Run, FIsh, Beer - The 2017 Lake Fork Flyathlon

Intro

I waited two years to do this race and it was worth it. I first learned about the flyathlon in 2015 when I read an article in 5280magazine about this new event that combined running, fishing and drinking beer. It was hard to believe it, but some genius had combined all three of my favorite things to do in my free time into one event. Unfortunately, it was too late to sign up for any of the events that year so instead I did one of the Sandbeech Lake training run listed in the website. The timing of the events did not work out in 2016, but finally in 2017 the stars aligned and I got to participate in the Lake Fork Flyathlon.

The basics of the flyathlon are pretty straightforward: you run a trail to a mountain lake orstream and try to catch a fish. You get a few minutes deducted off your time for every inch of one of the fish you catch. Then you drink a Colorado beer.

But all the events are about raising money for the preservation of native trout habitat in Colorado and the trails that access them.

Training

There were two folks at this year’s event who were making a documentary (not out yet but you can see their site here). At one point they asked what I did to train and I did not have a good answer other than to say it was all the things I do anyway. With some more time to think on it, there were a few things that, while I wouldn’t call them training, helped.

Even before I learned of the flyathlon I had thought it would be cool to try running to fishing spots and I did some experiments with the gear I would need. This helped me test out what gear I could get away with as well as what configuration would work well for running.

Then few times this year I have taken an hour lunch break and gone fishing on Boulder Creek. It’s about a 10-minute walk from the office. I keep my fishing gear in an REI backpack tucked under the desk. This helped me work through quickly getting the rod out and a fly on the water – because like in the flyathlon my time was limited.

One of my friends testing out the waters of Boulder Creek

Friday

The group campsite was the East Elk Creek Campground which was a surprisingly large group campsite. As promised in the emails and Google Maps, it was about 4.5 hours from Lafayette (after a quick stop to get some growlers at Odd 13). As compensation, Routes 285 and 50 are awfully pretty and about as pleasant as driving gets.

I rolled in around 6 pm and found a nice secluded spot across the creek from the main gathering area.

View from the tent

I then reheated some frozen tortilla soup that Alita made the day before. Frozen soups are one of the best car camping meals. They double as a freezer pack while your driver and make minimal dishes to clean.

Flyathlon tailgating

I then started meeting folks. There were four brothers / brother-in-laws from across the state who were gathered for a fellows family weekend. While we were chatting someone from the dirtbag diaries podcast came up and interviewed us (they incidentally did a great podcast about the new national monument up in Maine and the challenges around making that come to pass).

Eventually we all gathered around the campfire for beers and talk of fishing. I went to bed around 11 pm. There were still several folks up having a great time.

Main Event

The race started at 9 am and it was about a 45 minute drive from the East Elk Campground to the start at the Red Bridge Campground (on the other side of the Blue Mesa Reservoir). I got up around 6:30 and did my usual breakfast of oatmeal. I hitched a ride with the four brothers / brothers-in-law that I met the night before.

Race start at the Red Bridge Campground

At the start Todd, the race director, filled us in on the rules. The road paralleled the stream and you could stop and fish at any point on the way to or from the five-mile turn-around. This year the bonus was three minutes per inch of fish – up to 14 inches when you get five minutes off your time per inch (so three hours of running with a 10-inch trout would get recorded as a final time of 2 hours 30 minutes).

The race got off to its traditional start of “shot-gunning” a light American lager – i.e., the flyathlon founder’s daughters shot a can of PBR with some bb guns.

I took off at a healthy tempo pace of 6:30 miles and found myself rather alone. Based on the advice of the brothers and others I decided to fish early. The first checkpoint was around a mile. There were a few campgrounds immediately after the checkpoint. I kept going for another few hundred meters until I saw a nice set of about three drops. This looked good enough.

The night before I had rigged up a stonefly with a flashback pheasant tail dropper. I started nymphing the first drop and in about five minutes had what looked to be a 10 – 12 inch rainbow. But then it became apparent that I had placed the net on the wrong side of my pack. As I tried to reach around the fish got off. I allowed myself a few second of regret and moved onto the next pool.

After another ten minutes I hooked up with a nice 7 inch brown. I snapped my picture and gave it another five minutes to try for a bigger one. I then decided that I was on the board and it was time to use my speed. I gave my fly set-up to another lady who had also decided that this set of runs looked good and was fishing at the top where I had started.

