Portneuf River Report

I fished the upper Portneuf this morning and let's just say it was really crappy. Water clarity is poor and the flows are still high. I have always held that the Portneuf is a morning fishery so stumbled out of bed this morning in great anticipation. At first glance the river looked good so I walked over the hill to one of my favorite stretches. The one angry bull that bellowed at me from the other side of the fence was the most excitement I had all morning. Not a fish in site, not a rise, not a wake nothing. There were good numbers of caddis hatching so that may prove promising for the future. On another note the stretch of the river that I was fishing usually has a nice gravelly bottom, this for the most part there is mud up to your knees, the river didn't blow out this year like it usually does in the spring so I think all the sediments just piled up. I really do think that the river will start fishing well when the farmers turn off their water, but it may be until the middle of August til it is ready. I'll keep posting.

Fish Pics

I got to take a trip with Nate to some creeks in the Columbia Gorge fishing some native redsides, later we went exploring a little creek on Mt. Hood. We found some great coastal cutts. Not huge but really nice fish for a creek this size; with small rods and fast water it really made for some exciting action.

A really nice coastal cutt with all of the heavy spotting.

Most of the water on the creek was very fast

Here are some pictures from a creek near the Continental Divide that we found. We don't really know the name of it but it was somewhere near Monida. Also are a few random Portneuf pictures that I liked and some from Birch Creek, on the highway between Terreton, Idaho and Salmon, Idaho.

Portneuf at Dusk

Todd with a nice Birch Creek brookie

An Average No Tell 'um Creek Brookie

That's right we worm fished the heck out of those brookies, mostly because we found a few really nice cutts in the same stream and wanted the brookies gone. . .yep we ate 'em.

I've been everywhere...man

I feel like that old Johnny Cash song, I really have been all over the great northwest in the last three weeks and have had a chance to fish nearly everywhere that I went. The first leg of my trip was to Northern Idaho where I fished for native cutthroats on some miniscule streams and some stocked rainbows and brookies on some bigger water. Then it was off to Portland Oregon. I fished with Nate, and we had a great time exploring some less traveled creeks in the Columbia Gorge. We found some really beautiful native redband trout in the gorge streams travlelling east toward Hood River. We then worked our way around Mt. Hood where on the eastern side we fished Cold Springs Creek and found a slough of native coastal cutthroat (at least that's what I think they are after looking at Cutthroat Stalkers cutthroat ID page). Later we fished a very small tailwater to a crappy looking reservoir and caught some brookies. The highlight of the trip for sure was the small, very fast water of Cold Springs Creek catching those little and sometimes not so little cutts. Now I am back in Southeast Idaho and have found myself doing some reclamation, I mean brook trout extermination, work on a little stream north of Dubois, Idaho almost to the continental divide and Wyoming border. We found some really nice cutthroat in the small stream and also found that if we fished worms in the creek we could catch lots of really big (10-14 in) brook trout. So the three amigos harvested about 60 brookies from the stream in two days and had a great time doing it. We also fished a little reservior filled with cutthroat called Paul's Reservoir near the Idaho/Montana border. Finally yesterday, I got to fish one of my all time favorite "fun water" at Birch Creek. Really, it turned out to be much more than we expected when we found a great stonefly hatch on the creek and got to fish huge flies to voracious fish. Tobee and I fished a stretch of the creek .3 miles long and landed over 100 fish in three hours. There is a reason Birch Creek is popular, I'm just glad to be able to fish some places that not many people fish. I have some great pictures but don't have them downloaded yet so those will come in the future.