Backlash Four, Three Rivers

Late June and the boat calleth. Since theres so much damn water here to see, an exploratory daytrip nearby made sense. Bragging about faraway destinations lacks soul if you don't know your own backyard, so Stupe and I made the Little Isabella, Isabella, Snake route.

Set up in the boat at the L Isabella landing.

L Isabella, first portage.

Stupe noticed the cow, but again demonstrates that upland birds are her pot o' gold.

Last portage on the L. Isabella. Stupe makes the blaze and assures me no suprises await. Like bear cubs.

When my brother first moved to spring creek country, we fished the pastures. Once, when moving to and from a run, we passed a cow. He remarked, "You have to wonder, that cow could be thinking nothing or, 'I'm gonna eat this guy'". You never can tell. Same with moose. The animal will almost always move off. When chin deep in the BWCA, always keep in mind the long slog out if a fiesty moose decides your boat would be better off with a hole punched in the bottom of it.

Aforeseen bull where, at top right, L Isabella runs into Isabella proper. Stupe and I had some cheese and crackers and a cold one and watched the moose mow the river bottom. Hungry fella.

Isabella rapids number one, this one was runnable but we portaged.

Isabella flowing, at right, into Bald Eagle Lake. Twenty pound Northern Pike like to attach themselves to your stringer of walleyes in this water. The pic is taken at the end of the seventh of ten portages on the trip and the second longest at 141 rods. This is a prime spot to pitch hell and whatnot on a nine weight and have a real shot at landing a big Pike. But it ain't free. The last portage is the longest at 198 rods, which is the trail from the parking lot to the Snake River which leads to Bald Eagle. Hope you have a light boat.

Backlash three, Bwca sawbill two

PREFACE:

According to NOAA;
Fifteen below zero at 10:30 pm, Nov 30 2007.

Give thanks, 'coasties and southerners. You get open water.

I'll post some stuff you wish you had done from my summer now that the weather is good for working on the honey-do list, unless you want to see and hear about me taping sheetrock.

90 degrees. The walleyes are off. Beer available. Lake is warm.

S-Rod, this year's sponsored mexican, introduced us to a form of relaxation he calls "diapering".

After watching us float like dying whales or kicking the lake to a froth, the Don himself decides to demonstrate the proper prerequisites for total denial of gravity. With a leap he was afloat, and witnessing his instant gratification, all of us followed. We wished for the knowledge sooner.

Given ideal water temps and atmospheric conditions, bliss is near.

Taken from the campsite.
Some classic summer fishing. The crew members are floating around to see what might happen. This is how tourists smash fish records to bits. Feet up, dangling lines, and then something pulls the canoe to the bottom of the lake. You can be as hardcore as a twenty ton piece of granite about anything. If you don't lay back and watch how the water hits the boat every now and then, you'll wish you had.

The poles sticking out of the bow and stern have yellow deer hair and rubber legs attached to them, just in case.

A pre-diaper shot of the Don. After viewing the picture shortly afterwards, we decided that total serenity or absolute stupidity gives a man enough courage to dive the way he does. Out of ten, the water entrance was a solid eight.

Shortly after landing at the campsite. Very shortly. Very, very shortly. We recognized some challenges. Yes, rookie campers, animals learn by and from you. After chasing this little fella off of the plates for two days, we trapped his ass and hung him from a tree in a large plastic bottle. There he witnessed the goings on for awhile. Then he was released unharmed. He was seen no more.

Backlash two, bwca sawbill

A meal in late June in camp. I chose Sawbill Lake this year for its darkness, thinking that the hex's would be there. They were. Portages are customary on our annual trips but we decided to stay on Sawbill. Hence, the football and chairs got the nod on this one and I'll be damned if I know how my brother in law squeaked that sink drain in between the thwarts.

Backlash one

Another adage; it is said that, where I sit by a nice pine fire, there are four seasons. Almost Winter, Winter, After Winter, and Road Construction. An educated guess in it's origins might involve a real inventive sport to blame for the coining and word of mouth with the snowbird gang and barflies to name a few. Like many, it is a twisted tale.

