PAT NEAL WILDLIFE

See my new Web site

2011-12-09T06:44:00.000-08:00

We are moving to my new site but will leave this blog online to serve as an archive of the past five years. Enjoy it.

Save the heritage apples

2011-11-13T10:23:00.000-08:00

Winter apples ready for the picking.

It was daylight on the homestead.

Early as it was I was more than a little late for breakfast. The homestead cabin had been built in the 1890s by a pioneer.

The Homestead Law of 1862 was the coolest thing to ever hit this country, unless you were an Indian. At the time they were not considered U.S. Citizens.

Indians were unable to file homestead claims on their own land. Everyone else just had to build a residence at least 12 feet square, cultivate a crop and live there five years. That gave you clear title to 160 acres of prime bottom land.

The railroad was coming. The land rush was on. Homesteading was a family affair. Your wife could file a claim. Your kids could too once they were old enough.

The prime bottom land was soon taken. What the Indians called “The Jimmy Come Latelys” were forced to move up into the thin soils of the foothills where farming got tougher.

The homesteaders chopped and burned back the forest to plant potatoes and cabbage amid the stumps. These “stump ranchers” went to great lengths to clear enough land to grow enough food to eke out a living.

By the Great Depression farming got even tougher than that. Many of these wilderness homes were deserted and taken by the government for back taxes.

That's most probably how this cabin came to be abandoned by its family. Since then it was used as a haven in the wilderness for trappers, lost hunters and those that researched antiquity.

In the 1980s the roof of the cabin collapsed in the snow. By the ’90s the 100-year-old homestead cabin was a pile of rotting wood buried in blackberry vines.

The orchard in the meadow was the only sign of man ever being here. These few remaining pioneer orchards are more than just pioneer artifacts. If it's true that we should consider the medicinal and food value of plants in the rain forest before we cut it down, it might be a good idea to save the seed of these fast disappearing heritage fruit trees.

The diverse varieties of apples in pioneer orchards can ripen at any time between august and February. The flavor of these apples, particularly after a frost makes the genetically engineered mush ball that passes for an apple these days taste like the cardboard box it came in.

I'm not the only one that likes these old orchards. If you want one of these old time apples you're going to have to compete with the bears.

You'll probably lose.

These old fruit trees can grow to great heights and bears are just better climbers than we are. And if that last shiny red apple is a little too far out of reach, the bear can just break the branch off.

The bears not only provide a valuable pruning service they are good at eliminating one of the unpleasant surprises you can find in an apple tree, the bald faced hornet's nest.

Finding a hornets’ nest while picking apples can make you scamper down the tree like a squirrel. Bear will just eat the hornet's nest and keep on picking apples.

I've watched bears sitting over a pile of apples the size of soft balls, holding the apple between its paws, chopping them up in her jaws while sucking the cider out, a picture of pure enjoyment.

I scared her off. I would have stolen her apples, if they hadn't landed in bear manure.

My best advice would be to get your apples off the tree.

The wolf problem

2011-11-02T06:47:00.000-07:00

Erosion caused by elk feeding on saplings.

Do not be alarmed citizens. There is no plan currently being proposed by any known government biologist to re-introduce wolves to the Olympic Peninsula.

The howl of the wolf is a true symbol of the wilderness that has not been heard here since the wolves were bounty hunted to extinction back in the 1930s. It was a familiar scenario that was played out across the West.

With the coming of the railroad the human population increased to the point where there was no room for wolves. They had to go.

Since that time, many other species of fish and wildlife such as the 100-pound salmon and the Olympic Mountain moonshiner have become rare, endangered or just plain extinct due to the rising human population. Biologists are only now just beginning to explain how each of these individual creatures is vital to the health of the ecosystem.

For example, I have long contended that the reason for the decline of our salmon runs are caused by “nylon pollution.”

It is my own term for the fact that our salmon are being overfished throughout the extent of their range. I thought there is just too much nylon fishing gear in the water for the fish to survive their journey.

Nylon pollution kills.

I was wrong. According to the biologists, it's not nylon that's killing the fish, it's the elk!

Without the wolves to eat them there are so many elk along the Hoh River that they have killed off the trees, causing erosion, siltation and a rising water temperature, all of which is bad for fish.

According to biologists, if we could just get the wolves running the elk, trees would once again grow along the river, stopping erosion and shielding the water from the sun's harmful rays.

People who may have seen the Hoh in flood stage, when giant spruce trees roll down the river scouring the gravel bars like freight trains, might doubt the elk have destroyed the river theory, but they're not biologists.

The biologists know that any possibility of wolf reintroduction is still too controversial. So instead, the wolves will be “trans-located.”

You probably can't tell the difference, which once again shows why you're not a biologist.

Rest assured that no Canadian wolves will be used in the trans-location effort. Only American wolves will be eligible for this program.

Trans-location calls for moving the wolves from areas in Washington state where people want to get rid of them into places where people don't have wolves yet. However the wolf is reintroduced or trans-located doesn't matter with the health of the ecosystem at stake.

Any responsible wolf trans-location effort would have to include the restoration of the wolf habitat and a corresponding reduction of the human population.

While no biologists is suggesting that people be forcibly removed from their homes for wolf habitat restoration, we would expect those who support the wolf trans-location to move voluntarily.

Any reactionary anti-wolf obstructionists whose bourgeois sensibilities foster an unhealthy emotional attachment to their homes are liable to change their tune and become willing sellers once they are surrounded by howling packs of wolves.

Ideally, the initial wolf trans-location effort would establish a healthy population of wolves where they would provide the most benefit to the ecosystem as a whole and provide optimum enjoyment to the people who want the wolves in the first place.

That is why I would propose we first trans-locate the wolves to a place where people love them, our state capitol in Olympia.

More fish photos

2011-10-29T16:38:00.000-07:00

Here's a few more . . .

The Pacific flyway

2011-10-26T08:48:00.000-07:00

The storms of autumn bring us one of the greatest gifts of nature, the Pacific flyway.

For us sensitive bird-watching types, the North American continent is divided into three major flyways, the Atlantic, Central and Pacific.

These are like highways in the sky for birds migrating from their summer homes before winter. The mass migration down the Pacific flyway represents one of the largest movements of life on the planet. OK, I made that up, but I once saw an incredible migration of whale birds that flew past LaPush in a solid line for three days.

Just recently we saw a mass migration of buzzards that was creepy.

You want to be careful when you're bird watching for buzzards. If they are circling your driveway, you may want to consider going to the dump more often.

If you are fortunate enough to see a buzzard, be sure to keep moving. Don't fall asleep on a gravel bar while watching buzzards.

Remember, buzzards find most of their rotten offal through their incredible sense of smell so you may want to consider bathing once in a while before watching these fascinating birds.

Unfortunately, this is not a perfect world. The same autumn storms that caused the bird migration has brought the salmon back from their northern homes.

The salmon wait for the rain to raise the river so it is safe to swim back up into the mountains.

The harsh demands of salmon fishing often require you to sit and wait for the fish to swim by. Which can often cause our sleep-deprived angler who smells like the cross between a 3-day-old sardine and a tub full of rotten salmon eggs, to slump into a coma?

The first rule of guiding is that you won't get paid if the buzzards get your clients still; it's sometimes preferable that they are asleep when a fish bites. That is because most people's first inclination upon getting a bite is to rear back and set the hook like they saw on a bass fishing show.

Which can cause our angler to fall over backwards and severely injure me?

I used to say you could tell when you got a fish on because that's when the screaming starts. Now I gently wake our angler with a cup of coffee, a smoked salmon croissantwich and a newspaper and ask them if it would be convenient for them to reel in the fish on their line, sometime today.

This gives our angler an opportunity to adjust to their new surroundings and remember why they agreed to go fishing in the first place. Sometimes, by gently reeling in just enough to keep your line tight you have a better chance of landing the fish than if you jerk on the line and hurt the fish.

This can enrage the salmon that has every rock and stick in the river memorized. Chances are that fish will jump around until they break you off. You want to take your time playing a fish. This can take hours.

You might as well be bird watching.

Many people enjoy bird watching until I tell them I charge $5 a bird and $2.50 for ever bird call I think I hear. Others enjoy viewing wildlife until I charge them $10 to see an otter, $20 for an elk herd and $100 for a Sasquatch sighting.

Then there are the beautiful fall colors of the autumn leaves which are free for the viewing for a limited time offer.

Meanwhile, you want to keep reeling in the slack.

The buzzards are circling. It is good to be alive.

A day in the life of a fishing guide

2011-10-19T08:28:00.000-07:00

There is peace at the end of the day to sit before a crackling fire along a fast river beneath a big tree as the sunset paints the colors of the fall leaves to garish shades of red and give thanks that you survived another day in the life of a fishing guide.

City folks laugh and say being a fishing guide ain't work because you're just fishing and that's what you like to do anyway but fishing and guiding are two different things.

When most people go fishing, they usually don't expect to catch anything. People, who travel to the Olympic Peninsula from all over the world to go on guided fishing trips, do expect to catch something. They bring gigantic coolers and great expectations of catching a salmon.

This may be a lifelong dream they have only one day to fulfill. They expect a guide to make a sincere effort to catch a giant fish. If you can fake that you may have a future as a fishing guide.

Size does matter.

People want to catch a fish that's bigger than the one their buddy caught. Exact figures can vary widely. Some fish continue to grow long after they are freezer burnt but the sad fact is you have to catch a fish before you can brag about it.

That's where I come in. I help people with fishing problems.

Disturbed people are constantly calling me for the fishing report. A while back I got a call from a guy from back East. For me back East always meant Montana, but this guy was further back East than that — Chicago.

He said he was an investigative journalist, film critic and all around smart guy.

While investigating the Twilight phenomena, he had stumbled upon my website and decided I needed investigating.

I was told that dealing with journalists was a lot like handling a rattlesnake, don't trust them or they will bite you. Then there is Mark Twain's warning to not pick a fight with someone who uses “ink by the barrel.”

So I did. I took a journalist fishing. He said he wanted to ask me some questions about guiding. Did I really have a guide school? Did the fishing trips include past-like regression therapy? Was I really an unlicensed relationship counselor?

Questions are the curse of the fishing guide because we constantly have to answer all kinds of them like, how high is the mountain? How deep is the river? When will this fishing trip be over? Or, where is my car? And my favorite, where are my keys?

Small wonder the guides have developed a series of hazing rituals for the clients that separate the true fishermen from the wannabes and keep them from asking annoying questions. These hazing rituals usually involve a form of sleep deprivation where the valued client is roused from a sound sleep in the middle of the night and raced around in circles on muddy roads in the dark.

This generally leaves the person disoriented to the point where they forget all about catching a fish. They just want a cup of coffee and a warm place to go to the bathroom.

Instead they are hustled into a boat and hurried down river in the dark while the guide insists they levitate to avoid hitting rocks.

So it's no small wonder the journalist called me “a malignant sociopath spewing misanthropic venom in a crude attempt at humor.”

Someone finally understands.

The journalist caught a salmon anyway, which was revenge enough for one day.

It was good to be alive.

Firewood: Feel the burn

2011-10-12T08:39:00.000-07:00

Lately there was a sprinkling of fresh snow on Mount Olympus.

It’s not be the first sign that summer is over and fall is here.

The great flights of geese and sandhill cranes heading south are another clue that winter is on its way. Causing questions to be asked like, if the birds are leaving why are we staying here, to endure yet another winter in a frozen rainforest?

Be assured this winter will not be as hard as the last. This initial forecast is based on the incidence of spider webs and may require further research.

For that we’ll have to measure the fat on a big buck’s back.

Skinning a buck to predict the weather is a long lost art that is misunderstood by many, including the game warden, so it we'll have to wait for deer season to open to collect more data.

If I had to bet on it though, I'd say this winter will be cold and wet and dark. You may need a big pile of wood to get through until spring.

There are few things I enjoy more than cutting firewood, especially if I don't have any.

In a perfect world we would all cut our wood in the spring so it would have time to dry in the summer to burn in the fall. Unfortunately this is not a perfect world.

I blame the government. They would rather let our public timber rot in the woods than let a taxpayer salvage some downed trees to heat their home.

Toughest thing about getting firewood these days is finding some place to cut it. Whoever said, cutting firewood warms you twice, once in the cutting and once in the burning, was a real greenhorn.

Cutting firewood warms you in more ways than you can shake a stick at:

First, you must start your chain saw, if you have one. Those of us who have tried to cut a winter's worth of wood with a hand saw quickly find out why they are called misery whips.

Starting a chainsaw can be plenty miserable too.

There’s nothing like jerking a pull cord on a chainsaw to warm you up. After five or 10 minutes you may want to check for fuel. Got gas?

Then you may have to get creative. Take out the spark plug and give it a few pulls. Put the spark plug back in.

Continue pulling.

Drag the saw back to the road. Tangle in a mess of blackberry vines. Step into a mountain beaver hole and go down in a pile of limbs, land where a hidden stump catches you in the unmentionables.

You should be plenty warm by now.

This is before you have cut even a single stick of firewood.

It's once you get your chainsaw started that the real fun starts. With a good sharp chain pulling into the wood, the sawdust pours out of the log like water from a hose. The smell of the pitch, the roar of the saw and the ache in the lower back takes me back to an earlier simpler time when loggers ruled the Earth.

Splitting, loading, unloading and stacking the wood to dry, allows you to become intimately familiar with each piece until you could almost name them all. These are often bad names, given after you bark your shin or smash your toe.

Toughen up, cutting firewood is a contact sport.

It is all worthwhile at the end of the day when you have your first chimney fire.

This is yet another one of the many ways that firewood can warm you.

Fin-clipping follies

2011-10-06T07:35:00.000-07:00

Steelhead with clipped ventral fin from Sol Duc River.

Lately someone asked me when it was a good time to catch a salmon.

Which seemed like a funny question at the time.

Kind of like asking when it's a good time to win the lottery.

The trouble is a lot of the time you can't fish or legally keep the salmon you catch because of an absurd regulation that requires you to release a fish with an adipose fin and only keep the fish that's had this fin clipped at the hatchery. This brutal mutilation is painful and provides an extra degree of handling and stress at a time in their lives when these young salmon are about attempt a true miracle of life, swimming from fresh to salt water.

Hatchery summer steelhead with clipped
adipose fin and large predator bite.

