A couple weeks ago I collected a striking specimen of Psychoglypha and messed up the photo session pretty badly. Yesterday, I got a second chance in unceremonious fashion when I found a heathy specimen of this striking genus perched atop a urinal in a rest stop bathroom.

Last week I hunted for mule deer in Idaho, and I eventually harvested a doe on my any-deer tag after trying unsuccessfully for several days to turn up a good buck. I wanted to leave myself at a day of good weather at the end of the trip to fish the South Fork of the Boise in the tailwater section below Anderson Ranch Dam, where I had a pretty good hour of fishing one time after a previous hunt. On that earlier trip, I had just stopped to look at the water, saw a few fish, stopped, caught them, and left. It didn't give me a full picture of the fishery but it left a good impression.

This time I had a full day plus the previous evening, so I got to explore the whole road-accessible reach. It's rare that I have a bad time on a beautiful western river full of trout on a clear blue day, but this came pretty close. Every pool has fish, but they mostly just weren't very active, and the rise activity was mostly near the slower tails of the pools, where a fish might rise just once or twice before cruising to a new spot. They were picky about what they'd eat, which is normally something I enjoy, but when they're moving around too much to allow more than a couple casts over the same fish, it's difficult to get dialed in.

Finding decent fishing was going to take some moving around to find active fish in more stable locations. That was incredibly difficult to do because there were so many people. A large majority of parking pulloffs had at least one angler's rig parked already, and most pools were occupied by a guy for at least a day. I didn't see anyone catching fish. Unlike some of the Catskill rivers where crowding multiple anglers on a pool is within the normal etiquette, in the West it just feels wrong, so I had to just keep moving to find unoccupied places. When I found them, they usually didn't have what I was looking for: a good place to find fish consistently rising in one spot, ideally with a bit of backcast room. Every time I spied a promising piece of water as I moved around, my motto for the day quickly flashed through my head: There's a guy there.

Only one time did I see a really awesome rise of fish, with many nice ones sipping something in a stable location off a gravel bar with nice casting room, which had been unoccupied a few minutes earlier as I fished an eddy downstream and prepared to move up. I was excited to look up at the water and see all the tantalizing rises... but, of course, because a few minutes had passed, there's a guy there. Exasperating. Not fun.

At least I caught some bugs.

A quick evening on the water in early October provided me with another fresh Dicosmoecus adult to photograph, and I was struck as always by the gap between the patterns commonly sold for this hatch and the color of the real insect. Even my photos, being taken up close with a bright camera flash, show the colors a bit brighter than how the real thing usually looks, except in bright sun. Yet they show a ginger-brown body and dark grayish-brown wings with even darker veins. See the "Imitation" section of my Dicosmoecus writeup for more discussion of the ideal way to match this hatch.

Sunday August 9^th was a scorcher in the Wenatchee area lowlands, so I drove up into the mountains to poke around some small streams I mostly hadn't visited or fished before. With limited or no information on any of them, I aimed to explore as many different places as possible in a day, while giving myself enough time to get a feel for the fishing in each one.

The first one was a dud. I was recently listening to the Troutbitten podcast, which defined a small stream as something like, "a stream no wider than the dirt road you drove in on." In that spirit I'd propose a definition of a tiny creek: "a creek where you can usually stand on both banks at the same time." Many of these don't have fish. A few do, and it's a great find when you can land a trout a third as wide as the water it came from—even when the fish is 7 inches long. Meadows work best for this, because they can fit a deep-enough channel, sometimes with undercut banks, into a tiny width. Satellite imagery drew me to tiny Smith Brook (near the popular trailhead named for it) as a prospect for this kind of spot, but like most such prospects, it didn't pan out. It's a beautiful tiny creek, but there's too little water even for tiny trout. The frogs have the place to themselves.

I checked out six or seven other spots on different creeks after that, and I found trout in all of them, but mostly not very many and not very big (even by small Cascades stream standards). One of these spots (labeled "Mystery Creek") held some nicer (9-10") fish and very good numbers of more typical small-stream cutthroat. A brook trout and a few rainbows made appearances in different sections.