A disagreement:

During Almost Winter, the leaves go psychedelic. You can explore previous posts. There you'll find good times, folks. Good times.

The After Winter period revels in waiting for the Big Thaw.

The mouth of the home water. The river is pouring over the frost line, six feet up from lake level. When the line backs to the first rapids, game on for the first river steelhead. The Pond is at the left in back and early this year served as catalyst for The Thaw as well as major and minor tackle preparations.

Very exciting this After Winter is. For afterwards, one gets all dirty with fish.

Winter. At it's birth, forty degrees is a three layer consideration. Near it's death, t-shirts at thirty-five and sunny. Shorts and crocs for the adolescents.

In between; Sixty below windchills or a frozen lake so quiet you can hear a pin drop in six fresh inches on the far shore.

More to come. It just got born.

Road Construction equals summer. Here, the main thread gets wider and straighter to accomodate the tourists. Along with winter, it's aptly named. Frost heaves up on rock and clay with passion and lust. They feast on road the whole while.

Spanning three or four months of real summer-type weather, Road Construction seems a short, memorable season.

Getting off on the scenery, waiting for the deer.

I was pondering the vintage 1972 Polaris at this stage of the game and how it will pack me and a load of essentials onto a trout lake covered with another fifteen inches of ice for another winter.

Richard scouted this clear cut and in the middle of the first week, staked a blind and sat down here. He spent the first twenty five minutes of his season watching for deer and the end of the twenty sixth killing an eleven point. You watch and listen to the old dogs in all styles of life. If you don't, you're effectively turning tail on the crystal ball.

There's gunsmoke still coming out of T-mos' 94.

A quarter mile in.

Timber wolves. The night after Richard shot his deer, they followed the trail into the blind, tore up the spot where the deer was hit, tracked the run, ate the gutpile, followed the drag, and fucked up the ground where the deer left terra and entered truckbed. In an order few or none have been privy to. The spot is near epicenter of the densest population of wolves in this country. I did think about that when going back in for a field dressed deer. Sans rifle.

Still another cutover picture. There's the truck. Halfway there. The son of a bitch didn't look this big. Thank God for snow. I should have stripped those layers. I'd have chopped those antlers by now. I wish there was a little bit more snow. Fuck those four wheelers. This is fun. I'm having a brewski when I get back.

Every time I make a cut, there's a plan. Hollandaise here, bleu cheese butter there.

And a perfect one for mucking straight.

A pic for a fellow whose love of meat goes right to his email address...

Cut and Wrapped

I was thinking of holding out for a buck until a fat doe trotted out this Saturday. A fat doe equals a hundred and forty, dressed.
A big set of antlers or a really heavy deer makes for good bragging rights and rightly so. I'll pass for the fishing and the bird hunting that takes up the time to scope trophy racks. The freezer is (very freshly) full of chops and steaks and roasts and a big pile of quality grind ready to be made into any tasty thing.

Common anomalies

When an aspen tree grows up with any variation of climbing vine wrapped around it, here's what happens:

These are some of my collection in various stages of finishing.

I'll get around to making a groovy flytie table and maybe even take a crack at a chair when I find just the right specimens. Until and after then, they'll be another reason to exit indoors, mosey the "wilderness" and miss another blue ribbon edition of "Puking with the Stars".

A finished unit.

The more wraps the rarer, this is probably a one in a thousand find. Richard fashioned this walking stick. Now in retirement, he gets to think about important things more often, like wrapping romex around young popples in an attempt to create a real eye opener.

He's got a garage full and told me to turn my blog into a cheap garage sale. Comment on latest post if interested. You'll improve a SD pheasant trip for an honest Finlander if you do.

Another opener

Regular firearms deer season this time.

A sunrise, a sunset, and another sunrise later, I had a deer walk behind me and a forked buck tooling along with a six pointer pass right in front of me. They were in a hurry. For fun, I gave an estrus bleat (horny doe in a can) twice and it stopped the six-point long enough to flick an ear, hop the brush just behind the pine in the photo, and disappear downhill. I have no time for nicking running deer in heavy brush. Even less time for dragging it the mile it ran afterwards. Fack that.