At the turn-around I took a pull of the Law’s Whiskey (a Colorado native) and booked it on back. Other flyathletes asked if I had caught my fish (and you can just run – although you get a “crippling” penalty and what’s the point of that really?). It appeared I had a good chance of getting the fastest male but I knew that a 7 inch brown meant that I would have to finish well ahead of second place. So I kept pushing.

I finished up in an hour and thirty minutes. With my 7 inch fish that meant an adjusted time of 69 minutes. To celebrate finishing (and I guess truly make it a flyathlon) I grabbed an Uplsope IPA.

I watched the second finisher come in and then I went upstream (away from the race course) to do a bit more fishing. By that time though the sun was pretty high and bright in the sky and the wind was starting to pick up. I came back to the finish area after an hour and talked with the other finishers.

Grand Finale

Back at camp the organizers paired me with the fastest female finisher against the flyathletes with the biggest and smallest fish in a cornhole competition. Sadly my cornhole skills were not on par with my running skills and the big and small fish team prevailed.

Then the big and small fishermen had a bb gun shoot-off for a custom built Sage fly rod. The guy who caught the smallest fish won handily. This fellow had brought his family all the way from Missouri for this event and so it was fun to see him take the “grand prize”.

The rest of the evening was the fine camaraderie that comes with all great fishing and camping trips. I was glad to have come and look forward to defending my title and maybe convincing a few friends that you don’t even have to run to have great time doing a flyathlon.

Run. Fish. Beer. Friends.

Fishing the Frank Church / River of No Return Wilderness (2009)

25 June – 6 August 2009

Background

In Kuwait I can do all the running I please (or in the summer all that I can handle in the brutal heat), but opportunities for other pursuits, like fishing, are somewhat limited. Since I cannot make new fishing memories for a few more months, I will have to suffice with revisiting older ones. The summer after I left active duty in the Army my father and three friends from high school went on an epic fishing trip in northern Idaho.

The region we chose was roughly around the Frank Church – River of No Return Wilderness. There is something about that which just sounds epic, although we did not go down the Middle Fork of the Salmon River*. As with most wilderness areas out west, this one was vast enough that we never lacked for opportunities even though we did not hit this wilderness’ namesake.

"FCRONRWildernes Map" by USFS - US Forest Service

Johnson Creek / South Fork of the Salmon

We started our trip on the small Johnson Creek. I cannot say why we picked it from among the many choices other than you have to start somewhere.

Doing some planing at the Trout Creek Campground

Trout Creek Campground (44.747209°, -115.555123°) is about 3.5 hours from Boise. While there is no special gold-medal water right nearby, there is a wealth of small, lightly-fished streams. The first day we checked out various stretches of Johnson Creek and caught a few nice bows in the 8-12 inch range. The upper stretches of the Johnson Creek were nice meadow areas and produced nice brookies for one night’s supper.

Justin fishes a nice hole on Johnson Creek

Another day Justin and I hiked about 1.5 miles over a ridge to check out the Roaring Lakes (44.743020°, -115.632186°). We parked along Fire Road 467 just south of Trout Creek Camp. We took a pretty but indirect route in an attempt to follow a fire road. On the way back we went a little more directly. If the goings tough all around, straight is sometimes best.

View of the first Roaring Lake from the ridgeline

We each caught a 12-14” rainbow. Although the fishing to effort ratio was a bit off, the views were reasonable compensation.

Roaring Lake 'bow

We also tried out Summit Lake (44.646942°, -115.590025°)  and the South Fork of the Salmon. Both of these were slow. We did however get to see some of the zombie-like salmon that had made it all the way through Washington State and were the definition of spawned-out with chunks of flesh hanging off as they skished across three-inch deep ripples on their relentless journey. We also tried the East Fork of the South Fork of the Salmon River (It’s like Idaho ran out of people to name rivers after). Here we teased up some nice cutthroats with simulators.

Jeremy tries his luck on Summit Lake

Big Creek

On the way to our next base camp we stopped for lunch at the town of Yellow Pine. Yellow Pine is the modern-day definition of a one-horse town – an image that they clung to fiercely. The main drag of town was a dirt road with two restaurants / bars, a hotel, post office and store. Gas could be purchased there for $5/gallon if you could track down the owner to turn on the pump. The town’s claim to fame was its annual harmonica festival in early August.

