I Went Up This River To Find Hidden Fishing Pools

What's going on guys this is Noah with Northern Scavenger. It is mid-May and it is a beautiful weekend here. The flies are definitely out but I also think that the brook trout are going to be out this weekend. I'm going to be starting this trip at the ocean and paddling and pulling my canoe up river to a couple still waters that I plan on camping tonight. That wasn't too bad. Yeah so today I'm going to try my hand at pulling. It's a technique to get up and down rivers, going up river is called canoe pulling and going down a river is called snubbing. It's a great technique to propel yourself through current and it's a lot more efficient and effective than just paddling but there's also a learning curve involved. All right we're at a very technical spot for me. There's a fallen tree here so I need to go into the main current and not fall back on that rock there. This is it now. Hey Noah why aren't you pulling this? Well I think this is above my pay grade. Not at that level yet but what I am good at is lining. I jumped on a portage. The river got a little more steep and I found this portage on the side of the river. I'm going to take this as far as I can. The trail is in good shape. It's open and it's there so that's all we need to get there. We out. We out. I made it to the lake I want to get to and now the fun part is finding a campsite. This is always a gamble. I think I see a beach up there and as the saying goes never pass up a beach campsite. What makes this lake appealing for me is there's two little rivers that flow in and it's big enough that there will be some wind and hopefully that keeps the black flies at bay and I can get to these these creeks to fish for some brook trout tonight and right off the bat I see a beach there so that is going to be the first thing I assess. I think right here will do just fine for my tent. I can cook on the beach. I have a nice wind coming across to keep the bugs at bay. This is it. This is it. All right so when you're picking a campsite and you're picking a spot to put your tent for the night one important thing you got to do every time is look up. A lot of these trees are dead and one thing I do not want in the middle of the night is wind to pick up and one of these dead trees to fall on my tent and crush me. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to assess all these trees around where I'm going to be sleeping and preemptively push them all down so they don't fall on me tonight. Just got to move some stuff around. Oh baby. It's always good to make sure your sleeping area is nice and flat and there's gonna be nothing stabbing you in the back. Oh baby. The tent I'm using is the Eureka Solitaire All. Owl. Whatever you want to call it. But I picked this up this spring for these spring trout fishing trips where I don't necessarily need a three-person tent. So this is a solo tent. It's about two pounds. It'll do just fine for tonight. So one thing I learned about this tent is it's not freestanding. It just has these two tent poles that arc. My biggest concern is this wind. The wind's coming off the lake and going into the woods and there's a lot of dead wood there. So I don't want to have a fire and sparks go up and get shot into the woods. So I really wanted to make a big chimney rock in the back to protect the fire from the wind. Because of that, I kind of dug a hole. So the airflow down there might not be that good. I'd rather have a fire that I feel like I have a little more control over than if a gust of wind picked up and just threw sparks into the back. Now I am just going to chop some wood. You've seen this a million times so I'm not going to film this. We're going to do something like this. As I was collecting that wood, if you look at this forest it looks like every dead tree is going to be great for firewood. But really that's not the case. A lot of these trees are dead and they're rotting in place. So a lot of the bark is just spongy and it's not good for firewood. Oh what's my game plan here? Jesus. Other than getting there and not falling, my second goal is to not silt up the water too much. I'm switching up to a full new tactic here. You guys can see that. Switching up to the old nymph. As soon as I got one good drift with the nymph, I hooked up but he jumped off. That was a good size one. Instantly hooked up. We are on. He's a fighter. I can't even promise you good wishes. If I catch you, I'm eating you. He's a fighter. Beautiful fish. Look at that. That is dinner. Finally got it. It took a while. In that point over there, there's this very slow turning eddy and I was throwing a mud limino for a while. Nothing. As soon as I throw on a nymph, hit right away and then nothing for a while. And then I threw on the woolly bugger and sure enough after a couple casts, this guy hit. So I guess you just had to give him the right thing. He just needed something new to spike his interest. But I'm gonna head back to the camp and start working on dinner. Before I forget, there's a special ingredient that I want to use as a topper of the trout and it grows right now on the rocks on these rivers and that's watercrest. I am like 99% sure this is watercrest. So I'm going to fact check myself even before posting this just to confirm. Shit, that was easy. Oh, the coziest guy around. We're going to saute these guys. All the baby potatoes. Things are heating up. I stuffed the trout with rosemary, dusted on little lemon pepper, little straight pepper, potatoes and onions are done. I'm going to put that to the side. Now I'm going to chop up some asparagus. Oh, look at that. One last touch. There it is. Oh my goodness. Oh, thank you. This is going to be frigging amazing. Start off with a chunk of the fresh trout with a little bit of the watercrest. That is good. A couple bones but that's all right. Yeah, that was so good. It was so good and it also felt healthy. It was just like a perfect combination of work to get it, a little bit of gourmet and some health. Kind of a last minute trip. I wanted to get out for the weekend. So I just came to this local spot. Impromptu trips. The adventure is still there. There's always a little uncertainty, which keeps you on your toes. The solitude is also nice. I like doing solo trips every once in a while. A trip like this brings me kind of like inward, compared to going outward when I'm with other people. Good morning. Welcome to the green capsule of life. That is going to be some strong coffee. It pretty much stained the spoon when I was mixing it. So that's going to be a wake me up. Pretty warm this morning. I was expecting to wake up with it being relatively brisk, high-pressure system. But it looks like a low-pressure system is coming in. The clouds are a lot lower. Lower pressure. I think the sun will come out today. As I sit here, I look at this beach and I think I ask myself, how did this beach get here? You know, I'm on this boggy lake. A lot of spruce trees. You wouldn't expect a beach in these backcountry lakes. Here we see a white sand beach and that's formed from the weathering granites. Granites are made out of four main minerals. You have quartz, plagioclase, potassium feldspar, and mica, like a biotite or muscovite. Over time, these big rocks slowly get weathered down into smaller rocks and then smaller rocks until they are fine-grained sand, which you can see on this beach here. You can look at a beach and you can figure out how old the beach is based on the composition of sand particles. Plagioclase and potassium feldspar will essentially disintegrate, turn into sediment, and get flushed away before the quartz. So on these beaches, you can tell how old it is based on the composition of quartz compared to the other minerals. Beaches, they form from the local rocks. In Iceland, you have the black sand beaches from all that volcanic rock. And then down south, you have all those pink beaches from coral. So it's really cool. You can get an idea of how the landscape is formed based on the type of beaches you have there. I'm gonna check out this other little inlet that we didn't investigate yesterday. I think it's too shallow here, so I'm just gonna keep going forward. Beautiful spot though. I love checking out these side routes. I just saw another mayfly. All right, there's a pool here. So before I check anything, I need to see if there's a fish here. Fish on! Fish on! Come on! It's all right, it's all right. Beautiful fish. I had a feeling there might be a couple more in there. I'm just putting it into the main current and letting it come around into the eddy. Thought for sure. Oh, there it is. Come on, we're in the strike zone. Oh man, gnarly sweeper going right across the river there. This is a no-go. There's no way I can run that because of that sweeper. So that's an automatic bypass. So I'm just gonna portage this all the way to the next little still water. But yeah, I can't get over, I can't get over how nice this is. The black flies aren't even that bad. And I'm just like bouncing around on these rocks, just checking out pools, casting my line, trying to get a fish to rise on my topwater fly. It is quite pleasant.