Scorewise I'm ahead. Three deer through as opposed to none. No heavy weather. All the nifty shit that happens when your pieholer is shut and your ears and eyes aren't (super-duper especially when watching those addictive nighttime soaps like gheys anatomy),

and leaving the bullet riddled shore for some cabin hunting solitude.

The red carpet.

You walk on it. You clean it.

Checking off the list

Have you ever had Zup's venison sticks?

Partial whitetail deer preseason to do list:

Sharpen knife. (will it split a hen hackle fiber? How about in the air after you drop it?)
Buy license. (MN regular firearm zone one area 127 with antlerless bonus tag)
Check plat book. (It was county land the last time I checked, but best act responsibly)
Make sure T-mos is cool with me using his model 94. (T-mos is always cool, but best act responsibly)
If so, make targets for sighting it. (For a clean shot. At a deer.)
Get mega road trip style plastic bottle. (Whitetails disdain human urine as much as humans do. Well, real humans anyway)
Scope the aspen cutover and set blind. (At the risk of it getting stolen, this is to make sure I don't look up at daybreak and see orange in a tree stand anywhere. Also to naturalize the thing; Blind meet popple, popple meet blind)
Load a book onto the ipod (I watched a cow moose and her calf have dinner and bed down for the night from my tree stand three years ago. Then the sun set. Five hours turned into fifteen minutes, to my suprise.
I suck at sitting still. I'll plug in when the cutover goes quiet. The DA tells me the book she wants me to hear is a scary one, so I should be able to listen comfortably with a high-powered rifle in my lap and not get frightened, out there in the woods alone)
Dig the whole thing. (Only two weeks out of fifty-two for gun season. Six days if you dirt collar like me.)

American Woodcock

Back from a winterizing stint at the cabin with Richard. Pull the dock and Bunky the pontoon boat out of the lake, et cetera. And other generalities, like Richard exacting revenge on the cribbage board.

The American Woodcock is a migratory bird. Like ducks and geese, they travel in groups, landing in favored areas overnight or for a few days. Unlike ducks or geese, they are remarkably difficult to see after they do and must know it. A common technique used by reseachers for capturing live woodcock for banding involves a good pointing dog and a net. The dog points and the bird is netted on the ground. I've been told that the bird usually flushes before the person with the net can find it.

Richard counting primary feathers. It is difficult to dead-on determine the age and sex of a woodcock. Counting from the tip of the wing, the twelfth to fifteenth primary feathers give good indications of a birds' age and sex. Take notes on tip banding and mottling symmetrics.

Post test reward!

The recipe for Woodcock Ramake:

Breast filets of woodcock are carefully cradled in onion or green pepper the way julie cuts them. Wrap in a half of strip of bacon. Fresh ground pepper, maybe seasoned salt. Everyone knows the grill works best, but the oven works too. Use medium to low cooking temps to keep the bacon from flaring.

This photo shows ramake made with woodcock and grouse. If this doesn't look good to eat, an air freshener will help with the greasy, humid mcdonalds aura in your car or house. If still no go, peta is always looking for people to strap bombs to.

Richard's yellow lab, Rowdy, shows that the old dogs know what the game is about.

If that were a rattlesnake...

If I were fifteen feet away from a bird sitting in a relatively sparse pine in full daylight and the bird is abount an inch or two shorter than a grown rooster, I always believed I'd be able to spot it in a second. Stupe knew it was there, kept her trap shut and was looking at me real funny. I stared at the bird on the branch for five minutes. Put on your watch and look at something for five minutes. Then I got closer and closer until I could see that it's neck was bent at two forty-five degree angles and the tail was skewed way off to it's right side. It looked exactly like an eight inch chunk of branch. I looked at a ruffed grouse ten feet from me for minutes nonstop and I believed that it was not a grouse. By then, Stupe was bailing nervous circles and getting stoned on scent and then the bird gave a flinch. I've never given too much of a care for disintigration so I put one over the tree and we watched where it went.

