It rained so hard on the Wallowa last Sunday the fish were trying to stay dry. I was feeling good about our steelhead expedition as we floated past a traffic jam of fishermen on the bank and some asked for us to take them with us. Sorry, lads, not enough hot cocoa to go around.

The weather predicter said it would begin precipitating after 4 o’clock. At 4:24 and 28 seconds that soothsayer was correct. Stray drops becoming pitter-patter, then a downpour. Then a pouring down. Finally, a deluge.

But not before Fargo landed a beauty of a steelhead with some bold fish-playing skills. He’d hooked up with the steelhead while drifting a nymph out from the boat. This was twenty yards above a riffle with one sizeable boulder at the top. I was rowing at the time and couldn’t see how to help the situation, other than get the boat over as soon as possible.

“You’ll be all right as long as the fish doesn’t wrap around that . . .”

The fish wrapped around that boulder and I gave my condolences over my shoulder, saying, “Too bad, Fargo, I don’t see how you’re going to land that . . . Fargo? Hello?”

He’d jumped off the boat in thigh-high water, rod tip up high and wading back against the current. I kept waiting for his line to go slack after the steelhead sawed his leader off against that rock, but I’ll be darned if he didn’t wade back up to that rock, turn the corner and bring the fish in. I would have kissed that fish goodbye, but Fargo ended up kissing it for good luck.

We boogied to the camp at Sheep Creek to ride out the rainstorm, which put us on the Grande Ronde River and had us scooting by some of our fishing guide Tom’s favorite water. Hated to do it, but my main concern by then was putting up our rain fly and getting my hands around a coffee cup with steam coming off the top.

The Grande Ronde was running murky and we did manage to catch a few fish on our way to Troy, but we got more and more nostalgic for the clearer water back up on the Wallowa.

Naturally, the Grande Ronde was showing signs of clearing as we wound up our trip. Ah well, that’s spring fishing, I reckon.

….And speaking of fishing, follow this here link to see the profile of our fishing czar Tom Farnum in the La Grande Observer. Make sure to read the paragraph that reveals Morgan’s conclusions about water after a guiding career of over 20 years. I have to say, I’ve seen water apparently work with him in some situations and can’t dispute that he and it seem to have an understanding between themselves.

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Attention steelheaded fishes of the Grande Ronde River: I feel it is only sporting to give warning that I am coming for you.

It shall be an attack by water. You are right to tremble.

Some buddies and I are launching for three days from Minam to Troy, and we planned it for the very day the recent sunshine spell turns to nasty rain. Perfect.

The lineup looks like this: Fargo Kesey. Known him since 6th grade. I’m predicting I will catch more fish than him. His brother Dave is the same fisherman steelhead parents warn their smolts about.

Then there’s Chadwick Crawford. My brother-in-law. Also goes by ‘Crawdaddy.’ He is feared by shellfish and finned creatures alike.

Dave Rooper, a formidable fisher. And the father and son team of Mike and Patrick Baird. Fish magnets all.

It will go easier on you if you cooperate, steelhead.

Our plan is this: fan out in a three raft phalanx, or the ‘flying wedge’ as it’s known in the Ukraine . . . camp and fish and tell ghost stories and skip rocks and tell lies.

It shall be a ‘hoot,’ steelhead. We are glad you are down there on the Wallowa and Grande Ronde in record numbers. We would like to meet you. Especially me. These other guys, don’t worry about them. But I’ll be the guy in waders drifting a number 6 prince nymph your way. Try it. We’ll have a little tug of war and I’ll send you on your way.

Should be a good three days. Fishing guru Tom reported back from the fishing train today and claims to have lost count of how many steelhead he landed. I don’t know if that means he’s just bad at math, or the fishing is just that good.

I aim to find out.

Recent comments in the Gearboat Chronicles about the pottery work of Morgan Jenkins have launched international protests from art collectors and pinchpot aficionados, ending in a court-mandated decision calling for an apology from the author, who must take back what he said about Morgan’s ceramics resembling “something a kindergartener would do.”

An independent review by Ceramic Artists For Truth found these allegations to be simply not true, adding that the work of Jenkins shows a strong use of something, indicative of something else and evincing some French words with lines above some of the letters.

