June 26th to 29th Trout Hunt |
Monday June 26th 2006: Me and my dad left home bound for Eastern Oregon around noon with the hopes
that by the end of this trip I would manage to catch some Harney-Malheur Redband,
Columbia Basin Redband and Whitehorse Basin Cutthroat. Other than some
extremely high temperatures (109 degrees in Gresham, OR), the first day was
rather uneventful and we ended up staying the night at my relatives house in Bend
Oregon. Below: An evening view of the Three Sisters and the Oregon Cascades from my relatives place in Bend. Tuesday June 27th 2006: This was to be the day that I was to do majority of my fishing; we drove from Bend to the small town of Burns where we purchased our fishing licenses. The next stop was the Donner und Blitzen River in the Harney-Malheur Basin to try to catch some redbands. We arrived at the river in the mid-morning and set up camp at the Page Springs campground, where I figured would be as good of a place as any to set up a base camp and try some fishing. I hiked a ways above the campground and started fishing, the water was a bit high and off colored from snow melt, but this did not stop the fish from feeding. I began to catch fish almost right away and found these redbands to be some extremely hard fighting fish. The first redband I hooked jumped four times before finally coming to the net. I managed to catch a fair number of fish but lost far more including an 18" redband that I hooked on a streamer in one of the deeper pools and almost had to the net before it tossed my fly in the current. Below: The Donner und Blizten River Below: Left: Another view of the river and Right: A Harney-Malheur Basin Redband from the river. After I returned to the campsite when I was done fishing, I noticed that a large thunderhead was moving in and we made the choice to go ahead and break camp and continue on to our next destination in the Whitehorse Basin to fishing for some cutthroat. This part of Oregon south of the Steens Mountains was sparsely populated and we drove for over an hour without seeing any oncoming vehicles. The road to the stream that I planned on fishing in the Whitehorse basin lead us up Trout Creek in the Alvord Basin which was once home of the now extinct Alvord Cutthroat; another victim of mismanaged stocking practices. Below: An old house along Trout Creek the former home of the Alvord Cutthroat. Day 2 Continued and Day 3 and 4: |
