It’s snow tire season out here. That special time of year when you get to take friends to Les Schwab, drop them off, drive them back home or to work and then go get them four hours later when their car is ready and bring them back to the tire store.


A special time of year, indeed.

But important. No denying the importance of traction. Two law enforcement vehicles got tangled up in an accident out here recently. Be interesting to see who gets a ticket out of this one, the Enterprise Police Department or Sheriff’s Office. Here’s the news item link.

In art news, I’ve begun work on my winter ice sculpture. This involves letting a hose run into the creek on my property, at the suggestion of the City of Enterprise. Couple years back the water meter for my house froze. The ice crept into my supply line and I ended up thawing the situation with a welder attached to either end by one hundred and fifty feet of cable, cranking electricity through the line at a furious rate.


Yeah, so now I just run a hose and once this sets into a giant block of ice, I’ll do a sculpture of Morgan, posed valiantly at the scout for Granite Rapid in Hells Canyon.

Ah, the first weeks of winter . . . the trainquil silence as you slide into an intersection because you haven’t got your snow tires on yet. The merry crackle of your neighbor’s flue fire livening-up a late afternoon. Waking at 3 a.m. to the happy sounds of your roof shingles being peeled off in a violent wind storm. It’s a time to relect.

Reflect on why in the hell you didn’t get your fishing boat put away sooner, now that it’s got a frozen block of ice up near the bow you’re going to have to chip out in order to move the thing. And reflect further on how your friend Dave borrowed the boat months and months ago, managed to break it and that’s why you didn’t take care of it sooner – because Dave was supposed to.

Such a peaceful time of year. The gentle whir of electric meters hustling around and around trying to feed electric heaters to stave of single-digit temperatures. The gentle tinkle of ice crystals calving off ruptured water pipes.

Ah, I’m just making stuff up now. I don’t have electric heat or broken pipes. That thing about roof shingles is true, but all patched now – thanks to rafting equipment, as I had to rope myself off and for lack of a harness, used my flip line and carabiners that were hanging by my door after our last river trip.


The block of ice in the broken fishing boat is also true. Here it is.


But let’s shift our focus away from that, shall we. Yes, I think it’s best.

Tundra swans. That’s the good stuff. I was out stoking my wood-fired hot tub over the weekend and half a dozen swans flew over. They don’t really honk. It’s more of a . . . a . . . not-honk. And their necks are quite a bit longer than the geese that usually fly by. Impressive. I didn’t get a photo, so here’s an artists rendering, which is really more realistic than if I would have gotten a photo. Except there's only four swans in this rendering, not half a dozen. But you get the idea.


Speaking of impressive, lay your eyes on this here fish that Tom our fishing guide helped attach to the end of a fly rod recently. That is a big, big fish.


And there’s more where that came from waiting for you in the Grande Ronde, Wallowa and Imnaha rivers. Maybe add another layer of longjohns under your waders and bring along the mittens. And have a thermos of something steaming hot at the ready. Then you'll know you're really winter steelheading. The payoff? I mean, look at that fish. Just look at it.

It’s getting late in the rafting season when your gear is frozen to the trailer by the time you get back to the shop and go to unpack what’s become one giant gear-sicle. Metal tables and boxes we could cajole enough by kicking, but the more delicate items like canvas bags and coolers with pads on the bottom we had to pour water on to get free.

Only problem was, the water jugs we tried to do that with were pretty much frozen too, so we were fighting ice with ice, which doesn’t work nearly as well as fire with fire.

It’s been a good late season, and still is. Latest update from fishing guide Tom Farnum includes word of big, big steelhead being caught down around Troy. Not a lot of fish being hooked, he says, but the ones that do get enticed to bite are big bruisers in the 30-inch realm. Most of those fish were being picked up on big prince nymphs.

I never found a slot to work this photo in, so apropos of nothing, check out this dude toodling down the Grande Ronde a couple weeks ago. I think that should be at the top of the evolution diagram…not just rising off all fours and standing, but standing while paddling a canoe.


Well done, sir. I once had a long swim from the middle of a lake when my friend Fargo thought it would be OK to stand in a canoe. That episode didn’t work out nearly as well as this guy here.

