End of days...

...are here.  Wisconsins trout season is over...now, I know there is the tributary fishing on the great lakes and...Iowa.  I hear Iowa is pretty good with their year round season...but, unless I bag a buck early it is unlikely.  I've fished the tribs and like Travers says...its about the environs.  The Root river and its factory slag for gravel was the last straw...I don't care how big the trout and salmon are.  I'll take Wisconsins part of the driftless...besides, deer hunting runs through the end of December and I can wait the two months until March.

The year 2014 will go down as one of the better years...other than the demise of brook trout on most waters.  They try to blame it on global warming but its the brown trout...they just took over.  I suppose that was to be expected when much of the driftless restoration simply favors brown trout.  There is no special technique or structure to favor brook trout...other than an all out protection of them in brown trout  favored water.  And, higher limits for the browns.  Its not like most fly anglers are keeping any, anyways.  The problem as I see it, is the few that do keep trout are keeping the larger ones.  Some protection on larger fish through a slot or one per day limit is needed...I was always in favor of slots for size limits.  The future of our part of the driftless looks like increased bag limits and extended season...After the great blue winged olive hatch yesterday, I might be able to put up with two more weeks of fishing in October.  Strictly catch and release, though...big fish in particular but all trout are susceptible this time of year.  Remember, catch and release is a management tool, not a religion.  It works both ways...

Like an earlier post...the good old days is now.  With numbers of 5-7000 trout per mile on some of these spring creeks, stunting is to be expected.  Its why I don't fish those waters...finding larger fish is simply a matter of finding less of them.  And, after all these years I feel a pretty good handle of those places...all streams have them.  Focusing on those waters has made the year one of the better ones...I also find less anglers.  Although I did run into one yesterday who also fished downstream sections and said he had caught trout as long as his arm all summer and particularly the last couple of weeks.  Throwing jerk baits...which I can believe were taking bigger fish.  There is a lot of water and its only getting better.  I only hope it doesn't turn into too much of a good thing which always seems to turn into more and smaller fish.

Anyways...I finished out the season fishing almost every day the last couple weeks.  Even if it was only walking out back with Otis...the dry fly fishing was as good as I have ever seen it.  Bigger fish, and more of them.  Here are some of the more memorable trout from late summer through the last days of the season...

Fall in the driftless...

is a beautiful time of the year.  Fishing, hunting, and gathering are all part of the season...a good friend stopped by yesterday and brought some ginseng seeds to plant on our property and look for root.  He stopped back after a couple hour walk with some in his bag...we talked about hunting and fishing and family.  He's married to my wifes cousin...everybody knows everybody in the kickapoo valley and we had some catching up to do.  Its what we do in small towns everywhere.

Hunting will start in earnest, soon enough...I don't like to burn out on bow hunting too early.  Our stands are up and bows ready...I'm hoping one of my sons gets a buck first.  I like to wait and look them over.   Besides, there is still fishing to do.  And what better than to close the season on your home water.  Bob Hunt, longtime head of Wisconsins cold water resource, once told me after catching 50 trout with a friend on our land, that this stream is the best naturally reproducing small stream in the state.  Indeed, conditions are so optimum that tiger trout are often produced.  Tonight I caught multiple year classes of trout to prove it.

School and other obligations kept me off the water, yesterday...I've been fishing enough and nobody was feeling sorry for me.  So I got out today in the late afternoon...the sun was putting on a light show with the multi colored leaves and making havoc of my angling when trying to see in the reflections.  I still caught some fish...you see, I was in my home valley fishing just downstream from our farm.  I could see our hillside for most of the time.  Its a beautiful valley and I never feel it necessary to put the fishing first, though sometimes I do.  But, this afternoon it was the show...