The survivors swim thousands of miles to the northern sea and back where a fleet waits to catch the fin clipped salmon. This may require you to catch many unclipped fish in the process.

Making it possible to go out and catch fish all day and come home without one to eat. Meanwhile, hungry seals have been following you around snacking on the worn out fish you just fought to the boat and released.

The mortality of catch-and-release fishing in the saltwater would be tough to guesstimate since the seals eat the evidence. In the Frazier River where they put released fish in pens up to 45 percent of them died.

We had good salmon fishing in the salt chuck last summer.

I wonder how many thousands of salmon were fed to the seals and crabs in the name of conservation. All done in an effort to determine if a fish was a clipped hatchery fish, a wild fish or an unclipped hatchery fish.

Some hatcheries don't bother to clip their fish for a variety of reasons. Other fish hatcheries clip other fins, the ventral, pectoral and dorsal are hacked off at random for reasons my research has failed to discover.

This can make for an interesting series of fishing regulations.

I have spent years studying the fishing laws in an attempt to translate them into English. The most difficult part of cracking this code was the little known “credit card” edict. Also known as “The Game Warden Employment Security Act,” that requires you to release any fish with a dorsal fin wider than the width of a credit card, whether it is clipped or not.

It is a severe test of sporting ethic to reel in a 20-pound hatchery steelhead with half its dorsal fin missing, only to find what's left of the fin is wider than a credit card.

It is at this point you are even required to release what is obviously a hatchery fish. Causing some of the locals to practice alternative “filet and release” fishing methods.

The clipped fin rules were designed to allow a selective harvest of hatchery fish because they are presumed to be different if not inferior to the wild ones.

What is the difference between a 20 pound wild or hatchery steelhead? Scientists are still studying the problem. Meanwhile thousands of clipped fin salmon are getting ready to swim up rivers where you can catch and legally keep up to four a day.

The best time to catch salmon is before they have been in the fresh water long enough to turn red. Wait till after a hard rain turns the river brown. This will bring bright salmon up the river.

When will it rain? If I knew the answer to that question, would I be writing a column about clipping fish fins?

How to break a fishing rod

2011-09-28T08:15:00.000-07:00

September steelhead

It was daylight on the river. The faint glimmer of an autumn sun hid behind the jagged peaks of Mount Olympus.

As the sun rose the surface of the water was transformed into a shimmering reflection of red, gold and blue that mirrored the colors of the sunrise. If, as the famous philosopher what's-his-name said, “Hell is other fishermen,” this was a fisherman's heaven, without another person in sight.

Solitude is a rare thing.

Every year hordes of anglers journey to the Olympic Peninsula in search of solitude.

Until it's gotten so crowded you'd better pack your own rock to stand on if you want to fish near the water.

Then there are so many boats on the rivers it's become more like a demolition derby than fishing.

These days it may be a good idea to carry some extra boat bumpers or hang some old tires around your boat in case you are rammed.

Rear-view mirrors on your river boat might come in handy just in case you don't have eyes in the back of your head. You never know what's coming down river behind you.

It's generally bad trouble. Some of the boats carry potato guns and seal bombs so it might be a good idea to stow a tennis racket on board to ward off these impolite hazards to navigation.

Not this morning. The river was mine.

Wading to the water’s edge I hurled a spinner across the river where it dangled on a tree limb. What might seem like a bungling attempt by a casual onlooker is actually a technique it has taken years to perfect.

You can argue with me but you cannot argue with modern science. Our native runs of salmon and steelhead have been evolving for millions of years which, according to Darwin's theory would explain why these fish are getting smarter every year.

The fish have spent their entire lives watching people throw stuff at them. By the time a fish has reached adulthood they have pretty much seen every fancy cast there is. Except one, as a fishing guide who fishes more than 500 days a year on our local rivers, I was able to develop a cast the fish have almost never seen.

Though difficult to master, my tree limb lure presentation simulates a mutant tree creature falling in the river, creating a feeding frenzy that can stimulate strikes in the most lock-jawed lunker.

Rookies attempting this technique without expert instruction often make the mistake of trying to retrieve the lure from the tree limb. I have found it is much better to strip out line and lower the lure into the river. This allows you to fish water that would have been way out of range, if you hadn't cast into a tree.

Slowly, I let out line until the lure just touched the surface of the water.

Then it happened. There was flash of silver and a swirl in the water the size of a truck tire.

The lure disappeared, the line ripped loose of the limb and took off downriver, peeling 200 yards of 20-pound mono-filament in the time it took you to read this.

The great fish jumped four feet in the air, reflecting the colors of the sunrise on its silver sides. There was a sickening crack as my rod broke about a foot from the tip!

That's what I told them back at the tackle shop where I got the rod anyway. It sounds better than the truth, “I slammed it in a car door.”

Don't it?

Tale of 2 rivers: Elwha and Queets

2011-09-21T11:46:00.000-07:00

Queets River

To study the effects of the Elwha dams removal it might be helpful to look at the Queets River.

Fall on the Elwha River

The head waters of these rivers were known as “Terra Incognita” until the U.S. Army sent Lt. Joseph P. O’Neil and his mule trains to climb the Olympics and bring back a map.

A member of O’Neil’s expedition, Pvt. Harry Fisher became lost after climbing Mount Olympus on Sept. 20, 1890, and wandered down the Queets River.

Fisher reported that the Queets was like “a camp in Barnum’s menagerie as far as sleep was concerned.” Between the thrashing of the salmon in the river and the breaking of brush by the large animals hunting the salmon he had a hard time sleeping.

On Sept. 26, Fisher was hailed by an Indian, also named Fisher who offered the lost private a canoe ride downriver.

Fisher described floating the Queets in the cedar canoe watching his new friend hitting fish 20 or 30 feet away with a forked spear. After spearing six large salmon he quit fishing.

Fisher describes his “staunch friend” watching the many splashing salmon with “Pride, as a farmer would his cattle.”

He mentioned a weir that was built across the river to intercept the salmon.

Queets silver salmon.

A recent float down the Queets River revealed a far different world than the one described by Pvt. Fisher.

There are no homesteads or fish drying racks. There are no V-shaped ripples in water four feet deep made by giant king salmon swimming upriver in uncounted hordes.

There were no dead spawners on the shore that used to feed the trees, the fish and birds.

There is no dam on the Queets. Its pristine habitat is protected within a national park.

What happened to the Queets salmon that made them as rare as the Elwhas?

Maybe it’s the nylon. Nylon pollution can negatively affect fish through every portion of their lives.

Salmon pair up to dig a nest in the gravel. The nest is called a redd.

The government loves to count redds as a way of predicting future imaginary fish runs. Once identified as a shallow depression of freshly turned gravel, redd surveyors put nylon ribbons in the redds.

Fish routinely abandon redds treated in this manner. Redd surveyors love flagging the streamside bushes with plastic ribbons. This provides a free streamside guide to any lowlife that wants to snag the spawners off their beds.

Once the baby fish hatch they face many dangers in their life’s journey starting with, the smolt traps. A smolt is a baby fish that’s migrating downstream to the ocean. A smolt trap can block the entire width of a small stream.

This stops the upstream spring migration of steelhead and sea-run cutthroat. It allows any fish migrating downstream to get into the smolt trap and eat the smolts.

Otters and bears love smolt traps. Floods can wash the smolt traps up in the woods. If they survive the smolt trap, the fish have a chance to make their way to the open ocean where the real danger lies.

The bottom of the ocean has been plowed by the trawl fleet that kills the bait fish salmon need to survive. Then there are miles of drift nets, purse seine nets, ocean gill nets and landing nets of the sportsman and commercial trollers.

The surviving fish that return to our rivers face more nylon, the maze of tribal gill nets. The fish that survive the gill nets are targeted by sport anglers who will fish them back upstream to their redds.

I certainly hope someone is studying the problem.

Dam party? No so fast

2011-09-14T07:37:00.000-07:00

“Do you want to go to a party?” my fancy friend asked.

Of course, I want to rock ‘n‘ roll all night and party every day.

That's a job description for a wilderness gossip columnist.

Then I found out it was the dam removal party put on by the National Park Service.

Bummer.

In the course of my work I have been kicked out of Olympic National Park so many times I have a permanent stain on my trousers.

It's a bum rap.

In my own defense I can only say that no Olympic marmots have ever been harmed, electro-shocked or molested in the writing of this column. I’ve never transported Canadian fishers equipped with radio collars across county lines just to mess with the biologists tracking them.

I have never been charged or convicted of impersonating an endangered species.

I am a sensitive woodland creature trying to share my love of nature and the knowledge gained from 50 years of fishing. That is a blink of an eye in the life of a river but in that short amount of time, our rivers have been subjected to an environmental genocide that makes it seem unlikely the fish will survive another 50 years.

The Elwha dam removal project may be the biggest thing to hit Port Angeles since the coming of the railroad. Those were the good old days, when Port Angeles had a salmon fishing industry and a yearly salmon derby.

These days the salmon fishing industry has been replaced by the salmon restoration industry.

The dam removal celebrations will bring together celebrities, politicians and the best scientists money can buy in an attempt to restore the most pristine ecosystem in the continental United States. This is a risky undertaking where to quote another great American, former Vice President Dan Quayle, “If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure.”

We are told that taking the dams out of the Elwha is a grand experiment since no one really knows what is going to happen to the sediments behind the dams or if the fish can still make it up the river.

The lower Elwha dam had a blowout shortly after it was built in 1913. They blasted 40,000 cubic yards of rock into the channel to plug the hole. It's still there.

In the early '70s there was a landslide that blocked the Elwha up in Convolution Canyon. This is also called the Grand Canyon of the Elwha, located upstream from Hume's Ranch. The slide blocked the river and formed a small lake that was fantastic fishing until it was washed out by a flood. Unfortunately this slide occurred deep within the National Park so there were no loggers to blame and it can happen again at any time.

The Elwha dam removal project is an experiment, like one of those old black and white horror movies where the scientists are out to lunch while the monster they created slowly comes back to life.

It is a double blind study that will measure the unintended consequences of the placebo effect. It will test a theory that contends taking the dams out of the Elwha will bring the salmon back when rivers without dams don't have salmon either. I hope so.

We sincerely hope that the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe can do what no others have accomplished on the Olympic Peninsula, restore an historic run of fish on just one of our rivers.

We hope that despite the best efforts of scientists and politicians, salmon will be able to return to the Elwha anyway.

Until that happens it's too soon to party.

Spinner fishing

2011-09-09T08:14:00.000-07:00

Coho caught using a spinner.

Of all the ways there are to fish I think I like the spinner best.

Bait fishing is OK, if you don't mind smelling like bucket of rotten shrimp, fish eggs and worms. Chumming can be effective, depending upon your definition of the term but that's another subject.

Fly fishing is a fun way to see how far you can cast, if you don't mind using the fur and feathers of birds and animals to tie a fly, to catch a fish, and let it go, if you can.

People who fish with spinners like to cast as far they can, up into the tree limbs no matter how many times I told them the fish aren't up in the trees until the water's higher.

Fishing with a spinner can allow you to watch one of the coolest things you'll ever see on the river. That's when you watch a fish follow your lure and grab it. This is when many folks jerk the spinner right out of the mouth of the fish.

Or maybe you don't get a bite. No matter, you cast again and again, repeating the same failure while hoping for a different result. Which could confirm Einstein’s' theory of insanity, or mean you are fishing a spinner.

This is my story.

It is about fishing the Olympic Mountains in the good old days before the statute of limitations thing went by. I don't fish up there much anymore.

What with the plate tectonics thing, that pesky Juan de Fuca plate is just offshore shoving the continental plate higher and higher as you read this. It's a sad fact that those mountains are a lot steeper now than when I was a kid.

That's when I fished the best spinners on the river if only because I made them myself, out of red glass beads and a hammered brass blade strung together on a wire with a hook on the end. It was all you needed when you hit the trail with the sure knowledge there would be trout for breakfast, every morning.

We'd lower ourselves down on windfalls in canyons on the upper Elwha and cast these spinners into deep holes where we could watch the magic happen.

Being a light line enthusiast at the time, my line was only four pound test. We were after all, just trout fishing.

Until a Dolly Varden about three feet long came up and grabbed my spinner. They call them a bull trout now but whatever it was dove down into the rocks and broke off immediately.

I tied on another spinner but we were running low. This was not a good place to run out of gear, many miles from a trail head with days to go before being picked up.

Before we knew it there was only one spinner left between me and my hiking buddy. No matter, you could almost catch fish with your hands during the evening bite when the surface of the river boiled with feeding trout.

Still, even an expert can make a bad cast.

There it was, our last spinner hanging on a fir limb just bigger than a pencil, out over a cliff, above a rapids. There was no way four-pound line was yanking that off.

There was no way to climb out for a spinner rescue.

There was a shale slide nearby. We threw sharp-edged chunks of shale at the tree limb. About a half a day later we hit the same spot enough times to break the limb.

We rescued the spinner and didn't lose it anymore.

Nothing wrong with hatchery fish

2011-09-01T07:26:00.000-07:00

Hatchery summer steelhead

People are free to believe what they want: Salmon always return to the stream where they were spawned.

Not true.

Salmon and steelhead often return to the wrong stream. That's how they colonized new watersheds after the last Ice Age. Others believe hatchery fish should not be used to restore an ecosystem.

The experts doing the complaining about hatchery fish are usually part of the salmon restoration industry.

Salmon restoration is a complicated process where a river is studied, managed and fished until the fish are endangered. This opens a floodgate of federal endangered species funding which falls from the sky like manna. The money is used to hire consultants, publicists and earth moving machinery that looks good in the newspaper.

The restoration folks don't raise fish. This would sort of defeat the purpose since if the fish weren't endangered, no one would pay to restore them.

Instead of raising fish, they build log jams in hopes an imaginary fish can make it through the nylon and spawn there some day.

Hatchery fall coho

Until then the river is studied, managed and fished some more.

When all else fails, blame the loggers.

For an example of the salmon restoration industries cynical manipulation of our natural resources we need look no further than the Elwha River.

It is the largest salmon restoration effort in the country. They are taking out two dams to open 70 miles of pristine habitat that will allow an estimated 400,000 salmon to return to the river.

