Closer Look

A tiny creek (still) runs through it

wild trout
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Keith Blanton

You can see the front side of the mountain leading up to Wayah Bald from my dad’s front porch. I’m not sure whether I realized this when I was growing up here; it may have just been the “mountain over yonder in the distance.”   
 
When I was a kid, we lived across the creek from my dad’s current house, on the other side of the little valley, and our front porch view was of Owl Knob – a long, sloping mountain with a humped back like a brontosaurus and a long low neck that stretched to a smaller head (peak). We owned 120 acres of fields and scrubby woods, and from our front porch at the time, we owned all the land we could see and could not see another house. Our little creek flowed out of the Cowee mountains – a smaller range than the Smokies or Nantahalas, but with their own fire tower atop 5,000-foot Cowee Bald.  
 
Three miles from our house, as the crow flies, was the Cowee Indian mound, and the historical site of one of the principal towns of the Cherokee tribe, along the banks of the Little Tennessee River. Botanist and explorer William Bartram passed through here in 1775 and wrote of “a world of mountains piled upon mountains” as he rode through fields of ripe wild strawberries so abundant, they stained the hooves of his horse red.  

I guess what I’m getting at is that Macon County was a pretty good place for a half-feral budding outdoorsman to grow up. In his classic autobiographical novel, “A River Runs Through It,” Norman Maclean wrote: 
 
“In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. …our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ’s disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.” 
 
In our family there was no such ambiguity; there was a clear distinction between religion and fishing; but I went through adolescence under the mistaken notion that every kid grew up in the shadow of mountains, with room to roam and a trout stream to fish. 
 
I don’t have a specific memory of the first fish I caught, but I’m pretty sure it was a rainbow trout. It was likely caught on a cane pole with a red worm for bait (no bobber), out of this or some other small creek when I was less than six years old. Our creek flowed some 2-3 miles, from multiple unfishable little tributaries coming off the National Forest land to the bridge at the junction with the main road. At some point during my childhood fishing career, I fished every inch of the creek, but I concentrated on the half mile that flowed through our property.  
 
The creek was no more than about 6-8 feet wide in most places, maybe 12 feet in a few spots, and you could wade all day without getting your kneecaps wet (unless you fell in, which of course was a common event). There were a few places where landowners had cleared some trees or cattle had stomped out a path to water, but most of the stream was completely enclosed in a canopy of trees, brush, and grapevines. Most of the fish were small, but I remember a few rainbows up to 13 inches, and my dad once pulled out a brown trout that measured over 19 inches. 
 
I was an avid reader of outdoor magazines, and after mastering the live bait/cane pole technique, I moved on to the more refined, artificial lure approaches they touted. At some point early on, I discovered Panther Martin spinners and became a dedicated spinner fisherman. The trouble is, this creek was so small you really couldn’t cast a spinner (or anything else) on a conventional rod/reel combo. You would be hung up in brush most of the time, or your lure would wash halfway through the pool before you could even start a retrieve.  
 
So, I became possibly the only angler ever to specialize in tightlining spinner baits on a cane pole. A 7-foot cane pole (Giant River Cane) that we cut and dried in the barn loft, with about 4 feet of 8-pound monofilament and a spinner tied to the end of it. Toss the spinner into the head of a pool and pull it downstream, and then try to maneuver the splashing trout close enough for the creel or the release without getting the whole rig hung up in the brush. 
 
I got my first fly rod for my 12th birthday and learned the basics of fly-casting in the front yard from my dad, but it soon became obvious that fly-casting was going to be even less of an option than spin-casting on my little creek. About the only way to fish a dry fly was to wade downstream, letting the fly and leader and maybe 3-4 feet of fly line float down in front as you waded through a tunnel of vegetation. The bushy Royal Wulff or Thunderhead would get lots of splashy hits, but setting the hook was pretty iffy – you often jerked the fly upstream out of the fish’s mouth and then spent the next few minutes unraveling leader and fly from the alders and sawbriars.  
 
Based on the ads in the fishing magazines I was reading, I ordered a nymph assortment from Orvis, complete with a fleece wallet to keep them in, and put the same skills learned with live bait and spinners to use with nymphs. I became a dedicated nymph fisherman. Sometimes with a fly rod, but just as often with a cane pole, a short length of mono leader, and weighted nymph with a split shot about 10-inch up the line. I would mostly fish upstream – tossing the weighted rig into the head of the pool and follow it downstream on a tight line with the tip of the rod/pole, setting the hook on any sudden jerk or pause in the line.  

wild trout
WILDLIFE BIOLOGIST and fisherman Keith Blanton found that wild trout still swim in a creek that still flows out of the Cowee mountains.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because this technique is now known as Euro-nymphing or Czech nymphing and has become all the rage in the last few years. You can even take special classes from guides and fly-fishing experts, and buy rods, lines, and leaders specifically made for this style of fishing. But, as southern Appalachian bamboo rod builder and fly-tier Walter Babb once remarked, “We just called it fishing.” 
 
It has probably been 40 years since I wet a line in this creek, and there seems to be even less water and more brush now than I remember. But on a warm spring day a couple of months after we buried my dad, I tossed a weighted nymph into the head of a nice plunge pool and followed it down with my rod. The first fish to hit was a little 6-incher, but on the second pass through the pool I hooked a fat, healthy, 10-inch rainbow that put a bend in my rod and threatened to hang me up in submerged tree roots. 
 
I released the fish and reeled in and headed back to the house. I was not tempted to fight the briars looking for another fishable pool, but it’s nice to know that the tiny creek still flows out of the Cowee mountains, and that wild trout still swim in the creek.  
 

Keith Blanton is a Macon County native and a retired wildlife biologist.