Its Been That Kind of Winter.......

When we started the fall and thinking of all the heavy rains we have had over the past year, and how now we are getting that consistent "El Nino" pattern of storms, one right after the other, I remembered thinking last October on a guide trip that this year we could be returning to winters the way they used to be. The past several years have been so mild its hard to remember that what we have had lately is the real 'normal'...and that its been a while since it has been that way.

I mean we've had a snow here or there, including a 15 incher back in February of 2000. I remember that one as we were getting ready to open a fly shop and had planned to open mid February but lost two weeks due to bad roads and two large snows back to back. Lake Brandt Road here was impassable for four or five days, as 15 inches of snow became 7 inches of hard packed snow and the plows simply couldn't do anything with it.

As far as fishing the last real winters I remember, or should I say real bad winter, was the winters between 1991 and 1993. In fact, during that time the famous mountain 'blizzard' of 93 was a historical event. 24-28 inches of snow in the high country and over 30inches on top of Beech Mountain...I remember that one well. That was the year it was so cold that everything was either frozen totally and unfishable or the TVA tailwaters were generating..and there was no fishing anywhere for almost six weeks. I almost went crazy.

I can remember at that time the game saver was the blackfly hatch at the Jackson River in Covington, VA. That once blue ribbon jewel below Gathright Dam held thousands of trout. I have seen bitter cold days with hundreds of trout rythymically rising as though they were rising to a sulphur hatch in May. I have fished it on days when the air temp was 9F -11F and caught rising fish on dry flies. Wild, stream-bred rainbows and browns up to 20". Air temp was that cold, the ground was covered with anywhere from 12 to 20 inches of snow, and there were 8-10ft long icicles hanging from the cliffs that bordered the canyon like walls of the river gorge. Simply, it was one place the sun never touched from late November through March. It was the coldest place on earth ....or at least it seemed.

So how much more winter do we have? If its like most years like this we still have four to six more weeks of it............Can you stick it out?