Yellow Pine makes Nederland, CO look like the big city

This place looks legit. Lunchtime it is.

We set up camp (45.161452°, -115.250760°) and went right to Big Creek that afternoon and caught our first bull trout. Big Creek was entirely in the Frank Church Wilderness. This was nice because it meant no four-wheelers on the path that followed the stream and thus that every fishing spot not on a road had to be earned on foot. Big Creek was particularly attractive because it had a trail that went along its entire 35-mile length to where it dumped into one of the middle fork of the Salmon River. We never got to explore more that the first five miles. A great fishing trip would be to get flown to one end and hike the entire length of the river. I am sure that the middle sections receive little pressure.

Kyle tried a nice deep hole on Big Creek

The bull trout were quite amazing the next day. Both Kyle and my father hooked into ones that fought for over a half-hour. They both had to be released because the bull trout are somewhat threatened and while you can fish for them you are advised to not fish them to exhaustion.

Nice bull trout, bub

The best way we found to fish for the bull trout was to put on a heavy cone-headed streamer (a nice black marabou streamer with rubber legs was our favorite), let the current drag it down and around in the hole and then give it a few strips up. While not the most glamorous method of fly fishing, it produced some big bull trout.

Soldier Lakes

Dun broke the net with that cutthroat

We used the town of Stanley, Idaho to refit and then made our way up to the Soldier Lakes. We set up our base camp at Josephus Lake (44.548668°, -115.143078°) and did one overnight and a day trip up into the lakes. Because this drainage does not have spawning salmon you can keep some of the numerous cutthroats.

The ponds seem to fall into three main categories. There are the very shallow ones which appeared to get winter killed and were almost devoid of life. Then there were the mostly shallow ones with some deep pockets. These had lots of logs and cover along the shore and lots of 8-10” cutts visible and swimming along the shore. Then there were the deep lakes that fished a little slow, but seemed to have the monsters.

Taking a rest between the lakes

We checked out 1^st Lieutenant, Staff Sergeant, Captain and Cutthroat Lakes. 1^st LT lake was somewhat shallow from the shore and you could see the fish swimming around. Captain Lake was a bit deeper and held the biggest fish of the day. We camped along Cutthroat Lake that night. We took cutthroats in the evening and morning that were rising to our parachute adams flies. On the way out we fished Staff Sergeant Lake where Kyle and Jeremy caught a couple of 20+ inch cutthroats.

Soldier Lakes Cutthroat

Travel, Navigating and Getting Around

We primarily used the Idaho Delorme ($20) and US Forest Service Maps ($10 / map). There was another Delorme-style map, Benchmark Idaho Road & Recreation Atlas. This one had a different color scheme and was a little more cluttered than the Delorme, but in one or two maps that I looked at it did have a little more information in one or two spots – but not significantly different. The US Forest Service maps were very nice waterproof, 1:100,000 topo maps with 1mi grid squares (they did have GPS ticks on the edges, but these were not very user friendly for plotting points in the middle as the ticks did not line up with the grid square lines). They clearly showed forest service boundaries, private land and campsites. The campsite key listed the amenities at each campsite.

The other thing that we did that was nice was to plot the lakes (and points on the streams) on Google Earth and then transferred them to our GPS. My father and I used the Rhino 530HCx GPS. They double as walkie talkies and you can sent your location to each other (as long as you have line of site). An alternative would be to use some of the new GPS aps for your smarthphone. I have been using Backcountry Navigator and really liking it. I used these way points to hike into a few ponds that were off the trails.

Terrain

Large patches of the Frank Church Wilderness where we were had been burned. This could be a little soul crushing at times, but there were still ample green areas. Bush-whacking was generally easy with the exception of the burned out sections (where blow downs could be tough slogs). For us two miles is the most I would consider bush-whacking through to get to a pond, and even that could be rough. We could generally make about a mile and hour. The elevation changes are physically demanding, but doable. We were generally between 5000 and 9000 feet.

Weather

Late July through early August was a great travel time. We had one day of rain (the last day) with every other day being sunny or partially cloudy. We had one or two passing rain showers that lasted 5 minutes but the rain on the last day came through with brief quickness and fury when it did come. Temperatures in the mountains were high 30’s to low 40’s at night and into the 70’s and 80’s during the day. Humidity was generally almost non-existent.