Mr. Rombach regrets the error.

In fact, Morgan has never produced “little clay snakes,” or any “pinchpot ashtray.”

The civil court decision in ‘Morgan v. Jon re: pottery’ found that Jon is probably just jealous. They gave Mr. Rombach a lump of clay and put on some classical music so that he might demonstrate his own abilities with earthenware, but the results were not encouraging.

Reached at his solar mansion overlooking Wallowa Valley and parts of Idaho, Morgan was gracious about the flap and released a statement saying, “It’s cool.”

A showing of Morgan’s ceramic art will be held this summer at the Winding Waters boathouse.

I have seen a clay wolf with roses in its jaw. Check that off the list. My eyes also recently beheld a ceramic cheese platter festooned with shriveled up skeletal rodents appearing to crawl toward where the cheese should be. That one kind of freaked me out, truth be told.

And more. Much more. Dozens of dozens of works of art were pulled last week from the woodfired kiln up at the LH Project on the outer skirts of Joseph.

It’s easy to build one of these toadagama kilns. You just make a giant raised tunnel in your yard out of a few thousand firebricks or so, then get yourself maybe a hundred cords of wood and burn that for about a week, stoking the thing around the clock to maintain the temperature at the better part of a thousand degrees. Then let it cool. Crack er open and see what you got.

Resins and whatnots in the wood lend their colors to the clay en route to the chimney. The resulting finish has a very . . . ‘earthy’ look, if you will. And you will.

Paul, Penny and I went up to investigate all this kiln activity to check in on our friends at LH, including Morgan. We hadn’t seen much of Mr. Jenkins lately, but did get occasional cryptic messages mentioning his newfound interest in ceramics. She seems very nice, by the way.

There were many artists who loaded their work inside this inferno kiln, and it was entertaining to see what pottery emerged and guess who made it based on the style.

I was showing Paul a collection of pinchpot ashtrays and clay garter snakes, saying how nice it was that the local kindergarten class had put their projects in with the professional potters, when somebody set another pinchpot down and said, “Here’s more of Morgan’s work. . . .”

Which I think is great. I don’t know any other river guide who would volunteer in the off season to help preschoolers by sneaking their art into a kiln by pretending he’d made it himself. Well done, Morgan.

I fell in love with sort of an elliptical clay tube basket . . . I don’t what to call it, but I like it. A lot. I need to discover the creator of that pottery shard and commission one of my very own. It sang to me, if you know what I mean. And I want one of Morgan’s clay garter snakes too. He does have a talent for those.

Come to think of it, I’m also very fond of the masks made by Todd. If you’re a member of Winding Waters Nation, you’ve probably met Todd. He helps us a good deal when we can pry him away from the clay ranch. His masks don’t just follow you across the room, they’ve been following me around after I got out of visual contact. Now that’s artwork.

It really was quite inspiring, seeing all that creative juice hardened after a week in the hot box. Makes a guy want to break out the art supplies. And I’m going to, by gum. Spring is bringing on all sorts of flow. Art. Rivers. Sunshine. Green growths. Things are happening.

Here's an appendix, since I can only put two photos up per post. You can't just mention a wolf with roses and skeletal mice cheese platter and not have pictures.

Reeeeeeeediculous. Steelhead fishing is supposed to require long hours of cold perseverance for a brief but spectacular payoff. Six hours of angling per fish is an average I’ve heard bandied about this season. But not on Sunday. Mercy no. Not during that magic hour when I was averaging, say, sixteen minutes between fish. And this is me we’re talking about. As a rule, I don’t catch fish. Certainly not big beautiful steelhead. But I sure did Sunday, after riding down Minam Canyon on the steelhead train and walking into the best day of fishing I’ve had since Alaskan salmon took numbers for the privilege of getting on my line years ago.

This fish train runs . . . well, it goes ten miles an hour, I don’t know if that’s ‘running’ exactly . . . but it chugs nine miles downstream along the Wallowa River, stopping to drop passengers wherever they spy a likely patch of river. You get a lunch and further mobility to new fishing grounds when the train makes a mid-day traverse up and down the tracks. I wasn’t interested in new water. Tom Farnum, our Winding Waters fishing guide, stopped the train for me and pointed to a run nobody else was on. ‘If I were you,’ he said. ‘I’d just stay there all day.’

