The Dog's Breakfast, a Harbinger of Spring

Everyone has their favorite harbingers of Spring. The smell of fresh-cut grass, the sight of cottonwood fluff cruising through the trees on a light breeze -- whatever sign you pick, it always feels good to see another Fat Season creeping into the temperate zone. Oddly, for me, a long-standing sign of summer's approach are the spring days when I can smell asphalt heated by the sun. It gives off a very distinct odor when hot, and it sends a clear message: get the hell off the asphalt and go do stuff on rocks, rivers, and lakes.

For the folks who use the California stream season opening day as a harbinger, this year may be a bit of a disappointment. A LOT of water and snow fell on California this winter, and the streams are running high. Up until last week the lower Sacramento, which I like to fish between 5000 and 10000 cubic feet per second, was running around 50000. The Feather river, whose confluence with the Sac could potentially be a great place to pick up the first few shad of 2011, is running around 10000 cfs and is reportedly pushing the sand bar (where I like to anchor) way on over toward the Yolo county side, creating a deep slot that could be pretty hard to fish for a guy with an inflatable kayak. Don't even talk to me about the Pit; sure enough, I would have been out there last week getting ahead of the open bait season like usual, but there were very dependable reports of high muddy water running through the alders creating some pretty impossible wading and fishing conditions. I'll wait on that one this year.

If you are one of those true die-hards that are willing to line up on Hat Creek and indicator nymph your own little ten-foot section of the lineup, then power to ya. I can't handle that kind of crowd even when I'm not fishing, so I went for a nice bike ride yesterday. Today? Watch some soccer on TV, maybe take a damp hike, read books, write blogs . . .

But in fact, a couple days ago I experienced a very unique and telling harbinger of jumping fish and high cotton: I packed up 15 or so days of camping food and sent it to King Salmon, Alaska. Because I am such a predictable person, such a repeat offender and human broken record, I have done this or something like it for the past several years running in anticipation of long kayak expeditions in Katmai national park. I just keep going back! Each time with a little more self-consciousness of how unoriginal and non-adventurous it looks, but with a balancing measure of increased joy and satisfaction in the paddling, fishing, and relaxed hanging-out in real wilderness.

In itself, wrangling two weeks of food into a large bear can and a small kevlar sack is actually a mildly stressful puzzle. Here's what it all looks like after it has been sorted, bagged, and laid out for cramming into the containers:


By buying all the goods at Trader Joe's (dried blueberries and cheap macadamias), Whole Foods (Inka Corn and Emergen-C packs), Safeway (couscous packs and spam!) and Starbucklers (those nifty little dried coffee deals), I can make damn sure that I have stuff that I like and that will fit in the bear-safe containers. If you rely on the A&G market in King Salmon you're likely to end up with a mixed bag of mac 'n cheese and slim jims, which is palatable enough in camp but not ideal for powering a paddler over 100+ miles.

Because in the end, the name of this game is transporting from mouth to muscles critical substances such as calories to burn and proteins to mend your tired, shrinking, overworked tissues. On day three or four I am sure to wake up stiff and aching, with arms that feel about 50 pounds each and shoulders that can barely lift my hands up far enough to even pick my nose. The breakfast-based antidote for this is:

1. A starbucks Via pack in a titanium mug.
2. A precious, protein and vitamin-rich balance bar.
   
3. One pack of instant oats with dried blueberries, honey, dried milk, and pecan bits. Did you know pecans were the fattiest, most calorie-rich nut, after macadamias?
   
4. One more via pack to seal the deal.

This menu plus all the stumbling about between tent, food cache, and dining area, plus the wakefulness-inducing possibility of a brown bear stopping by for a bite, are generally enough to get the blood flowing for the day -- even if it is all being executed amid a cold, steady slug of rain from the Bering Sea. Once you get those tired shoulders moving again, they start to feel much better and will even uncomplainingly propel you across the lake and pull in a bunch of char, trout and pike. It always amazes me how much heavy activity you can do with a body that normally prefers to sit in a lounge chair and gaze at a television. As long as you keep it up without too many long pauses, you're good to go.

Still, I can't help but feel a slight dread of The Portage. Between Naknek and Grosvenor lakes there is a 1.5 mile portage trail that gets used periodically by paddlers doing the Savonoski Loop. The first time I ever saw it back in 2008, I took a good look at it, imagined carrying all my stuff over it on foot, and paddled nine miles back to the other side of the lake. Last year I took the sucker on: based out of Fure's cabin on the Naknek side, I carried the boat over on day 1, and then made the next two trips after resting and fattening in the cabin. 1.5 miles may not sound so bad, but please consider: the trail is muddy and slippery, and climbs; the spruce forest has about as many bugs in the air as oxygen molecules; and there is potentially a mama grizzly traveling up the other way trailed by cubs. In fact, last year there was a big solitary male hanging around the Grosvenor side of the portage. I spotted him while carrying around lake trout fillets in a ziploc bag, and he did not run away, oddly enough . . . then at Grosvenor lodge the guide told me that someone had been false-charged repeatedly by a dark brown boar at the portage -- definitely the same guy.

At any rate, I now know that the portage is doable (with some pretty extreme effort) and that it is well, well worthwhile. The scene at Grosvenor narrows has to be seen to be believed. They call it "The Bust-Up" -- a term describing the constant violent splashing of lakers and rainbows chasing down outmigrating sockeye smolts. It is fish-a-cast action (including on surface poppers) amid wheeling birds and lurking bears, and last year I had it pretty much all to myself even though there's a lodge right on the south shore. Then, without giving away too many secrets, I would point out that somewhere up on Colville lake there are several acres of water just prime for fishing pike on topwater flies. Got one pushing four feet long last year in fact. The lure of breaking that four-foot pike barrier is in itself adequate motivation to grunt over the portage.

Though, if Katmai Air will cooperate and fly a box out to Grosvenor Lodge, there will be another EXTREMELY important motivation to go over: a box of supplemental food I have prepared, that, assuming I can get it in the field, might even result in brief intervals of a full stomach during the second half of the trip . . . .

A little further up the watershed is my little Adventure Thang that I like to throw into any plan so that I don't feel so bad about always doing the same shit: some new water that I haven't touched yet. In this case, it will be American Creek, which is moderately famous for char and trout fishing. With five days set aside for the far side of the portage, I'm hoping to hike up the creek far enough to say that I have fished it (as opposed to just fishing its outlet on the lake) and get a decent dose of the Unknown.

Hell, if that ain't enough, I can always exercise the option of not going back over the portage to Naknek, and just continue on through the Savonoski Loop like all the other kayak nerds. However, I still can't imagine any really good reasons to do that when a) at least 20 miles of that course are unfishable, frigid, turbid glacial water, and b) Naknek Lake and its tributaries are some of the finest fishing on the planet. Chances of me ever seeing the Savonoski are slim.

Anyway, I'm saving the Real Big Adventure for a possible August trip. If that works out, then some discussion of the Meshik River should be showing up here before too long. Heavy fishing blog volume versus one every four months -- now there's another harbinger of Spring!