Fishing Regs

Much of the fishing regs are based on protecting the runs of salmon and steelhead. But if we wanted to eat we could generally find the brookies in the higher sections of the streams and these, are well, less desirable fish out west with a limit of 25 fish (and not included in catch-n-release trout regs). Many higher ponds allowed you to keep a cutthroat or two which we did for dinner once or twice.

Gear

We generally stuck to car camping with one day overnight hiking trip. If I return though I am definitely going to do some longer backpacking trips. While waders were temping in the cooler hours of the morning I mostly abandoned mine after the first few days and wet waded for majority of the trip. I found a pair of neoprene socks and my wading boots worked just fine. For longer hikes I used a backpack to put my waders, chest pack, net and rod into. The net is definitely worth hiking in as some of these ponds produced some 18-20 inch cuts and both my father and friend hooked into bull trout that needed nets.

I used a five weight rod which was good enough to chuck big streamers but delicate enough for some smaller streams. For bull trout you definitely want a sinking tip spool and some heavy streamers. Kyle did just fine with a three-weight. Anything bigger than a six-weight would be overkill for most of the situations we fished.

Flies

A promising omen while we were packing our gear in the hotel

There were some massive blue wing olive hatches in some of the ponds and lots of stonefly casings. For dries I liked size 14-16 grey parachute adams and grey or white 14-16 caddis flies. Stimulators (with or without rubber legs) were always good as a searcher fly. Tan hoppers were good in meadow stretches. For bull trout we liked big cone-headed black muddler-style streamers. A brown woolly bugger also caught a few nice cuts up in the mountain ponds. Scuds came highly recommended in one book and I caught a few on these as well.

Cutthroat Lake at sunset. Fish were rising everywhere.

* The canyons and current of the Middle Fork of the Salmon River make it rather difficult to access for several miles – hence when you go into the canyon you are rather committed (hence the “no return”). 

Cold Spring Campgrounds

Memorial Day Weekend Camping with a 5-month-old

24 – 25 May 2014

We finally took Knud Peter “Little Man” Hermansen on his first camping trip. I had been talking about camping as a family for several months but it was Alita who, so to speak, took the tent and ran with it. We really enjoyed the campsite and had a fun camping adventure with the growing family and friends.

Group Photo at the top of the Vista Hike

Choosing the Campsite

We settled on Cold Springs Campground in the Arapahoe National Forest near Black Hawk, CO. This modest campsite contained a mix of RV, car and walk-in sites. But the first thing that drew us to it was that it was less than an hour from Boulder. While we did not intend to bail, it was nice to know that if little man decided that he really no longer liked camping we could finish the night in our own bed. The campsite was also very close to Golden Gate Canyon State Park which gave us some great options for hikes (which we did not take advantage of . . . this time).

We stayed at Site 23 which was a surprisingly good choice. There were enough trees around to provide good cover as well as anchor sites for our tarp.

While not as fancy as other set-ups, the tarp performed well

We liked the far end of the campsite. Even on Memorial Day weekend the foot and vehicle traffic around this end of the campsite was pretty light. We camped with some friends and found that sites 19 and 23 made a good pair if you choose more than one. Even though they do not appear to be next to each other they were actually pretty close and easy to walk between

For the far end of the campsite I should point out that locations show on the reservations site map are approximate. For this end of the campsite I put down my own locations on this Google Earth kml file.

The campsite is also pretty family friendly. There is a playground but we did not use this – we had a thousand-plus acre playground all around us.

Hikes from the Campsite

The group of us that came up decided to do this hike that started from a "Vista" trail marker on the far end of the campground. It was a quarter mile round-trip hike that brought one to a beautiful vista that looked over the surrounding peaks and Highway 119. Rarely do you get such reward for so little effort. It was also very doable for the herd of kids that we had with us.

Vista Hike

Calling it a trail may be a bit generous. While it was easy to find a safe way to the top, it was not a well worn path.

As this picture shows, the Vista hike is more of a route than a trail

The other nice walk from the campsite was an old road the departed from near Site 20. It must have been part of the campground at some point because there was a bounty of old campsite markers and even an old toilet. We went about a mile down the road to where it intersected another dirt road. It was an easy walk even if you are carrying a baby (a rugged stroller may even have done the trick).

As a closing gear plug, we found  REI's Hobitat 4 to have ample space for two adults, a pack-n-play and a dog.

Suffice to say we'll probably pitch a tent here again.