Spring Broke 2018: Day One

Another year, another seven night cabin booking at Backbone State Park.  This year the weather gods more or less cooperated and we stayed all seven nights and fished all but one of the days.  It was mostly hard work in brisk winds and borderline temperatures, but it was great to be on the water again and we caught trout every day we were out, sometimes in pretty marginal conditions.

We were in Cabin 5, the same place we started out with our first two night booking during spring break two years ago (feels like more than two years, which is strange, because academically the years are whipping by so fast it’s like I can barely hang on).  I managed to get cabin booking organized early this year, so actually was able to make a bunch of weekend reservations during the spring. I have two weekends, including Mother’s Day, with James’s mother along in larger cabins (the house-sized Cabin 10 and the intermediate “Owl’s Nest).  James and I are doing another weekend in Cabin 5.  And I have a solo weekend plus a post-finals-week stretch of five nights in Cabin 5.  The only downside is that Cabin 5 is showing a fair bit of wear and tear.  I think we weren’t long after a renovation when we started coming, but everything is kind of banged up now.  The stove is chipped, and when the oven was preheating it locked up with a flashing F10 error code.  The every now and then access to cell data was enough to figure out that it meant a runaway temperature, and was most likely a failing temperature sensor.  I had to trek outside and find the breaker and flip it to get it to reset.  It didn’t act up again, but I cooked at a lower temperature (400 vs 450).  Also, pretty sure the old septic needs emptying, as there were some occasional wafts of foulness from the bathroom drains.  And the shower and handbasin drains were nearly clogged and slow draining.  You got like two minutes in the shower before it threatened to overflow the stall.  Natch, had I known all of that I’d have gone for a different cabin as I had my choice.  I’ve stayed in Cabin 5 more than any other, and it was mainly for nostalgic reasons.

Anyway, it wasn’t the end of the world.  James got the bedroom, despite my increasing arguments about age before beauty, so I was stuck on the futon with my sleeping bag liner and down quilt borrowed from my ultralight gear.

The big surprise weather-wise was the amount of snow.  The snow was basically all gone from the Iowa City-Cedar Rapids area.  A little bit north of Cedar Rapids we began to see a lot.  By the time we got up to Backbone, it was clear it had yet to really melt.  Snow everywhere, big piles of it from the plows.  I was quite worried that some of the little stream access roads, which aren’t plowed in the winter, would be problematic.  Temperatures were set to range from highs of 37 to 52 in Iowa City during the week.  A couple of hours north, it seemed you could basically subtract six from that for the daytime highs.

Cooking is part of the whole cabin in the woods daydream.  Backbone cabins are probably the closest I’ll ever get to weekends at the cabin in the woods, so bringing in groceries from the car and whatnot is part of the appeal.  The first evening I made Smoky Fish Chowder, which I’ve tweaked from a New York Times recipe (bacon, leeks, potatoes, hot smoked paprika, white wine, whole milk, fish stock, thyme sprigs, Alaskan cod, sea scallops, served with oyster crackers).

The first day (Sunday March 11) we headed to STSNBN.  The road was unplowed and snowy, but people had been over it recently.  It would have been dodgy in the old Malibu, but the Jeep-branded crossover (plenty of clearance and genuine four wheel drive, despite it being about the poorest Jeep-branded excuse for a four wheel drive you can buy) handled it without trouble.

The slope down was pretty slippery, but we were both wearing rubber soled waders, so it wasn’t death-defying.  We got down to find water levels low.  Not the lowest I’ve seen them in late summer, but far lower than normal.  There was ice on a lot of the backwaters and snow and melting ice on all of the banks.  We geared up and it didn’t seem all that promising.  The chub are kind of sleepy this time of year – you’ll get some, but nothing like the summer swarms.  It was all I could do to catch one decent sized creek chub out of the starting pool.  I fished all day with the TUSA Sato and James used my Rhodo.  Apparently on the last trip last year the tip plug of his Nissin Fine Mode got lost and I haven’t gotten around to getting a replacement.  He took to the Rhodo just fine; it was my go-to rod for the whole first year back.  James now basically refuses to fish with anything but his “confidence fly,” a size 12 black woolly bugger.  I’m getting to be the same.  The first year, 2015, started out with kebari, then went through a major woolly bugger phase, then switched to nymphs as I started to tie myself.  2016 was the Year of the Nymph, particularly the newly discovered and deadly beadhead hotspot killer bug and Frenchies.  2017 was the Year of the Slumpbuster.  And I fished almost nothing but number 12 black slumpbusters on this trip.

