Wild Brook Trout

Wild Brook Trout

Well it was a Friday night and I needed to get a break from work this weekend, but at the same time I almost needed to stay home and do some work too. So with the weather being a factor on Saturday I decided to hold off on a decision and wait till morning to check the Doppler radar and see how the rain was going to come through the area I wanted to fish. I probably should have worked, I probably should have fished closer to home so I could get home quicker and do some of the things that need doing this weekend. You have all been there before…so I said “The heck with all the work” and we headed to the mountains to get away.


So I packed up all my gear and my wife and son gathered all their stuff and we headed off to a surprise place, at least a suprise to them anyway. My wife and I had taken our son there when he was 3 years old to a bluegrass festival and to see some wild horses. We saw 1 horse then from far away before we got rained on. So I decided it was time for another attempt at the wild horses…. with some brook trout fishing thrown in this time of course. We hiked down the trail about 1 mile to the stream that had the brook trout and I proceeded to look the stream over and see if I could see any movement. I was in luck there were plenty of willing fish taking caddis off the top.

I proceeded to rig up my rod and tie on a caddis fly (took a few tries to thread the tippet on my fly as my eyes aren’t what they used to be. Once I got the fly on my tippet finally I made several casts into the pool where I had just spooked all the fish to see if there was any movement…. no takers there yet. So I moved up stream towards several waterfalls and found many willing brook trout eager to take my caddis fly. Those fish were as fast as lightning. Some times 1-2 takes is all you get if you miss, and if you do miss, just move on. I caught several small ones and then caught some nicer sized ones closer to the falls area. There were many large pools and lots of hiding spots for those wild brook trout. They were under every rock. After 3.5 hours of some great fishing and my son wanting to know when we are going to see the wild horses I decided to head out to the area that had the wild horses.


We headed up to the area that contained the wild horses and what a spectacular view it was just of the mountains. As we wandered down the trails my son spotted 3 horses on the trail and one of them was a small colt. We stopped and let him pet the colt. We had several apples with us and so we decided to feed the horses. They ate that apples so fast and then kept nibbling at the bag for more.


It was a fun time for each one of us. We saw over a dozen horses and several white tail deer and climbed rocks till our feet were sore from it all. It turned out to be a nice cool sunny day in the middle of June…just what I needed to get away from it all. Over all it was great weather, great fishing and a brand new fun adventure for the family….it was perfect.