Stupe takes another one out of the popples.

The home water takes a bath.

The same waterfall as shown in an earlier post. Rowdier. I took the previous picture from where the foam line is. I'ts rained here for two weeks steady with a day or two of what you might call letup and wouldn't call indian summer.

Thanks to some camp experience with real northwest coast steelheaders, the knee length rubber boots, dry firewood and chemical logs have been stowed just in case the water around here unblows before the season ends.

New structure

10/08/2007 08:15
213
10/08/2007 08:30
222
10/08/2007 08:45
228
10/08/2007 09:00
237
10/08/2007 09:15
250
10/08/2007 09:30
267
10/08/2007 09:45
287
10/08/2007 10:00
310
10/08/2007 10:15
326
10/08/2007 10:30
335
10/08/2007 10:45
349
10/08/2007 11:00
364
10/08/2007 11:15
378
10/08/2007 11:30
392
10/08/2007 11:45
397
10/08/2007 12:00
395
10/08/2007 12:15
405
10/08/2007 12:30
412
10/08/2007 12:45
412
10/08/2007 13:00
400

Brule, ah. Brule. So subject to adversity. And raining like hell again as I write.

Five words for a rainy month in Minnesota

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Giggity.

The nature of things

Silent... (no story, DA very effective)

and beautiful. (no story, hard frosts ineffective)

Another pic and The Reason Why

A bronze banded ruffed grouse tail.

This ruffed grouses' tail displays one of the rarer color phases. The picture may not strike the viewer in the face with a hard left. However, it affords me to show the appreciative another thing on this earth that is pretty.

It also shows the log which it had chosen for it's drumming site. Crusty grouse hunters will see the proof. The drumming log is a spot where a male ruffed grouse flaps it's wings to attract mates. No bathrooms in crowded airports, just a nice secluded stand of aspen trees.

Stupe and I had just taken one (that's granola for "kill") and as I was gutting it (that's sportsman for "taking care of wild game") this bird drummed.

Stupe makes three long loops around where I heard the drumming and halfway through the fourth, zones to the center of said loops, points, and flushes the bird and after I get a precious wingshot, makes a good retrieve. Wingshots are always precious. Like Big Fish takes on a dry, the moments deform part of your brain and you can easily recall every single one.

My pop put guns in our hands when we were real young. By the time I was twelve and my younger brother ten, we learned just what a .357 magnum could do to a person who was on the safe end of the barrel and what it did to a sprite can that wasn't. Around that time there were shotguns too, and "don't you ever fuck around with these, either". But he still entrusted us to them, took us for long walks and car rides and showed us what the ruffeds were all about. Still I wonder why we never wore helmets through this.

This led to that and I met the DA. DA the dog person, who's dad, Richard, raised and trained gun dogs for years. On a fine September Saturday afternoon he asked me how my bird hunting has been. I told him I had killed four so far that season. He invited me to go with him the next morning and guaranteed I'd see twenty birds. I saw twenty two and was barely keen enough to notice which scenes his dog acted in. Will you spell s-o-l-d for me, people? Shortly after the Da and I had two dogs of our own. She conveyed the idea of dog ownership. I held my ground of little resistance. One of them turned out to be just about the best out of the box bird dog a Labrador can be. Richard sees this and says to me,

"You better hunt that dog because you'll never have one that good again in your life".

So we hunt, the season is short. And only Kings hunt birds and fish salmon.

Gigity.

The summer side of life.

Finnish marigolds.

By late July they looked like this. They got a transplant in September to a small patch of dirt near the house (for heat) in September and I took this pic this morning. Blossoms through two frosts. Year after year, they keep on rocking and rolling after the hardwood trees around here drop leaves and after the potatos and squash and beans issue their statements.

Children talk, and rivers and trees. People (never on tv) talk from time to time. These flowers are rather articulated, so I thought I'd blog'm.

Salmon in the home water

Since the weather was tops today for fishing the brand of salmon that come into the rivers near here, I went. It doesn't take long to reach the home water. And with a bit of hiking I get to look at this:

Here's the upstream boundary for all fish that move up this river. Right after I took the pic a dark king took a very nice attempt at the falls. Figures.

