The Flyfish Journal - The Flyfish Journal 15.3
ORIGINAL FACE: An Owyhee River Primer
Words: Rob Lyon 2024-04-16 08:25:03
A typical view on Oregon’s middle Owyhee once you leave your watercraft and hike above the canyon. What is atypical are the green hills flourishing from heavy spring rainfall. In the distance, hoodoo formations recall central Turkey and distant alien planets. Photo: Brandon Sawaya
It was crazy windy on a cold Saturday night outside Rome Station, deep in the southeast Oregon outback. We’d been on the road from Washington’s San Juan Islands for several days and had only pulled into the boat launch on the Owyhee River an hour earlier. After unloading boats and pitching tents in a scramble, we’d driven back to the roadhouse for dinner. The only service of any kind for 50 miles in any direction, it was packed with hunters, ranchers and truckers, all watching the Boise State football game on the team’s iconic blue field.
One busy guy ran the entire show—cook, waiter, dishwasher, bartender and cashier. It took ages to get food on the table, but we felt more sympathy than pique. We’d have been in our tents or sleeping in our rigs otherwise; besides, we had the game and the beer. When the power went out, we lost the game and there was a general fuss, but the dude hustled out back to fire up a generator and returned with a couple of Coleman lanterns. We ate by headlamp and the Broncos prevailed to a riot of hoots and hollers. It was local color and always a lark to get in a small fix together with strangers, but in my bivvy that night I was nagged by the thought that the night’s events could prove prophetic. We might not have been as prepared for contingencies in the week ahead as the fellow at the cafe.
They call it the Little Grand and it has all the drama, visuals and geologic gravitas of its namesake, only in miniature. Picture a mile-deep ravine filled with freakish hoodoos and sheer basalt palisades, ancient caves, pictographs and rock strata every color of the rainbow. Whitish calcium limns river rock like a milk mustache. Lichens and microflora in butter yellow and soft green glaze the ochre stone of canyon walls and the crystalline basalt columns that aren’t texturing the cliff walls lay strewn on the canyon bottom like some ancient Roman ruin. The smallmouth bass are thick as thieves.
We had come in the fall again, five men and a young woman. Moore Huffman flew up from Los Angeles, where he works as a recording engineer and musician. His college buddy, Robyn Minkler, was our lead cameraman. Steve Thomsen is an old fishing buddy whose day job involved running the public works district of a huge county in Washington state. Steven Wrubleski is a stained-glass artist who lives in the San Juan Islands, as does Callie North, a grassroots political activist and co-founder of the KnowledgeShare program there.
We pushed off late the next morning under cool, clear skies and slipped through the shadow beneath the Highway 97 bridge a stone’s throw from the cafe of the night before. A semi rumbled loudly overhead—heading for Winnemucca, if I had to guess.
We approached a small ranching community at Rome, OR, population 25 souls. I cupped my hand over the brim of my cap to make out the namesake limestone columns towering several miles to the north.
Someone in a boat ahead pointed with their paddle, shouting, “Bass!”
We were tempted to stop and wet a line but did not; there would be plenty of time for that. It was late in the day in the middle of October and our first night’s camp lay on a cold sandbar at the base of the canyon entrance that loomed ahead.
The river was in no hurry.
We drifted lazily north, passing under a rudimentary bridge with leaking irrigation pipes strapped to the undercarriage, past weathered farmhouses and cattle gates. We heard the iron cough of a farm truck starting up, the lowing of cattle, the bark of a dog, the splash of our paddles. I felt as if we were drifting through the backyard of the ranching west. The river was very, very low but there was enough water for our boats if we minded the deeper channels.
Finally we left farm buildings behind and our surroundings morphed as the tiny river purled between tall fields of yellow hay and green corn. Fat carp flared like yearling pigs under our boats and towering bulrushes combed dark green back eddies where we glimpsed the coppery flash of our quarry. I stopped to examine the sun-bleached skeleton of a five-point buck resting on a gravel bar midstream, then continued on, when the strangest thing happened.
A dozen pheasant burst out of a field atop the embankment river left and launched over the stream in single file. Four bird dogs emerged and braked sharply; they looked chagrined at their fate and glanced quickly between us and the birds. We heard three shots, but they were in vain.
In the course of the 50-mile float from Rome to Birch Creek you will find an unimaginable amount of fly water. The river is crystal clear and drop-dead gorgeous. The first couple of days we punched hopper patterns tightly under brushy overhung banks. Rushes lined sweet pockets along deeper channels where I could imagine an alpha bass waiting for just the right appetizer to swim past. Mayfly hatches provided us the chance to fish bass like we would trout. High cover holes were always promising in such thin water, where as often as not a smallie would shoot up out of the water with my fly in its mouth, wriggling furiously through a half-moon arc, then bolting downriver and leaving the tip of my 4-weight tattooing the river’s surface and putting throat to my little CFO.
