September quest for Smoky Mountain trout

By By Otha Barham / outdoors editor
Sept. 26, 2003
I descended the steep, rocky cliff by squirming down through a chute used by bears to get to water. Large roots crisscrossed the narrow passageway, presenting barriers that I had to either go over or under but at the same time offering handholds that kept me from flying down the chute like one of those money boxes at the bank's drive-in window that shoots stuff between a customer and the teller.
At the bottom the Little Pigeon River wound its way among huge boulders, a noisy flow of liquid glass drifting, bouncing, swirling and often crashing its way through the maze of ancient rocks. Intermittently the icy water, mostly snowmelt from rocky highlands I would never see, slowed in relatively level places and formed pools. Each pool had a head that fed it and an exit way where it regained speed. It was one of these pools that urged me to risk breaking something to get to it.
Pools in the Little Pigeon contain rainbow trout, a few brook trout and, I hoped, a scattering of browns. I wanted to catch just one brown trout so I could photograph it and release it back to its chilly home water. My experience with trout reminded me that the crystal clear water that let me see the trout likewise allowed the trout to look right back at me. Thus I had to sneak up on the pool.
I readied my tools by tying a tiny number 16 Elk Hair Caddis onto the end of my sewing thread-size leader and pulling enough fly line through the guides to make a short cast. Watching for limbs that would spoil a backcast, I sailed the little fly toward the pool. It fell short of the foot-deep water, my line splashing in the rocky shallows. Happy that no one was around to see my nervous bumbling, I quickly lifted the rod, stripped line from the reel and whipped another stiff cast toward the pool's darker water.
Another try
This second cast also fell short, but I was getting the range. My third cast dropped the tiny fly into the edge of the deep water where only a slight eddy swirled, drifting insects to any trout that might have been holding there, Instantly there was that familiar slap of the water's surface that typifies a trout's strike. I lifted the rod, but the little fly slipped to the surface and flew back past my ear on its way to an unwanted backcast.
The trout had missed the Caddis. The fact that he or she didn't want my offering but was simply using it for a practice run became clear when I dropped the fake meal back into the same spot several more times without so much as a swirl from the educated trout. That one strike was to be the only one I would see that morning in trout water of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park.
My son John and I had climbed a mile past the parking area that marked the trail head of the Ramsey Cascades Trail that skirted the river in the huge national park. John left me at the bear chute and hiked on further into the park, his younger legs easily taking him into country more distant from the throngs who visit the area, and hopefully where less wary trout swam in the river's pools and runs.
When John returned and found me slipping up on another pool beneath a waterfall, I learned that he had not provoked a single rise from the upstream fish. So we fished the pool I had targeted to no avail and took photos of the beautiful scenery. John gave his brand new four-piece backpack fly rod a workout.
New water
The next evening we drove out of Gatlinburg up to the left fork of the Little River. We only had a couple of hours left before sundown, so I stopped at the first pool and John walked on upriver. We had learned at a downtown fly shop that this was good water, but this was a Saturday and fly anglers from many places had worked the river hard. We talked with a couple guys who had taken a few trout on a three mile hike upstream.
The over-fished pool I stopped at was one of the finest spots for trout I have ever seen. It was eighty or so feet long with a cutbank on the far side below rushing rapids that would offer insects to waiting trout in several spots. A fly dropped below the rapids would drift slowly through the eddy and along the cutbank, taking a full minute to make its journey.
Long casts kept any trout with its nose in the rapids from seeing me. I worked the spot long and hard, as had a lot of anglers before me that day I am certain. John joined me near sunset and we cast to a few rising fish. We got a few strikes from smallish trout and I lost two grasshoppers to them prized flies tied for me by my friend Don Hardy. He had given me a handful of his yellow, gray and brown creations during a trout fishing hike in the Snowy Range of Wyoming.
It was not our first trout trip for John and me with no fish to show for our efforts. But nary a grumble ensued. The canopy of trees three times my age, the busy sound of rushing trout water and a father and son together, wading among ancient rocks was reward aplenty.