul runs in the mountains, and I try to make it look like that will be a major sacrifice.

This summer I’ve been back to wading streams, walking the woods and biking. The change is marvelous. 

In a couple of weeks we’ll be back in the UP to ski again.  I am sure to take some time to just stand and gaze out over the 40 miles of forest to Lake Superior, blue-gray in the winter afternoon light.  I’ll ponder how good it feels to be back, and what it will look like when I stand there in another couple of decades, still on my skis.  

Good Friday Observances

 

 

 

          Since my first days of fly-fishing, the early trout season has attracted me out of the easy chair, led me to set down the channel changer and pick up the flies I’ve tied during the winter, and head out to the water. As many of you know, I worked hard across the state to ensure that we have continued to have an early trout season, and my tradition has been to get out and observe it on Good Friday. 

          Partly my observance was an homage to some of the people, most now gone, who helped me through my incredibly unproductive early fishing years.   In the early 1980s, several of them would bring a caravan of newbies out into the southern Driftless Area to fish streams like the Green River and Castle Rock Creek. 

          Most of these weren’t high-production events:   We’d dredge black Woolly Buggers slowly and endlessly, and usually would snooker a few browns or brooks into striking. In 1983, my journal notes on Good Friday indicated I fished until my fingers were numb, caught a 4-inch and an 8-inch brown, lost my only Gold-Ribbed Hare’s Ear nymph, and reported it was a “Great afternoon on the water!” 

          Once in a while we’d hit a good midge emergence and have major action on Griffith’s Gnats, and it would all come together. But our expectations were so low for actually catching that it was easy to be overwhelmed if you did not (a) fall into the still-chilly water; (b) break a rod in a slip on a snowy or icy bank, or (c) have one of your party do any of the same. These catastrophes can be contagious.

Eventually, in the late 90s, we got the Natural Resources Board to adopt an early season in its present form—a wise and judicious board, unlike its present unpredictable and radical environmentalist version--and since then I’ve never missed a Good Friday as my time to reflect, appreciate just being out there, and look forward to better conditions in the season ahead. 

Usually, the outing starts with a good burger at the Albertville Tavern, home of Chippewa County’s best burgers and just a roll cast from a near by trout stream whose name I forget. In early afternoon, the place is usually filling up with a hatch of Eau Claire lawyers who fill and empty a truckload of beer pitchers in a few short hours. 

This time of season, the best temps for fishing usually come in the time between about noon and 3:30 p.m., which makes for a few hours of exploring, chilling out, experimenting with (and losing) flies, and maybe catching some fish. 

My notes from Good Friday 2003, a late winter when our family was contending with workplace changes, physical challenges, and other (serious) distractions, meant my outing was a search for therapeutic contacts with nature. Pheasant tail nymphs finally turned out to be the trigger for trout, and as I caught them, “… I found myself admiring the colors and counting the blue-pink dots on their flanks, from 0 to 17 spots, never the same # on both sides. Some are a single wobbly row of 4 or 5, some in pairs or trios, never a predictable pattern. The other spots are a kind of yellowish, maybe with a bit of pink (like turning aspen leaves in the mountains in the fall). Some were darker, almost greenish black on the back, while some were lighter-backed. Is it the result of sand bottom versus dark holes? Bellies are the most colorful: pink, red-pink, orange-pink, almost red, tangerine—like the lip gloss department at Daytons—and I found them in the deeper and longer runs below riffles, often in the quieter water. “

After several hours, I called it a day: “Lovely, lovely afternoon. I needed that.”

Other years, fishing partners who were newer to the sport than me came along and ad fished together. “Ghilly fishing”, we’d call it, taking turns and wading the stream or walking the banks together.   It’s a good way to learn quickly, though it quite often involves ongoing catcalls, teasing, challenges and just straight-up b.s.ing. 

One of those teaching days in the mid-90s, I took out both my mother-in-law, 75 years young at the time, and my middle-school nephew. They both picked up casting quickly, much quicker than I had, and we worked along Duncan Creek on a lovely sunny afternoon. My mother-in-law is a great sport, a lady of style as well as one who welcomes adventures. She may have been aghast at the figure she cut in waders way wider than her petite size, but she was game as well as curious. When she caught a seven-inch brookie on a Royal Trude, she marveled at the fish, still resplendent in its fall spawning garb: “Look at those colors!” she said, “Someday I’ll sew a quilt with those colors.”

          Those days are as rewarding to me as the mentor as they were years ago, when I’d go out with my own mentors.   Now I have a chance to give back, to see the experience through the eyes of another angler, and somehow it always seems I get more than I give from the day. Funny how that works, isn’t it? 

Many of these outings, when as my friend Lon says he reflects “in the Church Everlasting of Woods & Waters”, have provided enrichment of the spirit as well as a chance to sort out that which troubled me and mine. What better way to spend a Good Friday? They can be great Fridays. 

 

                                                 

 

Welcome!

Long afflicted with the pesky habit of preserving in writing those observations, vignettes, questions, quips, it's natural for me to seek a way to share them.  This blog, I hope, will offer such an outlet, and let's both hope we find it entertaining.

Since much of my free time is spent appreciating the natural world in some way, it's likely much of the content here will have some tie to the outdoors.  After a career in the legal world, I can't help but try to analyze situations and organize them, bring order out of chaos, but my aim will be to avoid the more boring aspects and keep things interesting and  informative.

So welcome, reader, to my initial effort at blogging.  I hope we'll both find it worth our time.

Duke