But this also suprised me. The local fish polititians, with bulldoggish prompting by the local sportsman groups cut funding altogether for the pacific salmon stocking in the area. The pool you're looking at hosted state record kings and thousands of fish year after year. It seems that the more native species like brook trout, steelhead and lake trout are getting into the money around here. This suits me just fine.

I took the seven weight out and landed some of the pinks that will be there this time of year and turned one king. I spotted a few old rusty-tails cruising around but after awhile found myself thinking how much cooler this river would be if the steelhead ran it like the salmon do now.

Or even better, did then.

This afternoon

Here's stupe. (A Labrador Retriever retrieving)

Gifted with a perfectly good coat and enough sense to know that a handbag will only slow her down in life, the dog likes to focus on things that are important. One of those things, she'll readily admit, is finding ruffed grouse in the woods. Another is telling you that one is nearby and a third one is flushing it into the air. When I make my feeble contribution to this lopsided team she rewards me by a fine retrieve. When I don't she just stands there and looks at me.

The verdict is in...

Some of the guys at the office had a silent survey.

'Superman or Green Lantern?' was laid to question on this wall.

I thought superman would be a ringer with the box office returns.

Here's the results. This is Lantern country.

The view from across the road

An earlier post heralded the DA as community peacekeeper and since its inception to the www, readers wanna know; any word from the neighbors? Well, I can say this: After all the bitching, loud (and friends, I mean loud) music (with a scattering of evangelism), and vehicle revving, the finn bomb left a crater destitute of any of the above. A void where unhappy life once thrived.

Think of it. The creation of peace and quiet.

Based on experience, I can tell you the DA, despite her size, won't be eating crap sammies long if there's a Big Mac nearby. But I really am impressed with this. I hope I can pick the lock to this wonderful gift. I'll be sure to share, the world needs way more of it.

Critic

So I got an email from my new ses-in-law with a link to a Mason Jennings concert, it read "YOU HAVE TO GO SEE THIS!" My brother and her got me turned on to him since they gave me the honor of playing one of his ditties for their first dance. The DA and I pondered it and finally gave it the all clear when mom called and invited us to join her and my sis. Her nickel, to boot.

Now, I'm not a folk junkie so I can't weep tears o' prayer for this guy, but I know a solid performer when I see one. He earned his keep at the show and the cash I paid to get him on my Ipod. So cheers, Mason, you did a good job. Plus, being older than college age, its was a cool experience...Til mom started jamming the Floyd Kramer on the way home.

New season

I brake for ruffed grouse.

Here's stupe. Her apparent interest indicates a certain recognizance. I was going to shoot this bird but I got caught up in the dogs' antics and shot this pic instead. The bird flushed.

Stupe at work.

Stupe and bones.

Richard gearing up bones. Bones is a pudelpointer named after the ruffed grouses' genus Bonasa.

Richard at the walleye office. I'm sitting in the cabin. Feet up.

Here's stupe. If birds hang on a barbed wire fence beside a dog and a broken down over-under in the field for too many pictures they just rot. Cut into strips and rolled in seasoned flour and pan-fried, these went good with a can of beer.

The end of another opening day at the cabin. Richard felt it best to take the last few out of a 20 year vintage bottle of Beam given to him by his brother in law. He also felt it best to point out his cribbage win. Alas, I took the rubber match.

Here's my dog.

Here's stupe. She also goes by Casey or Lady. Sometimes Caseylady. Sometimes Youstupidfucking.

She smiles when she thinks she's in trouble or wants attention. She's a bird dog so I can put her on this blog as much as I want and she won't get offended. She's cool all the time.

Door County,Wisconsin

ART BARN
COFFEE
SHOPPING

Fin, Finn style

Bass lines breaking your windows? Suspected domestic abuse? Send in a pretty finn. The better half got fed up with the party scene across the street. So she marched over and swung the hammer. Meanwhile, the young Ike and I kept the guns ready back at the fort. He was ready to go, too. Itching for territory.