Never mind that our other Olympic Peninsula rivers, the ones without dams, don't support their historic numbers anymore. The salmon restoration “experts” claim the fish could come back to the Elwha without fish hatcheries.

They call fish raised in hatcheries “zoo fish” that could hurt salmon recovery by “weakening the genetic pool” of the fish native to the Elwha.”

The experts claim the trout that were trapped above the dams remain truly wild. They don't remember the good old days when the state pumped thousands of rainbow trout into Lake Mills, or when biologists flew thousands of hatchery smolts by helicopter to the upper Elwha to see if they could make it through the dams.

They did.

Washington started raising fish in hatcheries back in 1890. Billions of hatchery salmon, trout and steelhead have been released into almost every river, lake and creek in the state.

The fish hatchery was first built on the Elwha after the Elwha dam was built in 1913. This hatchery washed out soon afterwards.

In the 1970s a Chinook rearing channel was built on the Elwha. By then the hatchery workers could only find 12 female Chinook to spawn in the whole river.

Within a relatively short time they were spawning 1,000 Chinook a year. The Elwha facility could have restored the tens of thousands of fish that once supported a salmon fishing culture but fish hatcheries generally fail after you fire the workers and stop feeding the fish.

Meanwhile, nobody knows what the sediment will do to the salmon once they take out the Elwha dams or if the fish can make it upstream without a helicopter.

Given the way salmon and steelhead stray from one watershed to the other, it isn't a matter of if there will be hatchery fish in the Elwha but a question of when.

Is this a bad thing? Isn't it better to have some hatchery fish than no fish at all?

I am just a humble fishing guide but I never saw anyone complain about a hatchery fish when it was on the end of their line.

Mergansers mark autumn

2011-08-25T08:21:00.000-07:00

It's hard to say goodbye to a summer that was never really here.

Summer must have passed while we were waiting for it to show up.

There were the signs of autumn.

There was fog on the salt chuck.

The vine maple leaves started turning red.

One day a flock of mergansers flew up river and I knew that we were in for it.

There were 17 birds in the bunch, a mother and 16 babies.

I'd seen these birds before.

Mergansers are a big fish-eating diving duck about the size of a mallard. The males almost look like mallards with their iridescent green heads. Unlike a mallard the mergie has its webbed feet strategically located further astern to help it dive underwater.

Instead of a duck bill, the merganser has a hooked beak full of tooth-like barbs that make it a fish eating machine. Mergansers spend their winters fishing on the salt water.

With the coming of spring they fly upriver to mate and feed on the downstream migration of anadromous fish that are headed to the ocean.

The colorful plumage of the male merganser is a stark contrast to the pale brown feathers of the females. There could be many reasons for this. Females are attracted to bright colors but they want to be camouflaged proper to nest.

The mothers get killed defending their young from predators so it figures there are a fewer females than males. The excess male population needs some pretty nice feathers to compete in the brief mating game.

When it is over, the males fly back out to sea, to the north in great flocks, to spend summers working on their feathers. The females are left on the river to raise a brood in a world where everything wants to eat them.

She begins by laying her eggs in the hollow cavity of a cottonwood tree that might be a 100 feet or more above the ground. When the eggs hatch the ducklings have to get out of that tree or starve. They pile out of the nesting tree with only a cushion of salmonberry bushes to break their fall.

Then they head to the river to get something to eat. Their mother keeps them in the shallows near shore eating bugs and the baby salmon that have just hatched out of the gravel. It is at this time that counting the number of chicks in a merganser brood can indicate the health of a river. In the upper Elwha where there are no salmon you just don't see many mergies. In the Hoh where there are salmon, I saw sixteen babies in one family. The most I've seen is 22!

One or two will ride on their mothers' back while the rest paddle along to keep up. The mother has to feed each one individually which can make for a long chow line.

While she is catching fish for her brood, the mother has to be on guard constantly against all the animals that want to eat them. Imagine having a picnic with the children where you have to catch the meal. While you are poking around for a fish, a crow is pecking at one of your babies.

Overhead a pair of eagles, who have young to feed, are waiting to swoop down for an easy meal. On shore there are raccoons, snakes, mink and weasels all hunting baby ducks.

So when you see a mother mergie flying upriver with the same number of chicks she started out with, you know she was a good mom and summer is over.

A marmot problem

2011-08-18T04:39:00.000-07:00

Olympic marmot in Olympic National Park

By now it's apparent to even the casual observer that much of last winter's unusually deep snow pack in the Olympic Mountains is not going to melt before the coming winter.

The inevitable consequence of this phenomenon could have a dramatic impact on the quality of life that we all cherish.

As a responsible journalist I am not about to waste valuable print space spreading fear, innuendo and rumor about a devastating natural disaster that could hit us like a freight train at any time in the next 10,000 years. It is however a cruel irony that the effects of global warming could include increased precipitation.

In our mountainous regions this precipitation could occur as snowfall that is deep enough to survive the summer. Let's say last years' unmelted snow is buried under another record snowfall next year and the next and the next.

It is only a matter of time before the vast weight of new snow falling on the old, compresses the mass into ice.

It is then only a matter of more time before the ice begins to flow downhill to join with more ice which could create a glacier many thousands of feet thick.

This has happened before. In the last Ice Age Western Washington was covered with ice, clear down south of Olympia!

Archaeologists have long speculated that early man was able to survive on the edge of this harsh environment with the development of fur clothing.

In the event of a new Ice Age, however, modern man might not have this luxury since wearing fur is now politically incorrect thanks to the animal rights people.

While a modern Ice Age could directly impact man's ability to survive, it could also threaten our already endangered species with a deep freeze of global proportions.

I can think of no more dramatic example of an animal friend that desperately needs our help right now than the Olympic Marmot.

The marmots live in cozy, flower lined dens with territorial mountain views. They spend most of the year hibernating. When the marmots are awake they spend their days picking flowers, eating, breeding and raising their young without having to go anywhere.

I have spent years studying these rare and unique creatures in an effort to translate their “language.”

The marmots communicate with a series of whistles that warn each other of backpackers. These are people who carry big loads on their backs while wandering around pretending to be homeless.

The marmot language is easy to understand. They are making fun of us.

As a way of giving back, I volunteered to carry out a survey of the declining numbers of marmots in Olympic National Park. My marmot survey methodology involved a high-tech solution to this complex problem by employing electroshock procedures with state of the art surveillance techniques. It was hoped that by electroshocking the marmots out of their holes, they could be numbered and fitted with collars that would carry cameras back, deep inside the burrows.

This would unlock a treasure trove of data about the marmot's private lives that could make them the stars of their own reality TV show. Despite the initial promise of this new research I was unable to find federal funding for our furry friends. This is unfortunate since the marmots need our help more than ever. If the marmot dens remain covered with snow all summer, we'll have to dig them out by hand.

It might be the only chance the marmots have to survive until the next Ice Age.

We'll thank ourselves later if we do the right thing now.

A good day to be alive

2011-08-11T08:38:00.000-07:00

I took Bret and Dave out fishing recently and fish they did.
They wrote nice things about me here and I am sure you can tell why.
Check it out.

The well-equipped camper

2011-08-11T08:28:00.000-07:00

It's the simple things that I enjoy most about camping, like the smell of burning driftwood and watching the sparks from the fire shoot up into the sky to join the stars before they fade.

Or land on your tent to smolder as you remember you forgot the fire extinguisher.

Then there are the night sounds of the wilderness. The distant hoot of the owl, the electric crackle of the bug zapper and the gentle murmur of a 2500-watt gasoline-powered generator that tells you it's summertime and the living is easy.

Experienced campers know you must organize your supplies and prioritize your equipment to maximize your enjoyment of the outdoors.

Life in the wilderness can test a woodsman’s skill. There's a lot more to wilderness survival than being able to start a fire with just a single highway flare, cauterize a wound with gunpowder or siphon gas.

The first rule of camping is to avoid taking along a lot of useless stuff that you just don't need.

Still it's the little things that can make a big difference between a memorable outdoor experience and a life-threatening disaster that tests the endurance of the human spirit.

I once knew a camper who put all his food in plastic bags to cut down on weight and save space. Unfortunately he was too busy writing a newspaper column to label the plastic bags.

Relying instead on a keen culinary instinct to tell the difference between sugar and spice, I carefully measured a cup of Borax, a type of powdered soap used to cure fish eggs for bait, into the morning hotcake batter.

Breakfast was served to the campers without a single complaint. They must have known.

Camp cooks are chosen by a time tested process where anyone who complains about the cooking is the new camp cook.

After breakfast there were activities involving a foot race to the restroom facilities.

I avoided the shame and disgust of the pit toilet with what could be the most important piece of camping equipment to come along since the turkey fryer, the campers' portable flush toilet.

When using the camper’s flush toilet you really should read the instructions and maybe not enjoy the use of this product inside your tent. Especially while leaving an overfilled campers' espresso maker on top of your 60,000 BTU propane crab-cooker.

After the fire, I wished I remembered to pack the wet-dry camper's vac.

Instead I shoveled out the tent the best I could and tried to dry the mess with a gas catalytic heater and a battery powered ceiling fan. That's when I noticed my queen-sized campers' air bed was as flat as a soapy pancake.

I tried to find the leak by pumping the air bed up with my campers' air compressor but the batteries were dead.

By then it was time for a relaxing morning shower with the propane powered hot water heater inside the collapsible camper’s shower stall. Be sure to follow all safety instructions and check the temperature reading on your camper shower’s system or you could get scalded and go hopping around the campground like a singed grease monkey.

The rest of the day I spent doing the chores that need to get done to keep a camp running. I changed the oil in the generator and filled it with regular gas.

I put white gas in the heater, replaced the batteries in the fan and compressor and refilled the propane cylinders on the turkey fryer, crab cooker, hot water heater and lanterns.

By then it was time for dinner, which was hotcakes again.

Lake Crescent: A look into its deep history

2011-08-03T07:43:00.000-07:00

Mount Storm King across Lake Crescent.

A recent peninsuladailynews.com survey asked some locals about their favorite place to take visitors. Some said the mountains or the beach but no one mentioned Lake Crescent.

This is unfortunate since this beautiful body of water has played such a large role in making Clallam County what it is today.

There are two theories on exactly how Lake Crescent was formed. Either by the Cordilleran Ice Sheet that covered the area until about 14,000 years ago or by a landslide sent from the top of Mount Storm King by the evil giant Seatco that ended a three day battle between the Clallam and the Quileute and dammed the Lyre River forming Lake Crescent.

It was said to remain uninhabited, haunted by Seatco until 1849, when two Hudson Bay trappers paddled their canoe from Victoria, across the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Crescent Beach. From there they worked south into the foothills of the Olympics where they discovered Lake Crescent.

Trappers are generally secretive. They don't want to give away their best hunting ground. Lake Crescent remained largely undiscovered until the summer of 1895 when the U.S. Navy Pacific Fleet under the command of Rear Adm. Leslie A. Beardslee dropped anchor in Port Angeles harbor.

What was an isolated frontier town welcomed the Navy with open arms.

Beardslee was a known fisherman. Wanting to make a good impression the city fathers wisely took the admiral on a fishing trip to Lake Crescent where he caught 350 trout in one day! The admiral spent so much time fishing at Lake Crescent they named a trout after him.

The Beardslee trout and the Crescenti, named after the lake, are unique species that occur only in Lake Crescent.

E.B. Webster in his classic book, Fishing in the Olympics, describes the Beardslee striking a lure at 25 mph, peeling hundreds of feet of line while jumping six or seven feet in the air. Webster saw a fight between a Tacoma angler with light tackle and an 11-pound Beardslee that lasted for three hours and 45 minutes!

Eventually, a dozen fishing resorts popped up around the shores of Lake Crescent trying to catch the admiral's fish.

In 1912 Dr. Louis Dechman built a health spa resort on the North Shore of the lake called, “Eugenika, Goddess of the Better Race Sanatorium and Biological Institution.” The name was later shortened to “Qui Si Sana, Here is Health.”

Dr. Dechman was a promoter who claimed he could cure influenza, tuberculosis and childhood paralysis. Some of the locals said he cured bored housewives with something called bio-therapy. This involved the complex process of ‘cleansing the blood,’ whatever that meant.

English writer Fitzherbert Leather described the strenuous health regime at Qui Si Sana, breathing plenty of ozone rich air with seven course gourmet meals and fine wines served in the luxurious main hall and healthful walks through the fabulous gardens and orchards filled with statues exhibiting themes of breast feeding and female pulchritude at its finest.

Sadly, Qui Si Sana did not last. Only two of the historic Lake Crescent resorts survive to the present. Lake Crescent Lodge was originally Singer’s Tavern. That's where President Franklin Roosevelt stayed when he toured the Olympic Peninsula in 1937 to consider the creation of Olympic National Park.

In 1938 the Park was dedicated at the nearby Rosemary Inn, which has been restored as the Olympic Park Institute. Lake Crescent is not only a beautiful place, it has a lot of history for such a small area which makes it a great place to take a visitor.

The do-nothing Arctic summer

2011-07-27T08:14:00.000-07:00

Hoh River: The silver lining above

By now I think we've all had it up to here with people who complain about the weather. This has been a wet summer.

The locals used to say “if you don't like the weather, go back to where you came from,“ except in this case it's mostly the locals doing the complaining. Meanwhile visiting foreigners, Californians, New Yorkers and such, think our weather is a tree-shaded paradise on earth where you can sit outside at night without melting into a puddle of sweat on the pavement. Many tourists have come here to escape a national heat wave that's turning our bread basket into a dust bowl.

“Got rain gear?” I ask the tourists just to mess with them. It's a shock to victims of heat prostration, dehydration and other medical terms I can't pronounce. Rain gear is the last thing tourists think of when they visit the rainforest.

Some tourists mistakenly think they have rain gear. Usually it's a thin plastic poncho that gets ripped when you try to put it on.

Around here if ain't rubberized, it ain't rain gear. That doesn't mean you won't get wet if you have good rain gear. If you move at all you're going to sweat inside a rubber suit. The fact is you are going to get wet.

The trick is not to care. Just remember that you are mostly water. Experts tell us to drink eight glasses of the stuff a day but who has time? It's much easier to just get rained on and soak the minimum daily requiment through your hide.

Rain is good for you in many ways that researchers are only beginning to explore.