I love STSNBN for the solitude, the sense of being somewhere else.  Well, not so much this trip.  While we were still at the first pool we heard loud shouting.  A family with two kids had arrived.  They proceeded to hike downstream ahead of us, screaming, throwing stuff in the water.  They had a dog.  The dog got into the stream a lot.  We were fishing in their wake.  I tried to be zen about it.

It didn’t actually matter that much.  I caught the first trout of 2018 in the first decent pool downstream from the start.  It was a bit like the winter trip last February – lots of small (mostly about 8 inches) browns, far more than we normally catch when it’s warmer.  We made it just past the huge pool where I caught my first large brown in 2015 and sat down for lunch (lunch all week was deli smoked chicken, mayo, swiss cheese, lettuce, and Italian bread sandwiches, ziplocks of salt and vinegar crisps, and navel oranges).  The family came past us on their way back.  Based on the yelling I thought it was two boys and the flavour redneck.  Seemed more hippy up close, and it was a boy and a little very loud girl.  The manly dog, I think called Zeus, had notions of investigating our food, but the bearded dad dude called him off and on about the third increasing decibel command he obeyed.  We said hi.  So that brightened up the day.  The stream had been disturbed, but now we had it to ourselves for the afternoon.

A massive thunderstorm changed many of the streams last summer, and I hadn’t been back to STSNBN since.  Like other places, the storm had mobilized the dolostone gravel and just ruined a whole bunch of pools without creating new ones.  I guess it’ll take some years for new ones to form.  Essentially, the main channel got straightened a lot and became broader and shallower.  Many pools just got filled in, or else abandoned as the channel stopped flowing into their bend but instead cut directly across.  Four very familiar pools were either entirely gone or greatly reduced.  Streams change all the time, but these huge floods really resculpt them.

Still, the trout started coming pretty regularly, along with enough chub to keep things interesting.

The way things were developing, I began to hope James would get unlocked.  He’s never caught a trout at STSNBN, though he got to the point in 2017 where it was rare for him to get shut out whenever trout were being caught (and it’s now not at all infrequent that he catches more fish than me in a day).  About halfway down, he got rewarded.  He’s walked miles and miles on that stream and caught hundreds of chub and shiners.  It was sweet to see the first little brown appear on his line.

He caught another on the way down.  Outcrop pool, which had never yielded a trout, served up two, one landed and one escaped after a spirited fight.  We got to bottom pool fairly early in the day, to find it, too, a victim of the flood.  There was still one decent small pool, but it had been an extended four-part pool that took as long as an hour to fish.  The upper parts were abandoned by the channel, and the really deep downstream part was filled in with gravel.  Still, what was left practically screamed that there had to be a trout holding.

I stood back and told James to have a go.  He hooked the waiting trout on his first cast.

I had it in mind to sneak on downstream a bit further than usual, but about fifty yards down from bottom pool some landowner had built a barbed wire fence across the entire valley, including across the stream.  There were no signs, but a barbed wire fence across the valley is a barbed wire fence across the valley, so that was that.

My tally in the waterproof notebook says I caught four trout, but the photos seem to show me holding six unequivocally different browns, so I don’t know what’s up with that.  James ended up with three.  This was only the second time we’ve caught more than three total in a day here.  The first time was also in cold weather, last February when I caught 10.  I caught 16 chub and a shiner; James caught 10 chub.  The temperature had been brisk for most of the day, but the sun came out and by the end it was nearly pleasant.

We headed back to the cabin and I made a pan sheet dinner of salmon fillets and cabbage “steaks” (you just saw 1/2-inch thick cross sections from the middle of a small-medium green cabbage head) in a spicy Asian sauce (soy sauce, light brown sugar, minced garlic, minced ginger root, rice vinegar, sesame oil, red pepper flakes).