Much of last week I was with my two older brothers, Kevin and Darryl, and my two godbrothers, Steve and Doug (also, Doug's dog, Nick) in the mountains north of Bozeman/Belgrade MT.
(above, right to left: Nick, Doug, me, Kevin, Steve, and Darryl.)On Tuesday, Aug 12, we hiked up (way UP) and camped by Emerald Lake. (pic below)
It was loaded with grayling fish. Most of what we caught were 7-10 inches. Here's a picture of one my brother, Darryl, caught on a fly. Notice the large colorful dorsal fin which often comes up out of the water as you reel them in. If you're at your desktop, you should be able to click on any of these pics for a closer look.
In the picture below, you can see all the ripples as the greylings came up for insects. It's not a common fish (except in this lake) so we released them as we caught them.
I'm not a flyfisher, but I rigged one of Darryl's flies to my rod and managed to catch quite a few. Here's a picture of Darryl flyfishing; I found that it's hard to catch the line in action.
On Wednesday, we packed lunches and took a day trip to Heather Lake where Doug and I scrambled up the ridgelines.
From my view, you could see both Heather Lake and south bank of Emerald Lake behind. You might need to click on the pic or zoom in to see Emerald Lake. It looks like it's just over the rise, but they're about 2 miles apart.
Later, I joined Darryl in fishing for the cutthroat trout in Heather Lake. We could see them swimming in schools of 15 to 20 near the shore. Between us, we kept 4 that were about 10 inches and cooked them for dinner that night.
They were very tasty.
There were a lot of beautiful wildflowers. Here's a few...
One of my favorites now is the lupine with its whorl of 10 pointed leaves. (There's a good Biblical number for you!) It's the first plant I took a picture of at the beginning of my sabbatical. That was the seacoast lupine which grows on the sandy coastline. This is probably the silky lupine.
I also saw them in the Cascades where the blooms had already given over to its fuzzy pea-pods.I started to paint some of the scenery by the campsite. In the pic below, I was not wearing a jacket for warmth, but to limit mosquito bites! After laying out the basic shapes, I let the paint dry in the sun while eating dinner and came back to find that about a hundred little gnats had kamikazed into the wet canvas! Rather than trying to scrape them all out and smear it, I left them in and packed it out. In fact, I finally finished the little painting earlier this afternoon. (I brushed the little tykes off a couple days ago).
Before we hiked out, Darryl and I had just enough time on Thursday to scramble up to the ridge and one of the snowbanks that I was painting.
In spite of the amazing number of mosquitoes and swarms of (non-biting) gnats, it was the best hiking trip I've had!
No comments:
Post a Comment