There's no finer example of the healing, restorative qualities of our damp climate than to drive through a flooded campground full of soggy tourists early some morning after a heavy downpour.

A night in a leaky tent can transform heat stroke patients into hypothermia victims. This can heal relationships by drawing people in the pits of a vacation grudge, closer to the fire in an attempt to get warm.

Inevitably, the tourists decide they can't take the rain any more. They return to their sun- baked existence with a new appreciation for sweltering, enabling us to accomplish one of the major goals of the tourist industry, getting them to leave.

Incredibly, people who live here sometimes complain about the rain. They say it's been raining so hard “you can't do nothing.” Not true.

When it's raining too hard to mow the lawn, weed the garden or unclog the septic tank it's a perfect time to do nothing. The fact is that in our modern society of labor-saving this and time-saving that, we often don't have time to do nothing. This is unfortunate.

Scientists are only now discovering the health benefits of doing nothing. Studies have shown it can lower your heart rate, respiration and blood pressure. It's a good way to avoid exposure to the sun's harmful rays.

Nobody ever heard of anyone getting a fog-burn or having a suspicious growth cut out because it was raining, no.

The rain tends to keep people safely indoors doing nothing. It does not require energy which makes doing nothing an affordable, sustainable, environmentally responsible activity the whole family can enjoy. Even better, our politicians haven't dreamed up a permit for doing nothing.

Not yet.

Every cloud has a silver lining and the rain gives us all a chance to do nothing. If you do nothing else this summer join the millions of others who are already doing nothing.

There's nothing like it.

The art of tourist baiting

2011-07-19T08:44:00.000-07:00

Elwha River

Now that the tourists are here it's easy to remember why there's a season on them.

The Olympic Peninsula is a recreational wonderland that encompasses a diverse variety of really cool biomes from ocean beaches to rain forests to alpine tundra and glaciers.

Tourists come here from all over the world to clog up our roads and ask stupid questions like, “Does it ever stop raining here?”

It's not their fault. Tourists are an important raw material in a major industry. We want the tourists to come here, have a great time spending money then go back home.

Still, it's tough for the tourists to soak in the scenic splendor if it's raining so hard they can't get out of their car without a survival suit.

Luckily, tourist season is different than the fishing or hunting seasons. There is no limit and it is still legal to bait the tourists.

Misleading the tourists is a form of amusement the locals have enjoyed since the first European visitors arrived. The Native Americans routinely told the first explorers that not one of them ever went up into the mountains because they were haunted by everything from hairy giants to a thunderbird that was big enough to pick whales out of the ocean and drop them on the glacier.

Recent archaeological discoveries and tribal testimonies have shown the Olympics were inhabited for thousands of years with camps and trails all through the mountains. Obviously, the Native Americans wanted to keep it for themselves and not ruin it all by blabbing.

Our pioneer forefathers had their own ideas about baiting tourists. Many of them claimed to know what was up in those mountains. They said all you had to do was push a boat up the river to where you would find a lake and a prairie and maybe even some Indians that still hunted buffalo. Hearing this tall tale the Press Expedition of 1898 wasted no time in buying some green lumber, (from one of the pioneer forefathers) to build a boat.

The expedition wasted weeks building and pushing the leaky boat up the Elwha in the snow before abandoning the craft. Then mushing on to discover a camp of Elwha's with a big fire and elk quarters hanging up where they said no Indian ever went. The Expedition claimed the Indians were ignorant of the country.

I doubt it.

By then the Elwha heard through the moccassin telegraph what the white man did to the buffalo and didn't want the same thing to happen to the elk. That would come later anyway. Meanwhile, the Press boys plowed upriver into the teeth of the worst winter in 100 years. Then emerged from the mountains in the spring, starving and shipwrecked on a sunken raft. Never to return. There was no mention of a lake.

Later, tourists were told of the great mineral wealth that was waiting to be discovered in the Olympics. Mountains, streams and lakes were named after the gold, silver and iron you were sure to find if you had the right equipment. Promotions like these put Oil City on the map at the Hoh River.

Recently the government has come up with a new way to bait the tourists. We are going to take out the Elwha allowing an estimated 400,000 salmon return to the river.

We don't have to tell the tourists that our other rivers that don't have dams don't have fish in them either.

Just say the Elwha Dam removal is the largest project of its kind. The tourists will be so impressed they might not care if it's raining.

It really gets my goat

2011-07-13T06:59:00.000-07:00

Thank you for reading this.

Being a wilderness gossip columnist is a responsibility I take very seriously.

Enquiring minds want to know: “What do you do when you're attacked by a mountain goat?”

People used to think that you're more likely to get bit by an alpine alligator than gored by a mountain goat but that isn't true. Just last year a hiker was fatally injured by a mountain goat on a popular hiking trail near Hurricane Ridge.

This tragedy confirmed my own fear of mountain goats that goes back to the last century. It is a time referred to as B.C. (Before Color). There was only black and white television.

There were only two TV channels and they were Canadian, eh.

It was before video games. Children were encouraged and nurtured to spend time outdoors engaged in unsupervised activities before the parental guidance committee gave you some chores. Virtually unknown today, chores were menial tasks that could be in violation of today's child labor laws.

Being ignorant and oppressed we couldn't wait to get our chores done to engage in yet another forgotten practice — the family activity, where an entire family could be squeezed into the same vehicle, driven to a remote location and forced to backpack.

It's a degrading practice where you walk up a primitive trail while carrying a burden that contained everything you needed to survive in the wilderness — cocoa.

In that unenlightened age, you could drink out of a stream or build a fire anywhere. So we did. On clear nights we slept beneath the starry heavens, uncluttered with satellites.

It was early one morning during a backpacking episode that I saw my first mountain goat. Everyone was still asleep.

I opened my eyes to see a giant white horned monster licking the dew off my mother's hair just a foot or so away. The goat was huge but then everything seems bigger when you're small and looking up at it.

I froze. The goat looked me in the eye. I hoped I didn't have any dew in my hair. After a while the goat walked over to sniff through the ashes of the campfire. Then he scampered up a cliff and stood like a statue watching us.

At the time it never would have occurred to us that the mountain goat was dangerous. Back then families included the now-endangered father figure.

My old man was a logger who always carried a good sharp ax. If a mountain goat got frisky it was liable to end up on the barbecue.

Mountain goats are not as cute and cuddly as they look. They have been known to kill grizzlies.

Except for falling off a cliff, nothing much kills a mountain goat because they are tough and live on mountaintops that no predator except an eagle can get to.

Mountain goats seem to know this. They are intelligent animals that toy with humans by rolling rocks or playing “chicken” on the trail where one or the other must get out of the way and it ain't going to be the goat.

Lately, National Park Officials have proposed punishing the humans for the goats bad behavior by closing trails. Until then you are advised to shout and wave your arms at the goats but that has been tried with tragic results.

It's better to shout, wave your arms and shoot the goat. The rest of the non-native goats will soon get the message and go back to digging up endangered plants instead of attacking people.

We'll thank ourselves later if we do the right thing now.

Save the crabs

2011-07-06T08:04:00.001-07:00

Nothing says summer like a boiling pot full of Dungeness crab.

They are worth whatever they cost and that can be a lot if you consider the price of crab pots or ring nets and the boat you need to set them with. Wading the tide flats might be cheaper but you have to put in your time and wait for the right combination of an outgoing tide and calm weather to spot the crab scurrying through the eelgrass.

Then you have to scoop up the crab before he heads for deep water and you go over your boots.

These days the crabbing rules, aka the Game Warden Employment Security Act, are stricter than ever for good a reason. Every year there are thousands more people who want to go crabbing.

The Seafood Watch program of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which monitors fish harvest worldwide, said our crab harvest was sustainable. This abundance of crab may have been caused by a population cycle or the fact that we have exterminated the predators of the Dungeness crab like the true cod, leaving more crab for us to catch.

By harvesting only the large male crab we eliminated another predator since crabs are cannibals that prey on their own species. Releasing the female crab lets them lay more eggs. Releasing undersized crab lets them grow larger by moulting, that is they shed their shell and grow a new one.

Moulting crabs look pale and feel soft and there is no meat in them. There is no point in trying to cook a soft crab no matter how big they are. All you'll get is a pile of empty shells. The soft crabs will get bigger if you release them.

These may seem like small details but the only way we are going to keep crab fishing is if we release the small, female and soft crab.

A recent performance audit of the recreational, noncommercial crab fishery by the Washington state auditor, Brian Sonntag said the long-term population of the crab could be endangered by an estimated 45 percent of recreational crabbers who kill female, undersized and soft shelled crab.

These figures along with all other numbers in the crab fishery are disputed among the tribal, commercial and sport crabbers but they do show a trend. Sport crabbers tend to be outlaws. In one enforcement study only half the sport crabbers recorded their catch on their punch card. Even if the catch is recorded only one third of summer crabbers and 10 percent of winter crabbers report their catch. This in spite of the fact that I had to pay an extra $10 for my next license for not reporting that I didn't go crabbing.

One of the greatest threats to crab are the thousands of pots that are lost every year. There are many ways to lose your crab pot like setting it in 50 feet of water with 40 feet of rope.

Or maybe you've got too much rope and it tangles with your prop and the buoy gets cut loose. Or you set your pot in water with a heavy tidal current that just washes your gear away.

Lost pots generally just keep fishing unless you have a biodegradable cord that lets the crab to escape. Unfortunately many of the sport fishing pots do not allow the crabs to escape.

Thousands of crab die a cruel slow death only to rot and get counted as part of the catch quota.

Don't be stupid or cruel, follow the crab rules. The crab you save could be your own.

I'm a beaver believer

2011-07-06T07:55:00.000-07:00

Lake Crescent

It was daylight on the river. We were fishing for the summer Chinook, steelhead and cutthroat trout in the crystal clear waters of the Sol Duc river.

I noticed there was something wrong with the water that day. A small tributary was running mud brown sludge into the crystal blue water of the main river. I wondered what sort of industrial criminal would muck up a creek in this enlightened age of strict environmental legislation so I walked upstream to find out.

What I saw was a textbook example of environmental degradation.

Trees were being cut right on the shore of the creek. Whoever was doing the cutting must have been a real greenhorn. You could tell from the high ragged stumps that looked like something from the bad old days of logging when we didn’t care how much timber we wasted.

The trees were dropped right in the water so it was no wonder the creek was running pure mud. Even worse, whoever cut this timber didn’t even bother to truck it to town. The wood just was dumped in the creek and covered with mud. It was an ugly mess that choked off the stream so tight that not even a Bull trout could wiggle through.

What was once a virgin stream in the pristine wilderness, had been transformed into a stagnant pond full of even more unsightly brush piles.

“Beavers,” my fancy friend said. I knew that.

The exploration of America was personally financed by the beaver. Their fur was used to make felt hats. The Hudson’s Bay Company was formed in 1670. They said it was to find The Northwest Passage, a water route across North America, but all they really found was an “inexhaustible” supply of beaver.

The explorations by the HBC, aka “here before Christ,” fur brigades gave Britain a claim to 670,000 square miles of what we now call the Pacific Northwest. The United States claimed much of the same area based on the discovery of the Columbia River by Captain Robert Gray in 1792.

While he was there Captain Gray traded some iron chisels for 300 beaver hides. This set off the treachery and slaughter of the fur trade where metal, gunpowder, alcohol and diseases were introduced to indigenous stone-age cultures. This was seen as a civilizing influence at the time.

Competing fur companies tried to kill every beaver in a given area to discourage anyone else from exploring or settling. For a while it seemed that whoever skinned the most beavers could claim the most land.

The Hudson Bay Company was a powerful British monopoly that was a force for law and order on the frontier. The HBC stopped the cutthroat competition in the fur trade by banning the sale of liquor to the Indians. Hudson Bay fur brigades routinely lived with the Natives.

It was often the only way to survive in a dangerous wilderness. The company was in business for profit. It had no interest in taking Indian land or wrecking their culture. That would come later.

Trapping was a hard and dangerous life. Either alone or as a member of a fur brigade, you worked in winter when the fur was prime. Wading in freezing water by day and hiding from the Indians at night with no fire.

One fur brigade leader described the lot of his trappers as “worse than a slave’s.” At least a slave had a roof over his head at night. The only job benefit a trapper had was in seeing the country before it was ruined.

This country was discovered, named and settled by trappers.

Hudson Bay trappers John Everett and John Sutherland became the first permanent European residents on the Olympic Peninsula. In 1849 they paddled their canoe from Victoria to Crescent Beach where they were adopted by the Clallam tribe.

The trappers worked inland they discovered two lakes.

The Indians said the lakes were haunted by the evil spirit Seatco. He was a bad tempered cannibal giant with a habit of knocking down trees on his victims. Once when the Clallam and Quileute tribes were having a battle, Seatco started a landslide that buried them.

It took more than an evil spirit to stop the HBC trapper when there were beaver hides involved.

As the story goes one lake was larger than the other and since John Everett was bigger than John Sutherland they named the smaller lake Sutherland and the big lake Everett. It was later changed to Lake Crescent.

Luckily for the beaver, the felt hat made from beaver fur has fallen from fashion. The beaver have recovered much of their former range. If you’re lucky you can still find a beaver pond and watch them work. Beavers build canals, dams and houses with nothing more than sticks and mud and a lot of hard work.

Beaver ponds slow flood waters in the rainy season and conserve water when it’s dry. Many species of fish and wildlife depend on beavers for a part of their life cycle. The coho (silver) and chum (dog) salmon like to wait until high water and swim as far up a creek as they possibly can. If they can get into a beaver pond these fish have it made. Beaver ponds are fish hatcheries. They offer a refuge from winter floods and summer low water.

Compare this to the human's bungling, corrupt excuses for salmon recovery.

Beavers are not only smarter than people, they work for free.

I can think of no better time than our nation’s birthday to thank the beavers for everything they have done to make this country what it is today.

Permit this

2011-06-29T08:39:00.000-07:00

It's been another tough week in the news. From now on you will be required to have a permit to be on Washington state land for any recreational activity.

To be or not to be on state land is not a choice for many of us. The state owns waterways, tidelands, rivers, lakes and vast areas of hinterland all over the Olympic Peninsula.

Chances are if you drive through the woods and get out of your car you will be on state land. Once out of your car you are technically engaged in a recreational activity, which is defined by the State as “if it isn't commercial, it's recreational.”