In other news, there’s been bunches of big fat quail in my yard. Look at those fellers. Just look at em.


And with the foggy weather lately, I’ll warm up the internets with this here image of a lovely crackling fire outside the warm, cozy wall tent with laughter and good cheer inside, looking forward to a day of fishing in the morning.


Keep that image in mind while you’re scraping your windshield.

Low water rafting is a challenge. Take for example this photo of Morgan last week negotiating a stretch of the Wallowa River above the confluence with the Grande Ronde on one of our Winding Waters camp support steelhead fishing trips.

You’ll notice the river is quite shallow and the boat is weighted down with the luxuries and delicacies we bring on these trips to make a nice home in the wilderness for the fishermen. See how he eases through the riffle and has to hug rather close to the bank, seeking a slender channel that offers an inch or two of relative depth which will make the difference between squeaking through or hanging up. Also, there are larger rocks lurking about that can stop your progress, making it necessary to get out of your boat to pull and push your way off the rocks.

Oh yeah, and there’s a herd of elk in the way. That too. Reading the water doesn’t usually require factoring in how a bunch of enormous ungulates during mating season will react when you float down upon them in a large inflatable vessel. You kind of have to wing it in this case.

Normally this stretch of water would probably be considered a class zero rapid on the scale of one to six. Class one being no big whoop and class six being, say, Niagara Falls. But we’ll go ahead and bump this one up from a shallow non-consequential yawn to probably a class five-plus, seeing how Morgan was fairly sure these elk were about to attack him.

But Morgan is a professional and maintained his cool. Notice in this next photo how he turns the situation to his advantage by shifting his focus from trying to find the tongue or other telltale indicators of deep water, and just follows the stampeding elk herd instead. Nice line, Morgan. Way to use local knowledge.


Another detail you might notice in these pictures are the wooden oars. I had a pair similar to that on my boat, and I say ‘had’ because I broke, um…two of those on this outing. Not one. Two.

The first splintering crack came roughly, oh…say, eighty yards after we pushed off from the put-in at Minam. I went to pivot around the first of many, many rocks I would encounter on this run and during that pivot my oar blade came to rest on the bottom, pressure was applied and the blade promptly cracked and folded.

All righty then. Joanne Gallagher was riding along on my raft and she kindly offered to take over the oars after this episode. We deployed the spare and away she went. Joanne is a kayak instructor and accomplished rafting guide who we met through our friends at Wet Planet, a guiding outfit in the Columbia Gorge.

I once did a trip with Wet Planet on the Owyhee River which makes me cry in the shower to even think about. On that particular expedition I also broke two oars – those were fiberglass, so I’m really branching out. That was another low-water journey and me trying to shepherd a gearboat down that river was not pretty. Not pretty at all.

So she may have heard of my oar-breaking tendencies and was doing a fine job, rowing along – then I looked down and noticed the blade of our other good oar seemed to be cracked. She pulled it out of the water and, yep, two down. This was maybe a mile or two after our first casualty and she hadn’t really put any strain on the thing.

I figure, A) I have a curse. And I know just the witch doctor who put it on me. That’s the last time I’ll ever try to get a bargain on a set of oars in Cajun Country, argue the price and walk away. Never again.

B) Someone sawed halfway through my oarblades as a practical joke. Real funny, whoever you are. You got me.

C) Termites.

So I stole Morgan’s spare for the rest of trip and changed my rowing technique to make sure there wasn’t any more breakage. My new style is to wave the oars furiously in the air, never touching the water, and change the direction of the boat by this fanning action. It’s a little more work, but much easier on the oars.

Paul took it pretty well at the end of trip when I presented him with the set of useless sticks that used to be his expensive equipment. In fact, I think he found it kind of funny – though he sure does laugh in a strange way. Never seen anyone swear so much and clinch their fists and jaw when they’re in a good mood. But he’s from the south and they have different ways.


Aside from all that, many thanks to Tom Kennedy and his fishing buddies Bob, Gordon, Rick, Paul and Lee. My last encounter with Lee as I passed by headed for the takeout was hearing how he’d landed two steelhead and had one get off right there in the same spot where two channels merged below a small island.


We also encountered the Invisible Man on the river. Nice enough guy. Kind of hard to read, though.