Chasing Brookies...
Friday, November 20.
Agreed to work late to get the vacation days I requested. Hurried home a few hours later than I'd planned and threw together a bag of clothes and a few important supplies for 6 days deep in the mountains of north central Pennsylvania. Far past the last of the telephone poles and sewer drains, on a dirt road that branched off of a dirt road to a hunting camp with my dad, a good friend of his, Dave, and his son Logan who's in his mid-teens. The four of us, plus several others, meet at least once every summer to fish the Allegheny, and the bear hunting is something they've been doing for years, but this was the first time I was joining them.
Of course, Friday, I didn't get to see much. Night is a lot darker in a place like that, and we didn't arrive until well after sunset. Still, we managed to get a healthy start on the beer and I tied a few flies before settling in to sleep.
The next morning, we awoke to the first of a series of hearty breakfasts cooked in a cast iron skillet on a potbellied stove and I got my first good look at the view from the front porch. Well before there was any bear hunting to be done, we all decided to pile into a pickup and head to Renovo to check out a local store, and do some exploring on the way back. In town, I picked up a topo map of the area where the camp is located and got a few hooks for tying.
On the way back to nowhere, we turned off the main road onto a pair of ruts that plunged into the forest without much more than a brown post to mark it as a road. We took the road down to where it ended and walked off into the woods until we found this spot...
Where I made my first catch...
After walking that stream till the hollow started to darken, we headed back for camp as well as the rich food, cold beer, banter, and stories that any back woods camp would be incomplete without.
Sunday morning I awoke to the surprisingly horrible sound of a grate on a pot bellied stove being rattled to clear the ashes of the previous night's fire. By the time I headed downstairs, a few shovels of coal were crackling away inside. A second fried breakfast was behind me when I pulled out the map I'd bought the day before and Logan and I unrolled it to plan out a Sunday morning fishing trip to a nearby stream. Planning to be back by noon, we set off down the trail, our dads stopping about 50 yards into the trip and wishing us good luck as they filled buckets with water from the spring: the camp's only water source.
We did well, with both Logan and I catching several beautiful fish in the few hours we planned for our excursion. After fishing with a few small bits of tackle, Logan eventually switched over to one of the flies I offered him to use with his ultralight spinning outfit. He fared much better after tying on the fly. Also saw some unbelievable scenery...
This dark little guy came from a pool just a few feet above one of the others...not sure why the dark coloration.
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