Charging the public to get on public land is not a new idea on the Olympic Peninsula. At first Olympic National Park charged an entrance fee.

Later the U.S. Forest Service came up with their own permit for their land. Then the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service started charging money to go on the Dungeness Spit.

The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife invented a “Stewardship Access Pass” to park at their boat ramps.

Now with the state being broke and going deeper in the hole every day it only makes sense that we would be expected to pay to go on State land.

The new “Discover Pass” will cost you between $10 and $11.50 a day and $30 and $35 per year depending on where you buy it and a $99 fine if you don't. The money from the sale of these permits and the fines they will incur is hoped to make up for a $10 million dollar budget cut in our Washington State Park system and a million dollar shortfall at the Department of Fish and Wildlife.

You are required to display your Discover Pass on your rear view mirror (along with your Stewardship Access Pass and other appropriate permits if you should wander into Federal Jurisdictions) so that it can be recorded by law enforcement agencies.

Passholders should use an appropriate degree of caution once you get all required the permits hanging from your rear view mirror. If all these passes obstruct your view out the windshield, you can get a ticket for that too.

Many of the Discover Pass purchasers are expected to be out-of-state tourists who for the first time will have an opportunity to share the burden of supporting the state right along with the residents. Tourists come here with money and it doesn't matter much how we get it out of them.

What better way to say “Welcome to Washington!” to our many visitors than to write them a ticket by which to remember their visit to Washington.

Besides stimulating the tourist industry by writing the tourists tickets, the Discover Pass will provide additional opportunity for the state to gather information on our visitors. That will produce valuable new statistics and a database that will allow the state to monitor citizens more closely.

Unfortunately all these state passes may not go far enough to keep our state solvent. What we need is a new permit for those who have not yet had the opportunity to participate in the permit process.

By requiring a permit to walk on the sidewalk the state could close a vast loophole for people without permits. People walking on the sidewalk would be required to display the permit on their sleeves. The permit could be small, colorful and shaped like a star. Every citizen should have one, to share the burden.

We'll thank ourselves later if we do the right thing now.

Summer on the water

2011-06-22T11:25:00.000-07:00

Hoh River Canyon.

And then it was summer.

The fog cleared long enough for the snowcapped Olympics to bask in the hot sun. A winters worth of snow began to melt all at once.

You could hear it in the mountains roaring down the canyons making the creeks and rivers grow larger every day. It's not the greatest time to fish the river with the water rising fast and coloring up but you never know.

The scenery of the rain forest in summer is worth the float.

You want to be careful when you are on the river and the water is high. The locals tend to head for the swimming holes once the temperature swelters above 65 and we don't want any accidents. Water safety is a matter of life and death around here.

I can think of no better example than the bunch I saw on the Hoh River. We were floating downriver cursing our luck when we saw an attractive female standing on a beach. She appeared unaware of our presence, a pretty young thing, lithe as a thoroughbred, with her cinnamon hair shining in the sun.

It just so happened we were in one of my favorite fishing holes so I anchored up and threw out the gear. By then my sick fishing friend was ogling the sunbather with binoculars. Even worse, they were my binoculars!

Hoh River Rock Garden.

I couldn't get a good look. Just then two youngsters trotted out onto the sand.

“She looks a little young to have twins,” my know-it-all friend said adding, “I'll bet they had different fathers.”

People can be so cruel and judgmental. I explained to the Cretin it's a common practice for one mother to babysit while another has lunch with her friends

The mother waded out into the river like she was going to cross a busy street, which looked impossible for anything without gills.

“Hoh” means “fast moving water” and here it looked like a giant washing machine with enough logs stuck in to make it fun. The youngsters just stood there looking at mom like she was an idiot so she waded back and walloped their butts into the river.

“Some babysitter, “the chauvinist said. “Why would she try to cross the river in the rapids where the babies can drown?”

Upper Hoh River and Western Olympic Mountains

“Because of what's back in the woods, “I said, “lions and coyotes and bears.”

Elk like to calve on flat ground. Mothers have to leave calves to feed. Predators cruise the river bottoms eating elk calves. That’s unless they have a good mom or a babysitter.

Just then we saw a coyote trot out of the brush. The coyote was still soaking wet from being in the river.

This game had been going on for a while. Coyotes hunt in pairs and packs that drive the game into an ambush. Now they had the calf elk trapped on a gravel bar with the rapids on one side and a pack of coyotes on the other.

The mother elk drove the babies into the river where they had to swim then turned and charged back into the brush like she was going to stomp a coyote. The baby elk made it across and stood shivering on the beach, bleating for mother who was nowhere to be seen.

What could we do? What would you do?

You better not do anything at all. Leave the baby animals alone. The mothers will be back.

If it is a mother elk you had better be gone by then. Elk can stomp lions and coyotes and bears.

What makes you think you're so tough?

Book review: A reader's link to good sausage

2011-06-16T07:27:00.000-07:00

Every year along about this time the family freezer is looking as empty as a promise on one of my fishing trips.

Maybe you were lucky enough to get a deer or an elk last fall. By now the backstraps, filet and big Sunday roasts are just a memory.

All that is left is a big pile of packages marked “stew meat.”

If you're a duck hunter you've probably got a some birds you didn't get around to sharing with friends, family or loved ones.

Many people are prejudiced about ducks. They get that way after trying to eat one.

Ducks and geese on the Pacific Flyway can fly nonstop from the Arctic.

That makes them tougher than grandma's Army boot with a fishy aroma from eating seaweed, spawned out salmon and sand fleas once they get here.

The first step in cooking a duck is to get rid of that duck taste. That's why they make good sausage. The theory being if you mix in enough other ingredients no one will notice it's duck.

It's a good way to clean out the freezer and get ready for another hunting season.

Making sausage is an American tradition. The Lewis and Clark Expedition Journal entry for May 9 1805 mentions Touissant Charbonneau making Boudin Blanc at their camp at the mouth of the Milk River on the Missouri.

Lewis described Charbonneau as “perhaps the most timid waterman in the world” and the most worthless member of the expedition.

His rifle misfired, his canoe tipped over — no matter. Charbonneau, being a Frenchman had a way with the women. His wife Sacajawea, or Bird Woman, also called “Janey” by Captain Lewis, may have saved the expedition in a number of ways.

Charbonneau could also cook. This is a valuable skill in the wilderness.

The Journal describes Charbonneau filling six feet of buffalo gut with a mixture of finely chopped meat and kidney fat mixed with salt, pepper and a little flour. The stuffed gut was tied off and boiled then fried in bear oil until brown.

How could making sausage be that tough? Read on.

Once I had a bunch of meat from an old rutting buck that was so tough you could not get a fork in the gravy. The meat tasted something like a cross between a billygoat and burnt rubber.

It was perfect for making sausage. I took it in to the butcher shop to have it ground. They were all sorry when I came back. Apparently a package of ribs had gone through the grinder with the mix. My sausage was full of bone splinters. I had already bought all of the equipment, and supplies.

Toughen up. I was going to make some sausage. I figured if I used enough spices people wouldn't notice the bone splinters.

I stuffed the mix into some industrial guts and strung the saggy mess in the smokehouse. It may have got a little too hot. Some of the sausage was covered in charcoal. I sliced off a piece and boiled it in the kitchen. The aroma had us open all the doors and windows.

Then I fried what was left until the smoke alarm went off.

That was some sausage. Darned good if you warned people about the bone splinters first. It would stick with you all day in fact.

It gave me nightmares.

If I had it to do over again I would have held the bone splinters. I know that now.

I just read an excellent book on making sausage without endangering yourself or others.

“The Complete Guide to Sausage Making” by Monte Burch, 2011 Skyhorse Publishing, is the best book I have read on the subject in a long time. It gives you the complete instructions you need to make gourmet food out of game meat.

Hunting costs a lot of money. Food is expensive.

We owe it to ourselves to make use out of every part of the animal that we harvest.

Hold the bone splinters.

Book review: Beyond Catch and Release

2011-06-08T08:44:00.000-07:00

Lately someone asked me how the fishing was.

The fishing is bad and getting worse. I blame myself, but really the fishing was ruined shortly after the coming of the railroad. Extinction is a by-product of civilization, marching across the continent from sea to shining sea until until it got to the Olympic Peninsula. By the time I started fishing the old-timers were making fun of us kids not having anything left to fish for. We didn't know any better so we kept fishing. Fifty years ago we could not have imagined the inexhaustible runs of salmon and steelhead would disappear forever. We would never in our wildest nightmares have imagined a big book of fishing regulation that currently runs to a hundred and forty six pages in the State of Washington. If history repeats itself, you ain't seen nothing yet.

“Beyond Catch & Release: Exploring the Future of Fly Fishing,” by Paul Guernsey, Skyhorse Publishing 2011, is a book that explores the future of fishing in a way that makes me glad I am old.

As a fishing guide I thought the whole point of going fishing was to catch a fish. No. In “Beyond Catch and Release” we learn that fishing “entails a responsibility to be as good a fisherman or woman as we possibly can.

Knowledgeable and skillful, embodying a universal set of ethics-shared values, respectful attitudes and right behavior towards the outdoors, fish, wildlife and people who inhabit them.”

At first I wondered what planet these people are fishing on. The author lives in Maine where the fishing was ruined over a hundred years ago by people who had killed off the fish in Europe. Maine is the last sanctuary of wild Atlantic salmon in America.

Coincidentally, the Peninsula is now the last sanctuary of wild steelhead so maybe we can get a clue to just what the future of fishing holds for us here.

To look at the future of fly fishing we must look at the past. Guernsey quotes a Treatise on fishing written by the English Prioress Dame Juliana Berners in the 1400s which boils down to, close all the gates, pray and don't be a pig or you won't have anything left to fish for.

The funny thing is, that's pretty much the same advice Dame Claire, my mother, gave me 500 years later.

These days there are increasing numbers of people going after fewer fish. Many of the rules have been changed to the point where you must release the fish you catch.

Even catch-and-release fishing is offensive to the animal rights people who claim fishing subjects the poor fish to pain and fear for the sport of watching a creature suffer.

Catch-and-release fishing was banned in Switzerland in 2009. Don't think it can't happen here. If history serves, it is only a matter of time before catch and release with single barb-less hooks is restricted in the New World.

In the future there may be no catch and release at all. It will be “touch and go” fishing that is, fishing without a hook on your lure.

Until then, the author of “Beyond Catch and Release” recommends that if you should accidently kill a fish while fishing you should “eat it as sort of a sacrament.”

Making a sacrament out of the fish reminds me of a painting by the Ketchikan artist Ray Troll whose caption read, “Fish Worship: Is it Wrong?”

Yes. Worshiping things is a uniquely human trait that invariably results in the destruction whatever we worship.

Tourist season strikes again

2011-06-08T08:31:00.000-07:00

It may be just a coincidence that tourist season and bug season start at about the same time.

These seasonal pests have a lot in common. Both rely on warm weather to awaken from hibernation. The tourist hibernation is not what medical science calls true hibernation. They are watching TV. There are many good shows on TV that can remind you why you don't go on vacation.

The Discovery Channel “Dual Survival” show recently hit the Olympic Peninsula Rain Forest.

The program followed the whacky misadventures of two bickering worry warts who were having no fun.

In other words, average tourists on vacation.

One of the odd couple was a barefoot hippie. The other was a Rambo impersonator. Both tourists were wilderness survival experts chock full of useless facts like, did you know that you can eat tree bark? It's a survival trick from the Donner Party.

Is cannibalism ready for prime time? I had to stay tuned.

First, the tourists flipped their canoe in a white-water river. All of their gear and supplies either sank or floated away. Don't worry, our heroes had a support team along for health and safety regulations. As for the fishing and hunting regulations, those went out the window once the survival experts decided they needed to kill an elk and/or a steelhead if they were going to score in the ratings.

During one crucial moment in the show, the hippie found a broken beer bottle, but you have to find some full cold ones for bragging rights around here. A broken beer bottle is a clue that you're under the road it was thrown from.

The road leads to town where you can search for edible cheeseburgers. That's about the only legal food in the rain forest these days that's available without a fishing license, tags, stamps, punch-cards and a season with size and bag limits.

Instead the hippie made the broken beer bottle into an arrowhead that Rambo fixed on a homemade arrow he was going to stick some poor elk with.

Fortunately, Rambo was unable to wound an elk. Instead he “found” a turkey wandering in the forest. There are no wild turkeys on the Olympic Peninsula so it must have come from a nearby farm.

Rambo managed to bag the tame turkey, adding rustling to his wilderness rap sheet.

Meanwhile, on a creek nearby, the hippie was illegally harassing spawning steelhead with a wooden gaff hook.

All he could catch was a fish that was already dead. That's illegal too.

The tourists built a fire and feasted on the poached steelhead and stolen turkey before wandering to the ocean. How they missed a logging road is anyone's guess.

Too bad. They might have gotten picked up by The Rygaards on Axmen. Instead they built three fires in a triangle shape which is an international signal to the authorities to come and write you another ticket.

The Dual Survival dudes hoped some nearby crab fishermen would pick them up so they could be on “The Most Deadly Catch.”

That might have been an out of the frying pan, into the fire thing.

Eventually a plane flew over and wagged it's wings and the show was over.

We don't know where the tourists went next. We're just glad they did.

Permit this

2011-05-25T09:06:00.000-07:00

Hang on to your wallet!

The Washington state Legislature is working overtime.

They plan to require the public to get a permit to be on state land. This is not a new idea.

The National Park Service began charging the public to enter their parks years ago.

At first there was a problem. The fee station at Olympic National Park's Mora campground near Forks was burned down but the rest of us just shut up and paid up.

The National Park Service is always short on cash. They can't maintain the historic roads, trails, shelters and campgrounds that generations of Americans had assumed was a birthright. And now that the Elwha dams and the lakes behind them are being destroyed for the return of the mythical 100-pound salmon, the Park will need even more money.

The Park Service plans to celebrate the dam removal with a really big party inviting the President Obama and “A list” of celebrities like Jon Bon Jovi, who is already reportedly not coming. He was big in the '80s, but even has-been rock stars don't work cheap. Bon Jovi's hair spray bill alone could bankrupt a Third World nation.

Once the Park Service started charging money it was only a matter of time before the Forest Service got into the act with a permit of their own.