I would have moved if Tom hadn’t given me that tip. I would have moved just for the sake of getting feeling back in my feet. It was powerful cold early on. The guides on my rod iced over completely. I tried to make a cast but no line shot through. I tried a few more times, because in my style of fly casting, line does not always move through the guides. That style is known as ‘bad.’ But this time it was ice. And frozen feet. And no fish. Ah yes, I thought. Now this is steelheading.

Fast forward two hours. I had just landed my second steelhead. Sun was up, I’d taken off my coat and gloves, even thought about getting down to a t-shirt. Made six more casts and hooked up again. Just got all my line on the reel when the fish decided it had better things to do upstream, ripping a crease in the water while taking line right back off my reel. Another steelhead came up and rolled fifteen feet to my left. And I laughed. Just laughed. Sunny. Warm. A March day that went from freezing to sunscreen weather and I was in the right place at the right time.

The mood on the train was buoyant riding back to Minam. To signal the train to stop, the ‘elephant wave’ is conducted by wagging your arm back and forth as you hold it down. Like an elephant wagging its trunk. And the last group of fisherman made this signal as the train approached, except two steelhead on a stringer were doing the wagging, not their arm.

The steelhead express will make three more runs this season, this coming Friday and Saturday, March 12th and 13th, then the following Saturday on March 20th. For reservations, contact the Minam Motel at (877) 888-8130, or click here for a link to their train info. If you want the inside track from a steelhead professional, I can personally recommend Tom Farnum, who put me into the best day of steelheading I’ve had. Ever.

Rafting guides have a fairly relaxed dress code. Shorts. Torn-up shirts. Flip-flops. That works out well for me, since my wardrobe is heavy on those same items.

But I did gussy up over the weekend for the thrift store formal, a fancypants sort of affair held out here in Wallowa County every year. The idea being to wear your finest Sunday-go-to-meeting threads that came into your possession via somebody else.

I cheated a little bit, as my sweet checked smoking jacket came from my dad instead of a thrift store. But it was bound for a thrift store if I didn’t snatch it, so I give myself a pass on a technicality.

Nothing like a bunch of hillbillies and country folks all polished up and out on the town. Costume jewelry, bolo ties, bearskin coats and heirloom apparel mingled with a faint essence of mothball. Very classy.

My favorite part of the evening was talking to Alyssa, who I used to work with at the radio station here in Enterprise, and her friend as they discussed how odd it was to be wearing high heels. Ten seconds later they both stilletoed through the permafrost layer of the lawn and their heels sunk in, dropping them down three or four inches. They moved over, sunk through again and then just gave up and kept visiting, rocked back on their heels a little bit.

So that’s the last I’ll be needing my one necktie for another year. It’s back hanging on it’s nail and I’m back to wearing jeans and an old t-shirt.

While we’re on the subject of apparel, I’ll help you get packed for your rafting trip with us this summer. Here’s the usual inventory of my drybag for going on a trip through Hells Canyon:

Torso related items: Old t-shirts, one for every day on the river. I also throw in a few longsleeve button-down shirts, good for sun protection when it’s blazing hot and nice to have when it drops a few degrees around sundown.

Fleece. Always bring a fleece jacket. Just nice to have. Also a light jacket. Definitely a raincoat.

What else . . . couple pairs of shorts. Chaco sandals. Baseball hat. Sunglasses. Maybe a pair of jeans for the evening. A towel. A bedsheet to put over the sleeping pad. Sleeping bag. And that’s about it.

In the spring or fall I’ll throw in warm socks, polypropylene underoos, extra rain gear and more warm stuff in general.
For the most comprehensive gear list, you have to talk to Morgan. He outfits himself with the idea that a pleasure trip down the lower Salmon River may detour into a year-long exploration of the Antarctic. The guy is prepared. We’re thinking of getting another gearboat just to carry his various hand drums, guitar and the sporting goods aisle of clothing he carries with him.

There’s a happy medium in there somewhere, and our comprehensive What To Bring list on the main site can help you find it.

I saw a green shoot of vegetable matter poking out of the ground here today, so boating season approacheth. Get your sunscreen together folks, there’s rapids to run.