Nature Pictures from Trout Streams, Page 82

Working my way down the mountain with a backpack full of bear.

These bear tracks made ma a little bit more alert than I was before. They're not same-hour fresh, but they're also not especially old, and who knows how far that bear moved? I never did see it, but who knows if it saw me?

14573 ft Mt Hunter

The Yukon River Bridge. It doesn't look as intimidating from this angle as from up above when you see that it's "paved" with wood, although I trust that was a wise engineering decision given all the truck traffic and extreme weather conditions.

I missed one strike in this pool after taking the picture. It was a good fish that first showed itself with a telltale bulge and eddies below my fly, the sign of a nice trout refusing without quite breaking the surface. Five or ten drifts later it took convincingly, but I missed the hookset. That was the story that day -- missed hooksets. I didn't stay to fish this pool very long, because I tried to cross to fish it from the side that's on the right in the picture, obviously the best angle, and I found that what looked like an easy crossing near the tail was a swift, bouldery flat of very deceptive depth in the clear water. I found myself half-way across, past what had originally looked like the deepest water, only to find that the water that looked easiest was even swifter and deeper. I thought surely I was in for a swim, but somehow I made it back to the near bank dry and jumped in the car to head for less treacherous wading.

Bear backstraps & bacon... a great dinner in camp!

Taiga looks pretty happy here for a dog with several porcupine quills hanging from her chin.

Maybe I should have edited my fingers out of the picture to make this smallmouth look a little bit bigger. I would have to pretend that the size 18 ant in its mouth was, I don't know -- a jointed Rapala?

Interesting vegetation grows around this shallow, remote spring pond at the headwaters of an obscure trout stream.