Oregon Cascades Trout Part V: Why Trout, Why?

Why should anyone fish for trout anyway? Well, first, because we love to fish, that part is simple. But why should I or anyone with like-obsessions about giant anadromous fish care enough to pursue these relatively small fish?

Here are some of the thoughts that ran through my mind when I headed back into the mountains near Oakridge recently.

The first reason, and heck I don’t really want to be counting the reasons, but this is the first that came to my head, is that these are real, genuine wild fish. Native fish that have been here in Oregon for tens of thousands of years. I was reminded of this when I saw young-of-the-year trout hiding and feeding along stream margins everywhere I looked, day after day. These young fish are in the early stages of the precarious circle of life and death that trout live in these streams, all season long. The wildness of these trout is something to be respected, I think, and cherished. May they always be able to live here.

Something else to think about, while we visit and explore these Oregon Cascade streams fishing for resident rainbow and cutthroat trout, is that once, before the great dams were built on the Santiam, and the Willamette, and on the Mackenzie rivers, a great run of wild spring chinook salmon ascended here into the headwaters. Their number may have exceeded two hundred thousand fish. These salmon were part of the ecosystem for tens of thousands of years. Now the chinook are gone. The falls in the photo above, several hundred miles from the ocean, were once leapt by chinook of fifty pounds or more. I know the sentence falls flat, but the image in my mind is glorious. Imagine fifty pounders traversing these waters!

Even though salmon in the cascades are largely faint memories, ghosts, they should serve as reminders of what we have already lost and to help us concentrate on saving the wild trout that still live here. These fish are worth saving for the world that our children will inherit from us.

These wild trout are beautiful beyond description or their size.

It is to our emotional benefit to appreciate the beauty of each fish, of its habitat, and of the rivers where they live and we visit now and then.

Ponder the daily movements of these fish within summer home pools, their seasonal migrations to find shelter from winter floods, their need for gravel to spawn in spring, the places where young trout shelter along stream-side grasses, and the instct life that sustains these fish.

Notice the moss covered cedar stumps along the riverbank, now shrouded in vine maple and shade, pools constrained by rock so hard that they will never move, and places where we can see that the river has moved its channel from time to time in winter flood. These are all parts of the history and the future of this river we have come to fish.

Solitude. Discovery. Familiarity. Wild fish. Insect life. Cold clean water against our legs. Shade of the forest in the heat of an August afternoon. The smell of campfire. Stinging sweat running down into our eyes. Feet tangled in the forest floor. A great rainbow rushing our fly from a shaded pool. The sting of Devil’s Club on bare arms. Wondering if anyone would find us if we lost our way here in the forest. The sweet taste of a weeks-old energy bar found in a vest pocket. Tying on a #14 Renegade, once again, and remembering trout caught decades ago. Bright trout faces looking up from under our fly. Little flashes of silver in the depths where we think our fly to be. A fifth attempt at threading a 6x tippet in a #16 fly at dusk. No sound save the river. Sitting to watch a evening hatch.

And there’s more too. It’s all there if you can find it.

JN