peanut butter blues Aug 5 2023

 Day 3 of the forecasted 7 days of rain.  The weather was iffy yesterday morning so I hiked up the upper Crandall Creek where bigger cutthroat are reputed to live.  Ran into some Forestry people who were just finishing a research trip on that same trail.  They said they'd just seen fresh grizzly tracks exactly where I planned to go.  Doh!

The creek size should have been just about perfect for me but thus is what I found:

The floods from kast year and huge snowpack this year completely blew out the creek.  It's now about a 200ft wide bed of gravel strewn with trees, ripped from the raging waters.

Nonetheless,  there were pockets here and there and many of them held small trout.   I caught a bunch of brookies,  a rainbow, and some cutties including a 12 inches who was hiding under a fallen tree in the water.  I saw bear scat but no grizzly tracks.

Today, I returned to fish the lower Crandall Creek but with all the rain, it was the color of peanut butter.   I traveled upstream on the Clark's Fork hoping it might be clearer and it was.  Caught a bunch of brookies and 3 rainbows.   Got rained from a storm in the East while simultaneously getting baked by sunny skies in the west.

I'll try the lower Crandall Creek tomorrow  and the probably head for the Bighorns on Monday.    I'm writing this from way up on a mountain pass where you can look down at snowfields and the tops of clouds.