Not wanting to be left out of the revenue stream the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife began charging money for a permit to park at their boat ramps. Part of the money was used to maintain the luxurious outhouses this journalist made a career writing about.

A really desperate tourist once asked: “I really need a permit to go to the bathroom in Washington?”

“Depends,” was all I could say.

There still ain't no law against baiting tourists.

Now the state wants to charge people for a permit to go on state land. This is an idea whose time has come but of course there are some problems.

The state has shut down so many of the roads that go into state land that you could have a hard time finding any.

The state boundaries are so poorly marked you might never really know if you are on state land until you get a ticket for being there without a permit. Or you could have the wrong permit.

Let's say you're going camping up the Dungeness River. You'll need a state permit to make a bathroom stop. Then you'll need a Forest Service permit to park and have your car robbed at the trailhead and maybe a Park Service back-country use permit to walk up the trail and camp.

Unfortunately all these permits might not produce the billions required to keep this ship of state from sinking.

Does this mean we just give up trying to tax our way out of a financial meltdown?

It's time for a more creative permitting process. If we are going to charge the public for a permit to drive or walk on public land, is it fair that we let others use our cities crumbling infrastructure for free?

I think it's time for the state to require a permit for people who walk on the sidewalk. Literally, millions of these pedestrians walk on sidewalks every day without contributing their fair share to society.

With the increasing price of gas, people are forced to walk on sidewalks. A state pedestrian permit could offset decreasing revenues from the state gas tax.

These free-loading pedestrians clogging our worn-out sidewalks have had a free ride for too long. The state should require a pedestrian permit.

We'll thank ourselves later if we do the right thing now.

Fishing just for the halibut

2011-05-20T07:30:00.000-07:00

It was daylight on the water.

A dark headland loomed above the port bow.

Ahead there was a narrow inlet squeezed in by a low sand spit to the starboard.

We were at the mouth of Sequim Bay. Formerly the site of a Clallam village first described by Vancouver in 1792. The Clallam caught whales stranded inside Washington Harbor until whaling stations in Victoria and Aberdeen put an end to the practice.

Later, an actor the Indians called “The Duke” anchored up in Sequim Bay. That was John Wayne.

He had a yacht named the Wild Goose that he used to fish the Strait with from Sequim to Neah Bay. He donated the ground for a marina on Sequim Bay, which is about the fanciest fishing facility I have ever saw.

The restrooms at the John Wayne Marina are like a trip to the day spa where you can turn on the hot water and let the cares of the world wash away no matter how hard they beat on the door.

Be aware, the restroom is only open from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. so you might have to make other plans.

You can't expect to sleep in till six in the morning and expect to catch a fish, especially not a halibut in the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

The place was packed with more than $1 million worth of fancy boats trying to back down a two lane ramp that was paved all the way down in to the water.

Compared to the way I launch my boat, lowering the poor thing off a cliff with a chunk of crab line, this was the Indy 500 of fishing.

I had to catch a halibut. And not just any halibut. I needed one big enough to win the fishing grudge match of the century. I'm not one of those psychos that has to catch a bigger fish to secure my own feelings of self-worth, no.

My old editor, Jeff Chew, was on another charter boat fishing for halibut. The honor of the fleet demanded I catch a bigger fish.

Deep sea fishing for halibut is not for everyone. You have to enjoy the rhythm of the pounding waves with the icy spray of salt water in your face and the smells of the sea and diesel and oil exhaust churning the greasy breakfast burrito and battery acid coffee in your gut while you try to convince yourself and others in the same boat that you've never been seasick.

After a pounding ride that took about a century we stopped at the secret halibut hole. The secret must have been out because there were plenty of other boats there.

I let out line, a fish prayer, gave my fish call, chummed, meanwhile I was still letting out line. As luck would have it I got a bite just as soon as my gear hit the bottom. It took a while to reel that big halibut in.

We had the harpoon and a riot gun loaded with buckshot ready to subdue the beast but I had to get it to the surface first.

Once I saw the fish however, I knew I could never harm such a beautiful creature.

Then after a quick picture and congratulations we released the trophy for some other lucky angler to catch another day.

That's what fishing means to me — giving back to others while humiliating your fancy friends in their big fancy charter boats.

The air was sweet with revenge on the way back to John Wayne Marina.

It was good to be alive.

Olympic Peninsula history, a timeline

2011-05-19T08:29:00.000-07:00

New Dungeness Lighthouse, since 1857, Dungeness Spit

14,000 Years Before Present, Manis Mastodon Site. The remains of a butchered mastodon and a spear point in a rib bone represent the oldest evidence of human activity in the Pacific Northwest.

9,000 Years B.P. Archaeological remains found on James Island at mouth of Quileute River.

6,000 Y.B.P Elk hunters camp made of posts and cattail mats with stone oven for baking camas located on the edge of the Sequim Prairie.

3,000 YB.P. Hoko Rock Shelter inhabited by Makah fishermen.

2500 Y.B.P Tse-wit-sen village built at west end of Port Angeles Harbor. The 335 Human remains and over 100,000 artifacts unearthed by a construction project represent the largest pre-contact burial site in the Pacific Northwest.

219 B.C. Chinese tradition tells of a mysterious foreign land to the east of Japan they called “Fousang.”

1285 Marco Polo called this new land “Anian.” The fabled Straits of Anian were said to reach across the continent. Renaissance explorers were sure this was a shortcut to the Orient, a land rich in gold, spices and souls waiting to be converted to Christianity.

In 1513 Balboa discovered “The Western Sea” later named the Pacific Ocean and claimed all of the lands that it washed for the King of Spain.

1579 Sir Francis Drake was raiding Spanish ships full of treasure they had looted from the New World. To avoid pursuers, Drake sailed round the tip of South America and up the west coast looking for the “Northwest Passage”, a shortcut to England. Along the way Drake landed in a harbor he named “New Albion” to claim the land for the Queen of England, repair his ship and bury 17 tons of treasure. The debate has raged since then whether Drake's “Port Albion”, was the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

1592 Juan de Fuca, a Greek navigator claims to discover the Strait that bears his name for the Viceroy of Mexico. Few believed this claim since there were no records. Juan De Fuca did mention a stone pillar at the entrance of the strait.

1639 Japanese Government decreed all junks must be built with open sterns and large square rudders that were unfit for ocean navigation causing countless Japanese to be shipwrecked on the West Coast of North America.

1700 A subduction event occurred as Juan de Fuca Plate slid beneath the North American Continental plate creating an earthquake that was estimated to be over a 9 magnitude earthquake that sent a tsunami that reached Japan. All tribes on the Olympic Peninsula have an oral tradition of floods which may have originated as the result of a subduction event.

1700 an Ozette village was buried in a mudslide. An archeological dig at the site in the 1970's found a

European bead and some brass tacks that could have come from Drake's or the ship of Juan de Fuca himself.

1775 First landing on the Pacific Coast by a European near Pt. Grenville. Captains Bruno Heceta and Bodega y Quadra sailed north from San Blas Mexico. On July 14^th Heceta landed north of Pt. Grenville planted a cross and buried a wax sealed bottle to take possession of the land. This was observed by the Native Inhabitants who must have understood the implications of the ceremony.

1775 Captain Bodega Y Quadra and his ship Sonora who was sailing with Heceta, loses a landing party that was ambushed and massacred near the Isla de Delores the Island of Sorrows. Quileute claim the Spaniards were captured and enslaved.

1778 Captain Cook sails past the mouth of the Fuca Strait in the fog. Cook named Cape Flattery for the “pretended Strait of Juan de Fuca”.

1779 The name Oregon first appears on a map. It is given to a river in the Pacific Northwest by an English map maker.

1782 Smallpox epidemic among the S'Klallam

1787 A longboat crew from the English Ship Imperial Eagle is attacked and massacred near the site of the Quadra attack. English Captain Charles Barkely names Destruction Island and The Destruction River, (Hoh) for the incident. Barkley sales north and discovers the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

1788 English fur trader John Meares observes Fuca's stone pillar. Replaces broken spar with a local fir becoming the first logger on the Olympic Peninsula.

1788 Robert Duffin, one of Meare's officers was sent on a longboat expedition from Nootka on Vancouver Island down the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Port Townsend. Duffin was attacked by what were presumed to be S'Klallam Indians west of Discovery Bay with arrows, clubs and stone bludgeons. Several of the crew were wounded. The longboat was said to be pierced, “in a thousand places with arrows.”

1789 the American Captains John Kendrick and Robert Gray, who discovered the Columbia River, entered the Strait of Juan de Fuca as far as Clallam Bay. On a voyage around Vancouver Island Gray traded an old iron chisel for sea-otter furs worth $8,000 dollars in China. Gray traded the furs for tea which he sold in Boston. Gray became the first American to sail around the world.

1789 The English Captains John Meares and William Douglas were arrested at Nootka Sound for violating Spain's Territory.

1790 The Nootka Convention established a joint occupation between Spain and England where sovereignty would be determined by occupation.

1790 Manuel Quimper Purchases berries and salmon “of a hundred pounds weight” from natives off

the mouth of the Elwha River. Quimper planted a cross at what is now Jamestown and later at Neah Bay to claim possession for Spain.

1791 Spanish military post established in Discovery Bay.

Dungeness Valley prairie

1791 Port Angeles is discovered by Francisco Eliza wh named it, “Puerto de Nuestra Senora de Los Angelos.” Name later shorted to Los Angelos, Then changed to False Dungeness.

1792, May Captain Salvador Fidalgo arrived at Neah Bay to build a fort that was supposed to include a battery of cannons, palisades, and an oven large enough to bake bread for the Spanish fleet. This would bolster Spain's land claims and monitor shipping on the Strait.

Predictably, the Makah were hostile. They killed a first officer who tradition says, had abused their women. Fidalgo retaliated by blasting an innocent Makah canoe out of the water with his cannon. Given these hostilities, Nunez Gaona could not survive without the protection of a warship and Neah Bay had a rocky bottom and rough swells that made it a poor anchorage. The Spanish “Fort” never amounted to much more than a few huts and a garden.

It didn't take long for the Spanish to observe the sea otter trade would die once the otters were extinct. The land was covered with an impenetrable forest that could not be farmed or grazed. As a Northwest Passage, The Strait of Juan de Fuca was a dead end road to nowhere since there was no gold to be found in the region.

1792 September 29^th Nunez Gaona abandoned by the Spanish leaving the British, Russians and Americans to fight over who owned The Strait of Juan de Fuca.

1792 Robert Gray Discovers the Columbia River and names it for his ship.

1792 Manuel Quimper enters Dungeness Bay trading with the Indians for fish, venison and mats.

1792 Captain George Vancouver anchors in Dungeness Bay. The Indians ignore him. Vancouver is so impressed with the beauty of the area he names it Dungeness after his home in England.

1793 the Scotsman Mackenzie completed the first journey by land across the North American Continent to the Pacific Ocean at the mouth of the Bella Coola River.

1805 the Americans Lewis and Clark reached the mouth of the Columbia. While neither of these explorers took a formal possession of the land their right of discovery gave their countries a competing claim.

1808. Captain Nikolai Bulygin and the ship The Saint Nicholas had been sent by the Russian America Company to explore the coast of what the Americans called Oregon Country between The Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Columbia River. Of course Bulygin was hunting for sea otters but he was also looking for anchorages for large ships and farmland that could supply Russian Alaska with the fresh food they needed to prevent scurvy. The Nikolai wrecked just north of the Quileute River. The survivors included the Captain's wife Anna Petrovna, the first white woman on the Olympic Peninsula, Aleuts and Hawaiins who fled south to Hoh River where they were captured by the Indians and traded

History of the Olympic Peninsula Timeline

by Pat Neal

as slaves to other tribes south to the Columbia River and North to Cape Flattery.

1810 May 6^th Captain T. Brown of the Ship Lydia anchored at Neah Bay and was able to purchase 13 of the Nikolai survivors. Anna Petrovna was not among them.

1812 The Russians gave up on the Oregon Country and went south to California building Fort Ross near Bodega Bay.

1812 The United States declared it's first war, on Britain. As the War of 1812 ground to a stalemate Great Britain learned the United States could not be bullied.

1818 Britain and the United States agreed to a common boundary that followed the 49^th parallel west to the crest of the Rockies. The disputed Oregon country would be jointly occupied by both countries. It was a diplomatic ploy the British had used to eliminate the Spanish at Nootka Sound.

1819 Under terms of a treaty Spain agreed to stay south of the 42^nd parallel in California, ending all land claims in the Pacific Northwest.

Morganroth cabin

1824 the Americans countered the British with another joint occupancy treaty, this time with Russia who agreed to move north of the 49^th parallel, territory that was claimed by Britain. This left the Strait of Juan de Fuca with two rivals for ownership. Until the Oregon Treaty of 1846

1826 Hudson Bay Company establishes Ft. Vancouver on the Columbia River

1828, July, Chief Factor Dr. John McLoughlin of The Hudson's Bay Company at FT. Vancouver sends an expedition of 60 men under Chief Trader Alexander McLeod to punish the S'Klallam who were accused of murdering 5 HBC men and kidnapping a woman on Hood Canal. The expedition attacked a S'Klallam village at the Portage at Indian Island then met the ship Cadboro at Port Townsend. The Cadboro sailed to Dungeness Bay, anchored in front of a village and began negotiating for the release of the woman. The village was shelled by cannon fire and burned by a landing party that destroyed 46 canoes. The woman was returned to the Cadboro three days later. On their return voyage, the Cadboro burned a S'Klallam House at Port Townsend that was reported to be over 200 paces in length. The expedition was criticized as excessive by the Hudson Bay Company. As a result Alexander McLeod was not made Chief Factor.

1833 Three Japanese shipwreck survivors from a fourteen man crew washed ashore just south of Cape Flattery after drifting across the ocean for 14 months. The Japanese were rescued and enslaved by the Makah, then purchased by the Hudson Bay Company who tried to return them to Japan.

1841 The United States Wilkes Expedition explores Puget Sound. This is the first government expedition sent to the Pacific Northwest since Lewis and Clark on a mission of scientific discovery and geographical mapping. It established an American land claim. Reports Potatoes being grown in Discovery Bay by the S'Klallam.

