Spring finally came on the Squamish

It has been a long time coming but spring has finally arrived on the Squamish.  Monday was a good day, cool and mostly cloudy with a spitting of rain but the water was just the perfect clarity.  Only problem was trying to find the fish.  Only bumped into one fisherman who had lost a "9 pound doe Steelhead and I had a witness".  Good to know but the fish including the bull trout were mysteriously absent.  Thursday afternoon was a brighter sunnier day and the warming over just three days had started the spring melt.  

There was obvious cloudiness in the water as we headed upstream, very likely coming from "Mud Creek" which is a creek that is always first to go chocolate mud at the first sign of spring melt or a rain storm.  A slide and or excessive logging upstream causes massive erosion that quickly turns it into a silty torrent that provides a huge portion of color to the main stem of the river.

We were turned back just before Mud Creek as the road crew had just shut down the entire access road up the Squamish-Elaho valley for a one month repair job of the Mud Creek crossing.  This shut off access to the best water which we were hoping to reach.​

However, we managed to find a likely looking section of the river and hiked in for about half a kilometer to a perfect stretch of fly casting water.

With the water clouding up some bright tinsely flies were chosen to grace the end of the line and it didn't take too long for some feisty Bull Trout to tear into them.

What they lacked in size they made up for in spunk and brightness with the beautiful salmon spots on chrome backgrounds.

SThe hope was to tie into at least one Steelhead but we were treated to another view as the new Zeis binoculars helped pick out three mountain goats...no 6 goats...no there are 11 on the hillside, but then there were three more further up making 14 but in the end we thought there may have been as many as 18 spread across the hillside.  They were feeding in the spring sunshine as they navigated the impossibly steep cliffs.  Unfortunately we had left the spotting scope behind so no photos to prove the story, just good memories.

As the sun started to set we headed back towards the road crossing a few sets of moose and elk tracks.  Earlier we had seen some mule deer but now the elk tracks began to look fresher and fresher till eventually we saw them moving through the braided stream bed feeding heavily on the fresh green spring shoots.

We enjoyed watching the very large Roosevelts who seemed in great shape considering the long cold winter that they had just endured and it was very encouraging to see they were doing fine.........All in all, a Steelhead would have been nice, but hey, it was still a great spring day and bull trout + mountain goats + elk + mule deer still made for a mighty fine time!   Tight lines!