September 6, 2014

More wolves and a fishing comic adventure.

I got up late and only made it to Slough Creek in the morning. There were lots of people there, so I decided to take the camera to show what I mean by too far for photos. It's about 1.5 miles out to the wolves and this is the best I could get:

You can just barely make out that it's a dog shape. I'm hoping the new scope next year will help with this problem.

Then, I went fishing. The plan was to go down the Hellroaring trail and fish where Elk creek enters the Yellowstone River. There are some very spectacular views on the hike down:

This is the area I planned to fish:

All those rocks provide shelter for the fish. The only problem was that, when got there, this is what I saw:

That's a fishing guide and he had 3 clients with him. That meant that this place was taken and I would have to find someplace else. So, I ate lunch and decided on another spot about 1/4 mile upstream on the other side of the river that I know of. So, I hiked back up to the main trail and crossed the bridge over the Yellowstone River:

The view from the bridge is pretty good, too:

Then, it was following a faint trail through the sagebrush:

And then down a wide gully to the river bank:

I was fishing and getting lots of strikes and caught a couple of 17 inch cutthroats when I had an adventure. I was out on the end of the rock point you can see in the picture above when I hooked a large fish. I got it to the rock, but I was several feet above the water, so I slid down to a small niche in the rock closer so the water. When I did, my water bottle, which was attached to my belt with a velcro loop, got scraped off, fell in the river, and started floating downstream. I resigned to having lost it and got the fish almost out of the water when the line broke. Drat! I lost both the fish and the bottle. I really didn't want to lose the bottle as it was a new one with filters built in. It also had my water bottle holster that I use all year long. Then, I noticed that the bottle was caught in an eddy about 20 feet from the rock. Maybe I could catch it on a hook and get it back. 5 casts later, I had it hooked and was reeling it in. When I got it to to the rock, I grabbed the line to lift it out of the water, so I set the fishing rod down. It immediately slid off the rock and into the river with the bottle. I started pulling on the line from the rod, but the drag on the reel was set too light and all it was doing was unreeling line, not pulling the rod up. However, if I pulled in faster, the rod would rise a little out of the water. So, I pulled as fast as I could and got hold of the rod tip. It came off the rod. More furious pulling and I finally got all the rod out, but, somewhere in the process, the water bottle came loose from the hook and went floating downstream. I was left there with the rod all in parts and a great pile of flyline all tangled around my feet.

I decided to call it a day and hiked out.