1843 City of Victoria is Founded.

1845 HBC census of the Clallam Tribe 1,300

1846 Oregon Treaty made the middle of the Strait of Juan de Fuca the boundary between the U.S. and Britain.

1846 When the northern boundary of Oregon was moved to the 49^th parallel the Hudson Bay Company found itself in American territory so they moved to Victoria on Vancouver Island.

1847 Paul Kane, an Irish artist commissioned by the Hudson Bay Company to paint the Indians of North America described the S'Klallam village I-E-Nusw at the west end of Port Angeles harbor as “strongly defended with two pallisades. The outer one was 20 feet high, the inner one 5 feet, enclosing a space 150 feet square, entirely roofed over and divided into cubicles for separate families. Kane found 200 people living there.

1847 Tatoosh Island Lighthouse built. George Gerrish is the first keeper.

1848 Measles and dysentery epidemic among the S'Klallam

1848 President Polk signed an act that created Oregon Territory, a vast area of land that included what is now Oregon, Washington and Idaho.

1850 September 27, Congress passed the Donation Land Law that provided a survey be made of all public land and grants of 320 acres be given to any citizen willing to settle it.

1851 Alfred Plummer and Charles Bacheller land at Port Townsend where they are welcomed by 500 S'Klallam

1851 Sea Captains Elijah McAlmond and Thomas Abernathy are the first to file homesteads at the mouth of the Dungeness River.

1852 June 9^th Col I.N. Ebey of Whidbey Island observed a great deal of smoke coming from the Olympic Peninsula which he supposed was caused by Indian setting fires.

1852 Jefferson County is created by the Oregon Territorial legislature, named after President Thomas Jefferson.

Sequim pioneer cabin

1853 President Millard Filmore established Washington Territory. The population is 3,985 not counting the Native Americans.

1853 John Donnell first white settler on the Sequim Prairie.

1853 President Franklin Pierce appoints Isaac I. Stevens as Governor of Washington Territory. Stevens duties include signing treaties with all the Indian tribes west of the Rockies and north of the Columbia river and surveying the route of the Northern Pacific Railroad.

1854 March A fight between The Clallam and Army troops in Dungeness left four dead, two Clallams and an Army lieutenant and captain. Three Clallam were arrested. They later escaped from Fort Steilacoom and were followed to a Clallam camp on Hood Canal that was destroyed, killing seven Clallam..

1854 April 14^th Clallam County is created. Clallam is an Indian word meaning “Strong People” Whiskey Flats, also known as New Dungeness is the county seat.

1854 At a conference of chiefs from all over Washington Territory, Chetzemoka spoke against war with the whites saying, “If you wanted to kill off the whites, you should have struck long ago. Now it is too late. Born in 1808 in the S'Klallam village of Ka Tai, at what is now Port Townsend, Chetzemoka was called The Duke of York by white men who had trouble pronouncing his name. He is said to have visited San Francisco in 1851. During this visit, Chetzemoka was greatly impressed by the great numbers of white people. He knew any attack on the settlers would trigger an overwhelming counter attack from a superior military force that could exterminate the S'Klallam. Chetzemoka spoke of the effects of trade between whites and Indians. The S'Klallam traded for Hudson Bay Blankets instead of weaving them from dogs that had been raised for wool. They raised potatoes instead of digging camas and steel axes instead of a beaver tooth adze.

1855 Captain Abernathy finds a schooner off Diamond Point with 32 deserting British sailors who had died of smallpox.

1855 Chetzemoka chosen by Territorial Governor Isaac Stevens as Chief of the S'Klallam. This meant he was to sign the treaty and be held personally responsible for the good behavior of his people .

1855 Point-No-Point Treaty signed by Clallam who give up 750,000 acres.

1855 January 31 Makah and Governor Isaac Stevens sign the Treaty of Neah Bay. Makah give up 300,000 acres in return for fishing and whaling rights.

1856 January 25^th Chief How-yak signed a treaty in Olympia where the Quileute of Lapush gave up 800,000 acres of land and agreed to be moved to the Quinault Agency. The Quileute refused to move.

1856 Chetzemoka cut the hangman's rope at a lynching in Port Townsend of a young S'Klallam who had been unjustly accused of murdering two soldiers.

1856 Rufus Holmes is the first permanent settler in Port Angeles called “False Dungeness” at the time.

1856 October 20^th American warship U.S.S. Massachussetts orders a large encampment of Canadian Indians near Port Gamble to return north. When they refused the Massachusetts opened fire killing 27 and destroying all their canoes and provisions. The survivors were taken to Victoria and released.

1857 A combined Force of Haida and Snohomish Indians attacked a Chemakum village killing 400. The Chemakum tribe did not survive.

1857 The Dungeness Lighthouse is built. Charles Blake is the first keeper.

1857 A party of Canadian Indians murders Colonel Isaac Ebey a former Customs Collector at Port Townsend at his home on Whidbey Island.

1857 A war party of western S'Klallam planned to attack Port Townsend. Chetzemoka stopped them from exterminating the new town saying if they killed the whites others would come to wipe them out. After a nine day discussion, Chetzemoka sent a message to the Port Townsend from Signal Rock saying , “The Danger is Passed.”

1857 Ft. Townsend Completed. When terms of the treaties began to be enforced the Indians rebelled. Major Granville O Haller was sent with a company of the 4^th infantry to eerect a fort of hewn timbes at the head of Pt. Townsend Bay.

1859 The bark What Cheer sails north from San Francisco carrying smallpox up the west coast. Natives Americans caught the disease by retrieving bodies, bedding and clothing that were thrown overboard. The resulting epidemic devastated the Peninsula tribes from Ozette to Port Townsend.

1860 The Territorial Legislature passed the first liquor control act to prevent the sale of adulterated liquors.

1860 Captain Thomas Abernathy and Elliot Cline brought a pair of calves and an 18 month old heifer across the Strait of Juan de Fuca in a dugout canoe. Starting the dairy industry in Dungeness.

1862 Port Angeles is declared a Federal Reserve and “Second National City” by President Abraham Lincoln.

1862 Federal Agent Victor Smith moves the Customs House Records from Port Townsend to Port Angeles at with the help of the Cutter Shubrick. Port Angeles becomes the official Port of Entry to Puget Sound.

1863 Customs House in Port Angeles is destroyed by a flood.

1863 Ediz Hook Lighthouse built.

1865 June Confederate Raider Shenandoah destroyed brig Susan Abigailsouthwest of Cape Flattery taking the crew prisoner.

1870 Territorial Legislature passes an act depriving women of the right to vote.

1871 August 31, Chetzemoka ordered to move from Port Townsend to Skokomish. The Clallam loaded all their posessions in canoes which were to be towed to Hood Canal by the side wheeler North Pacific. The S'Klallam village of Ka Tai was burned before the canoes were out of sight. Chetzemoka complained to Olympia and was promised full compensation which never came.

1875 The S'Klallam in Dungeness were being threatened with removal to Skokomish by military force. A group of S'Klallam pooled their resources and bought 210 acres of land on the beach north of Sequim for 500 dollars. The land was divided up according to how much each had contributed towards the purchase. Called “Jamestown” after Jim Balch, one of the organizers of the settlement the land was cleared of stumps and planted with potatoes, oats, turnips and wheat. Livestock was raised. Orchards were planted.

1878- Luther Ford homesteads the Forks Prairie.

1878 First school in Clallam County is built at Jamestown.

1880 The Last Clallam Potlatch is held at Jamestown. The Potlatch was the most important social function of the tribes in the Pacific Northwest where they gave feasts and gave gifts to celebrate the giving of a name, the return of the salmon, burial of the dead or to celebrate a successful hunt. Special houses were built to hold the ceremony. One Olympic Peninsula Potlatch house was said to be 600 feet long.

1880 First Church in Clallam County is built at Jamestown.

1882 May 22 Lt. Wittich of Ft. Townsend leads the first government exploration of the Olympic Mountains by cutting a trail to the two forks of the Dungeness.

1882 Beginning of the Shaker Church. In the fall 1882 John Slocum, a Native American fell into a trance or “died” one morning. Witnesses said his neck was broken. Slocum awoke in the afternoon saying he gone to heaven and was not allowed to enter because of his wicked life. When he awoke he began mission to combine Christianity with native religion.

1868 Quillehute County is reated by Territorial Legislature.

1869 Territorial Legislature passes a memorial to Congress requesting the annexation of British Columbia.

1884 Indian Homestead Act.

1885 Lt. Joseph P. O'Neil cuts a trail from Port Angeles, up Ennis Creek to Hurricane Ridge then southeast to the headwaters of the Dosewallips.

1887 The first sawmill in Port Angeles was built by members of the Puget Soung Co-ooperative Colony a utopian social experiment that built a school, opera house, shipyard and a newspaper based upon the utter cooperation of human beings disbanded shortly after it was founded.

1889 Quileute tribe gets 1 mile square reservation. Quileute Village at Lapush burns while they are away in picking hops in Puyallup.

1889 November 11 Washington becomes a State.

1889 Port Crescent is platted with 166 city blocks a dock and a newspaper. It eventually grew to include a sawmill, saloons, hotels, grocery stores and about 30 homes.

1889 December The Press Expedition begins it's exploration of the Elwha River by building a scow with green lumber purchased from the locals who have told the expedition there is a lake surrounded by a large prairie just up the river.

1890-March Norman R. Smith built was reported to be “The Shortest Railroad in the World!” Built 15 feet long to “Hold The Pass” that Smith figured the railroad would need to approach the south side of Lake Crescent. Unfortunately it was decided that the railroad would go around the north side of the lake.

1890 May Chris Morganroth claims homestead 28 miles upstream from mouth of Bogachiel River.

1890 July 4^th squatters stake out and occupy homestead claims in The Federal Reserve in Port Angeles.

1890 November 10, an election moved the Clallam County seat from Whiskey Flats (Dungeness) to Port Angeles. A vigilante brigade headed by Sheriff Sam Morse moved the county records.

1891 The Federal Reserve In Port Angeles is officially opened for settlement.

1893 Last Clallam Secret Society Initiation held in Port Angeles.

1891 A 4,300 foot dock is built out into Dungeness Bay.

1892 John Huelsdonk, “The Iron Man of The Hoh” settles on the upper Hoh River.

1893 The Panic of 1893 forces The First National Bank of Port Angeles closes taking people's savings with it.

1895 Port Angeles Harbor hosts U.S. Navy's Pacific Fleet for summer maneuvers. For the next 40 years the towns populations swelled from 5 to up to 20,000 people for three months at a time. This created serious social problems.

1895 Some farmers set to work with picks and shovels to dig a ditch and build a flume to carry water from the Dungeness river to the Sequim Prairie.

1896 May 1 The first irrigation ditch brings water to the Sequim Prairie. The pioneers celebrated with an Irrigation Festival that became the oldest community celebration in Washington.

1897 President Grover Cleveland establishes Olympic Forest Reserve which ends homesteading by private settlers.

Looking back to the first Sequim Irrigation Festival

2011-05-11T08:41:00.000-07:00

Built in 1862, the McAlmond House in Dungeness was said to be the finest mansion in Puget Sound at a time when Port Townsend and Seattle were just a collection of shacks.

In 1854 Whiskey Flats (New Dungeness) was named the county seat for the newly created Clallam County.

The name was taken from the local tribe, meaning “The Strong People.” By then the Clallam had their fill of getting their land stolen by squatters just as soon as the homestead law made it legal, while getting cheated for their furs and poisoned with rotgut trade whiskey.

At the time between 600 and a thousand Clallam lived on the beach at Dungeness. The white settlers in the vicinity might have numbered 35. The Clallam were ready for war. Clallam Chief Chetzemoka spoke against war saying, “If you wanted to kill off the whites, you should have struck long ago. Now it is too late.”

Chetzemoka had been to San Francisco with James Swan as a tour guide. He knew any attack on the settlers would trigger an overwhelming counter attack that could exterminate the Clallam.

In 1855 the Clallam signed the Point-No-Point Treaty giving up approximately 750,000 acres for a reservation with the Skokomish on Hood Canal.

Some claim the harsh terms of the treaty were an attempt by Governor Stevens to start an Indian war to stimulate the pioneer economy on the frontier.

Captain Elijah McAlmond had been the first to ship piling out of Dungeness Bay for the lucrative San Francisco market. McAlmond evicted an Indian village to build a house that stands to this day on a bluff that overlooks the mouth of the Dungeness River. Built in 1862,

the McAlmond House was said to be the finest mansion in the whole Puget Sound at a time when Port Townsend, Seattle and Olympia were just a collection of shacks.

Meanwhile times were tough at Whiskey Flats. The Territorial Legislature made it illegal to adulterate liquor, a practice that had sustained the fur trade on the west coast for almost 200 years. The missionary Rev. Myron Eels reported 500 Indians had died in the saloons of Dungeness but no one can say for sure.

In 1855 a schooner was found off Diamond Point with the bodies of 32 deserting British sailors who had all died of smallpox, which along with the other European diseases and the whiskey, devastated Native American communities throughout the Pacific Northwest. Native Americans could not homestead their own land. They were not American citizens. The Clallam were forced to buy their own land back at Jamestown.

Meanwhile, the camas gardens whose beauty had caused Captain Vancouver to name the place after his native Dungeness in England, were taken over by homesteaders who turned the hogs loose. Efforts at farming were dismal.

Located in the rain shadow of the Olympics, the Sequim Prairie was dry enough to grow cactus. Plagues of grasshoppers ate everything down to the moss on the fence rails. In 1895 some farmers got together and dug a ditch from the Dungeness River to the Sequim Prairie.

On May 1, 1896, the pioneers had a picnic to celebrate. This became the Irrigation Festival, the oldest community celebration in Washington.

Once the Sequim Prairie was watered it became a dairy center that held the world’s record in butterfat production per cow. By 1950 there were 300 dairies in Sequim. Today there are only two.

The camas prairie became farms, which became housing developments, studded with box stores so thick they block my view of Walmart. Sequim has become an Indian word meaning “traffic jam.”

Now that the irrigation ditches have been run into plastic pipes, we think back to the first Irrigation Festival.

Those were the good old days. They just didn't know it yet.

How the Peninsula was won

2011-05-11T08:27:00.000-07:00

The milk cooling tower on Port Williams Road near Sequim, a remnant of the Dungeness Valley's dairy farming past.

