It’s not the water or the fish — although the fish sometimes have something to do with it — as much as the part that’s not in the water.
The great conundrum and mystery with our rivers is the way they drag the mountains, foothills and the species that live there out onto the prairie.
So when you are floating the Bow River below McKinnon’s Flats with fishing guide Barry White and you look up at the looming river bluffs on the south bank, where the sun doesn’t get at them, you’d swear that you were somewhere near Banff.
The towering white spruce, the alpine junipers that spill over the rock faces and the understory of rusty dogwood yell mountains, even though the big rocks are a couple hundred klicks away.
In a ragged old cottonwood just above the run Barry calls the Sheep Shack, there’s a bald eagle’s nest.
If you look up from pounding Woolly Buggers into bankside buckets, you might catch a glimpse of a fuzzy, gray head poking above the stick-built structure — the pair’s new fledgling.
It was around here on Aug. 4, 1859 that Captain John Palliser measured a “rough poplar” that was nine feet and seven inches at the base. He didn’t say if there was an eagle’s nest.
Then he reported back to his railway promoter bosses in England that southern Alberta was a “semi-desert” which not only didn’t “offer the favourable prospect” of a railroad but “can never be expected to become occupied by settlers.”
Seeing the office towers of Calgary and the irrigated wheat fields east of Indus shining in the morning sun makes you realize that first impressions aren’t always the best impressions.
About two miles above where the Palliser Expedition crossed the Bow — where he noted in his journal that the river was still as cold as the glaciers that fed it — the Captain also observed “a fine hammock of spruce fir”.
That “fine hammock”, if it’s the one I think it is, was going to prove very interesting the day I spent floating the Bow with Barry and my buddy Brian on the part of Alberta’s famous trout river White calls his “canyon section.”
There’s also a confusing dichotomy: while remnants of the river’s mountain origins stretch eastwards almost as far as the take-out at Jensen’s Flats, the northern slopes, where the sun beats mercilessly on the cliffs of paskapoo sandstone, are complete with prickly pear cactus and chokecherry tangles, pretty well the semi-desert Palliser described.
Early-season trout fishing on the Bow can be as frustrating as intriguing. A bug hatch of some kind is all but guaranteed — as there was during Barry’s trip.
A fairly decent midge hatch welcomed us at the boat launch followed by an even better flight of the early season mayfly, called a blue-winged olive. A tan caddis came next.
But while the bank swallows and Franklin gulls loved the proliferation of insects, somebody forgot to tell the browns and rainbows, who chose to ignore the parade of protein passing over their feeding lanes.
I always hope to have a dry fly day on the Bow. But past experience has taught that stripping streamers through the holding places along the banks, or dead drifting a couple of nymphs under a strike indicator on some of the walk-and-wade sections, will likely be the name of the game.
The nymphs produced first when a rainbow ate my red San Juan Worm as it rode down choppy funnel between two gravel banks. A 14-inch rainbow jumped a couple of times before sliding into Barry’s net — by any other standards, a righteous fish. But not by Bow standards.
Most of the other hits turned into misses as the trout appeared to be taking the Woolly Buggers short, until I got a hook-up with another rainbow that could have been the stunt double for the first.
The great unleashing of mountain snows on Alberta rivers doesn’t come until mid-June. But there was already a hint of the great runoff to come and the water became progressively murkier as the trip wore on.
A herd of mule deer came down from the parched bunch grass bluffs to feed among the cottonwoods. They bolted when the boat approached, stopping to suspiciously watch our progress from a bench.
A murder of crows rode the thermals kicked up by the valley walls. The coulee that leads to the boat launch was in sight and the afternoon and the float was all but done.
One last stand of mountain spruces rose from the river on a steep bank of eroding sandstone, across from a gravel bar Barry calls Racoon Island.
It appeared to be my last chance to catch a decent fish — the river below to the take-out being a confusion of rapids and side channels that didn’t have a lot of quality holding water.
Barry put the boat tight to the Racoon Island cutbank and I began laying a Black Woolly Bugger into the complex of rubble rock that broke off the cliff and slid into the river. When the fly settled in a pocket below a flat boulder I saw a flash of gold. I set the hook and the battle was one.
Nothing showy, the fish being a brown. But a war of attrition nonetheless — which I won when a 25-inch hook-jawed male slid into Barry White’s net. It was my last-stand brown trout.
Barry White can be contacted at HYPERLINK “http://www.bowriver.com” www.bowriver.com. 780-999-0695.
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