With the signing of the Oregon Treaty of June15, 1846, the boundary between the United States and Canada extended westward along the 49^th parallel to the middle of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

The treaty gave the Americans title to the Olympic Peninsula. Not that it mattered much at the time. This was a mountainous area covered with a thick growth of almost impenetrable timber that made travel by land extremely difficult. The rivers that came from the Olympic Mountains were short, violent streams that defied navigation by anyone but the Native Americans who had a long tradition of poling their cedar dugout canoes upstream to hunt, fish, gather food and trade with inland villages.

While some maintained that Native Americans did not venture inland because of their superstitions about the land being haunted by evil spirits, the evidence would suggest otherwise.

The earliest settlers mention lush prairies throughout Western Washington. These prairies were savannah grasslands that were maintained by the Native American practice of burning every three to five years. The fires kept the encroaching evergreens from taking over, attracted game and propagated a variety of plants that were used for food, fiber and medicine.

The first reference to a permanent European residents on the Olympic Peninsula was in 1849 when the Hudson Bay trappers John Everett and John Sutherland paddled their canoe from Victoria to Crescent Beach where they were adopted by the Clallam.

The Hudson Bay Company, aka, “ Here Before Christ” was a powerful British monopoly that was a force for law and order on the frontier. The HBC stopped the cutthroat competition in the fur trade by banning the sale of liquor to the Indians. Hudson Bay fur brigades routinely lived with the natives. It was often the only way to survive in a dangerous wilderness.

The company was in business for profit. It had no interest in taking Indian land or wrecking their culture. That would come later.

The settlers of Oregon Territory had formed a sort of government described as “week, transient and primitive” by the few settlers north of the Columbia River at the time. These were the future Washingtonians that were in turn described by the Oregonians as “the crudest elements of the frontier.”

By 1853 these crude elements in Washington were seeking independence from Oregon. Isaac Stevens, a West Point graduate who had risen to the rank of major general in the Mexican War was rewarded by being named Washington's Territorial Governor, Superintendent of Indian Affairs and leader of the Northern Pacific Railroad survey all at the same time.

Steven's political machine was described by his opponents as “perpetuating a political dynasty which stinks in the nostrils of all honest men.”

Stevens was in a hurry to make treaties with the tribes that would extinguish their title to the land so it could be legally homesteaded by white settlers. The Indians were not in the same hurry.

Stevens speech to the Indians, a variation of the “trust the Great Father of the Americans” theme was translated into Chinook, a trade jargon of native French and English words, then translated into the individual tribal languages. The response from the tribe was translated back to English.

At the Point No Point Treaty negotiations, the tribes did not want to sell their land but a Clallam village had recently been destroyed in Dungeness Bay by cannon fire from a ship.

The tribes signed the treaty.

By then squatters had already started a settlement at Dungeness named “Whiskey Flats” for the towns only industry, selling liquor to the Indians.

The Russians came and went

2011-04-29T07:56:00.000-07:00

Sequim Bay on the Strait of Juan de Fuca

By 1792 there appeared to be little chance that the Strait of Juan de Fuca would be owned by the Americans.

That was the year the English Capt. George Vancouver mapped the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Puget Sound, Hood Canal and the Georgia Strait.

In 1793 the Scotsman Mackenzie completed the first journey by land across the North American Continent to the Pacific Ocean at the mouth of the Bella Coola River.

In 1805 the Americans Lewis and Clark reached the mouth of the Columbia River. While neither of these explorers took a formal possession of the land their right of discovery gave their countries a competing claim.

This claim was ignored by the Russians who had already begun their journey east from Kamchatka to the New World. The Russians made no pretense about saving souls on the way to a Northwest Passage. They were looking for profits for the stockholders of the Russian American Company.

A private concern who would claim as assets Alaska south to Northern California and Hawaii. The Russian method of hunting the fur seal and sea otter in the Aleutians wrote one of the most brutal chapters in the history of the fur trade.

One description tells of the Russians arriving at an Aleut village in summer.

The first order of business was to make hostages out of a number of children. Fox traps were issued to the natives who were required to deliver furs as a tax and a ransom for their children.

In the spring the Russians got their traps back with all of the furs that were caught. The natives recovered their children and traded for more goods that put them in debt for another year.

Once the otters, seals and fox were gone the Russians moved on with impressed crews of Aleuts who were forced to hunt down more fur if they wanted to see their homes again.

That is how a Russian ship Sv. Nicolai came to be caught in a November gale off the coast of the North Olympic Peninsula in 1808.

Capt. Bulygin had been sent by the Russian America Company to explore the coast of what the Americans called Oregon Country between The Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Columbia River. Of course Bulygin was hunting for sea otters but he was also looking for anchorages for large ships and farmland that could supply Russian Alaska with the fresh food they needed to prevent scurvy.

The Nikolai was wrecked just north of the Quileute River. The survivors fled south to Hoh River where they were captured by the Indians.

Russia gave up on the Oregon country and went south to California, building Fort Ross near Bodega Bay in 1812.

That was the year the United States declared it's first war, on Britain. As the War of 1812 ground to a stalemate Great Britain learned the United States could not be bullied. In 1818 both sides agreed to a common boundary that followed the 49^th parallel west to the crest of the Rockies.

The disputed Oregon country would be jointly occupied by both countries. It was a diplomatic ploy the British had used to eliminate the Spanish at Nootka Sound.

In 1824 the Americans countered the British with another joint occupancy treaty, this time with Russia who agreed to move north of the 49^th parallel, territory that was claimed by Britain. This left the Strait of Juan de Fuca with two rivals for ownership.

Until the Oregon Treaty of 1846 made the middle of the Strait of Juan de Fuca the boundary between the U.S. and Britain.

Fight for the Strait

2011-04-20T07:28:00.000-07:00

In last week's episode Spain and England were poised for war over who owned the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

While Spain had initially sailed north from Mexico claiming to look for the fabled Northwest Passage, they were also on the trail the Seven Cities of Gold rumored to lie between the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean.

These were the Conquistadores who colonized a vast area of the globe from the Far East to the Western Hemisphere.

When Spain began claiming the Northwest Coast things did not go smoothly. In 1775 Captain Quadra of the” Sonora” landed near Point Grenville to take possession of the land by planting a large cross.

This was observed by the native inhabitants who must have understood the implications of the ceremony. A Spanish shore party was later ambushed and massacred near the “Isla de Delores”.

In 1787 Captain Barkley called it “Destruction Island” for the same reason.

Vancouver Island might have been colonized before the Olympic Peninsula because of the warlike nature of the natives.

The Spanish and the English preferred to land at Friendly Cove on Vancouver Island. There the natives traded bits of metal, beads and blankets for sea otter skins worth a fortune in Canton. This lucrative trade attracted ships from Europe and the United States and lured the Russians south.

In 1789 the English captains John Meares and William Douglas were arrested at Nootka for violating Spain's Territory. They had been trading sea-otter pelts under a Portuguese flag as part of a global tax dodge.

England had a claim to the Northwest Coast based upon Drakes voyage of 1579 and the discoveries of Captain Cook in 1778. This was the basis for what was called the Nootka Crisis.

England had just won the Seven Year's War with France. Then as now war was good for business. English Prime Minister Pitt and the English Press campaigned for a war with Spain over the Nootka Crisis.

This was a war Spain could not afford no matter how high the crown raised taxes.

The Nootka Convention of 1790 established a joint occupation between Spain and England where sovereignty would be determined by occupation.

In 1791 Manuel Quimper planted another cross at Neah Bay to claim possession for Spain. In May of 1792 Captain Salvador Fidalgo arrived at Neah Bay, called Nunez Gaona to build a fort that was supposed to include a battery of cannons, palisades, and an oven large enough to bake bread for the Spanish fleet. This would bolster Spain's land claims and monitor shipping on the Strait.

It was the first European settlement in what would become the American Pacific Northwest.

Predictably, the Makah were hostile. They killed a first officer who, tradition says, had abused their women. Fidalgo retaliated by blasting an innocent Makah canoe out of the water with his cannon.

Given these hostilities, Nunez Gaona could not survive without the protection of a warship. Neah Bay had a rocky bottom and rough swells that made it a poor anchorage.

The Spanish “Fort” never amounted to much more than a few huts and a garden.

It didn't take long for the Spanish to observe the sea otter trade would die once the otters were extinct. The land was covered with an impenetrable forest that could not be farmed or grazed.

As a Northwest Passage, the Strait of Juan de Fuca was a dead end road to nowhere since there was no gold to be found in the region.

Nunez Gaona was abandoned on Sept. 29, 1791, leaving the British, Russians and Americans to fight over who owned the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Strait history

2011-04-14T09:43:00.000-07:00

The history of the Strait of Juan de Fuca is as fog shrouded as the weather.

Native Americans would have been the first to discover this body of water shortly after the most recent continental ice sheet melted. A spear point in a mastodon rib excavated near Sequim indicates the southern shore of the Strait was inhabited 14,000 years before the present.

It is probable that the earliest foreign visitors to the Strait of Juan de Fuca came from China or Japan. They may have been swept across the ocean by the Japanese current. There is evidence that the Japanese were in the Americas 5,000 years ago. In 1833 a Japanese ship, one of many known Oriental shipwrecks, washed ashore just south of Cape Flattery.

The Clatsop Indian term for stranger is, “those who drift ashore.”

Another theory suggests the Chinese sent expeditions of trade and discovery to the New World. Chinese tradition from 219 BC tells of a mysterious foreign land to the east of Japan they called “Fousang.” In 1285 Marco Polo called this new land “Anian.” The fabled Straits of Anian were said to reach across the continent. Renaissance explorers were sure this was a shortcut to Asia, a land rich in gold, spices and souls waiting to be converted to Christianity.

In 1513 Balboa discovered the Pacific Ocean and claimed all of the lands that it washed for the king of Spain.

In 1579 Sir Francis Drake was raiding Spanish ships full of treasure they had looted from the New World. To avoid pursuit, Drake sailed round the tip of South America and up the West Coast looking for the “Northwest Passage,” a shortcut home to England.

Along the way Drake landed at a place he named “New Albion” to claim the land for the Queen of England, repair his ship and bury 17 tons of treasure. The debate has raged since then whether Drake's “Port Albion,” was the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

No one knows for sure but around 1700 AD, an Ozette village was buried in a mudslide. An archaeological dig at the site in the 1970s found a European bead and some brass tacks that could have come from Drake's ship.

These artifacts might also have come from the ship of Juan de Fuca himself. He was a Greek who claimed to have discovered the Straits that bear his name while on an expedition for the Viceroy of Mexico in 1592.
Few believed this claim since there were no records.
Juan De Fuca did mention a stone pillar at the entrance of the Strait.
When the great navigator Captain Cook passed by in 1778 it was so foggy he named Cape Flattery for the “pretended Strait of Juan de Fuca”. The Straits remained to be discovered by the English Captain Charles Barkely in 1787. De Fuca's stone pillar was subsequently observed by the English fur trader Captain John Meares in 1788.
In 1789 the American Captain Robert Gray, who discovered the Columbia River, entered the Strait of Juan de Fuca as far as Clallam Bay. While these explorers claimed to be looking for the Northwest Passage, the discovery of the value of a sea otter pelt in China set off the treachery and slaughter that historians refer to as, the fur trade.
By 1790 Spain became alarmed at these incursions into what they had long considered a “Spanish Lake.”
The stage was set for a war between the super powers Spain and England over who owned the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Next: The Nootka crisis.

The secret lure

2011-04-07T09:05:00.000-07:00

Secret lure? I'll never tell.

If I said it once I said it a million times, I need another secret lure like I need a hole in the head.

Don't get me wrong. Secret lures can be the secret to good fishing.

Trouble is the effectiveness of a secret lure can be time sensitive, depending upon run timing, clarity of the water and the number of people using the secret lure, that can make it not a secret anymore.

Typically, about the time you find a secret lure it'll stop catching fish and you have to find another one.

It can be a very frustrating experience to shop for a secret lure in a tackle store. That's because in any display of fishing lures there are the empty spaces that indicate certain items have sold out. Those were the lures that caught fish, the ones you wanted to buy. The ones that aren't there.

You can go ahead and ask if they'll sell you the lures that aren't there but chances are all you'll get is attitude.

The best way to get a secret lure is to find one on the water where it was fished.

One day I noticed a funny colored plug floating down the middle of a smooth stretch of river. Then I saw a large boil and a silver flash of a steelhead just underneath the plug!

If a fish would bite at a plug floating on the surface I wondered if it would work on the bottom of the river. It did.

That plug caught fish until the paint was eaten off it. It kept catching fish, even after it was chewed down to bare plastic. It didn't matter what color the plug was.

It must have been the action or the shape of it the fish liked. Sometimes the secret of a secret lure remains unknown. I will mourn the day that plug is lost.

The secret lures you find generally share several identifying features such as bent hooks, scratched paint and maybe some broken line still tied on. These are clues the lure was badly abused. It's the one you're looking for.

Plugs and bobbers can be found where they washed into back eddies with the flotsam. Sinking lures are generally on the bottom of the river, which can make them tougher to get.

The rewards can be great.

A root-wad stuck in a good fishing hole can snag enough lures to start a tackle store.

Retrieving this treasure trove is not without its' hazards. Just ask the guy who hooked the winch on the front of his pickup to the small end of a gear-grabbing snag in the Hoh River. This was back before this sort of thing was illegal.

Things went OK at first. Then the big end of the snag caught the current and started dragging the truck toward the setting sun, sideways.

It might be safer to look for secret lures in some of the tree branches overhanging our more popular fishing holes. There's are so many spinners, spoons, jigs, floats and colored lines in the trees it looks like they were decorated for Christmas.

Folks suggested I prune the limbs to get the lures back. Forgetting, I do all my tree pruning with a shotgun and with the price of shells these days, no way.

No doubt the best way to find a new secret lure is get it out of the mouth of a fish that you caught. You may have to catch many hundreds of steelhead to find a secret lure with this method but nobody said it was easy.

This column is part of a study guide for “Fishing The Olympic Peninsula,” a course held this spring quarter as a Port Angeles Community Class at Peninsula College. The PA Community Classes will be discontinued as of summer quarter. I warned PDN garden columnist Andrew May I would ruin it for everyone.