The fishing was nothing at all like our summer steelhead fishery closer to home. Summers on the Deschutes are often a quasi-military operation, whereas fishing the O’ was easy. I was reminded of Sobey Pond, a dawn bike ride every Saturday morning outside our subdivision in northern California, where we honed our chops on black bass and bluegill and it felt like God’s backyard to me and my grade-school buddies. Not just the fishing either, but the exotic aura of the aquatic world it was steeped in—to such a degree that I was inspired to write a paper (my first) on pond ecology for science class. There was a hint of that old ingenuousness here in the Oregon desert.
Before our first Owyhee float trip I had gotten ahold of Ray Perkins, a biologist for the Malheur Watershed District. I thought maybe the smaller-sized fish common in not only the Owyhee, but the John Day as well, might be stunted. But he explained there was a relative dearth of cyprinids (minnows) in these desert systems compared to the smallmouth-rich streams of Tennessee, for example. As for stunted, he told me, “To me the word ‘stunted’ means you have most year classes, but the older individuals do not grow very much. What I think we have in the Owyhee is a population dominated by younger-age fish. Once they spawn, at about 10 to 12 inches, they have a very low survival rate.”
Aquatic insects are stacked in the Owyhee and a primary food source for the bass. You don’t need to tie on the tiniest bug in the box either—hungry bass cut you a lot of slack. Working a hatch of blue-winged olives or sniping hoppers close to shore is the name of the game. Bass can sip mays as delicately as any highbrow trout. There are boss bad boys around, the dark kingpins of the underwater, but they’re not likely to waste their time on a bug.
I had managed to track down a local old man of the river who seemed to be in the know. I asked him the secret. “First,” he said, “build yourself a little rock-lined pool beside the hole you’re fishing. You have to fish out the small bass that you’ll catch at first. The big ones are hanging down beneath and have the patience to wait for something worth their time to come along. So, put all the little fish you catch in that holding pool and once you winnow out the population a bit you might have a chance to catch that lunker.”
Quaint advice, I thought, rather like a fairy tale even, but not something I wanted to bother with.
What do an angler and his fish have in common here in October? An eye for warm water. Plan well and you’ll be dipping in a hot spring every night. Not only is it a balm for the quickly dropping mercury but it was also where we found some of our biggest fish—not in the pools, of course, but finning in the warm effluent near shore. We found frogs in the pools though, invariably parboiled, and remembered the adage about frogs in hot water as we scooped them out and settled in.
Moore took his time scoping his line. He paddled back and forth across the lip of the pool where the team staged above a steep and rocky drop.
It was a gorgeous day, warm and sunny, blackbirds singing in the cattails, the scent of minerals and sagebrush in the air. We’d fished our way downriver from our last camp, then pulled in here to assess the scene. It was another nameless rapid, where we made yet another on-the-fly assessment. To run or not to run, or perhaps to walk, line or even portage—just as it had been, oh, 15 to 20 times each day.
“OK,” he called back to us, “got my line. Adios!”
We watched him drop like an arrow in the quick water river right, angle back river left and shoot the big standers at the bottom, then eddy out river left to stage in response to any mishaps with our other boats.
A moment later he was on the radio, “Catch my line?”
“Enter right, scoot left, then straight through the slot at the bottom.”
“You got it, man.”
“Right behind you.”
Floating in the fall is entirely a solo drill. No riding behind the mahout in a cushy raft; each member of the team is captain of their own ship. You will likely not see another boat on the water and this is a big part of the draw. Talking with the ranger at the takeout after our second or third trip down, he could only remember one other party floating in the fall and that was a year earlier. We had a laugh a moment later when he realized that party was us.
Most members of our team were experienced with small boats—kayaks, dories, cats and rafts on Northwest rivers and the open ocean off the British Columbia coast, and we knew our way around what they call ELF (extreme low flow) boating. If we weren’t out for a week and carrying all manner of gear, we could have managed with a pack raft or even a single-person inflatable kayak (IK). But we needed a boat large enough to carry a fair amount of swag, while at the same time sleek enough to slalom through the rock gardens and manhandle in the shallows. Two-person IKs proved to be the answer.
Moore had a grin plastered across his face, his white teeth flashing beneath mirrored sunglasses as he descended the last of the steep canyon slope into camp. We could see him from the riverbank where Steve and I had turned from teasing smallies to glance upslope when we heard the shout. His shotgun was strapped across his back, and he was holding something in each hand that dragged along the ground.
“What the hell?”
I could tell Steve was trying to make sense of it, too. “Rabbit?”
“Right...I think. Big suckers though.”
“Jacks—they’re jackrabbits. What the hell do we do with those?”
“Hare,” I told him, for indeed they are as different from a cottontail as duck is from grouse.
Moore stopped in front of us and held them up with a piratical grin. “Look what daddy brought home!”
Moore, our kayak ninja and neophyte hunter, knew we were hoping for dinner when we sent him off earlier in the day to see what he could find. He told us he’d climbed to the canyon rim and found these two hopping through the wheat fields up top.
But jacks? Rumored to be stringy dark meat and not at all cottontail-like, we were nevertheless honor bound to cook them.
By this time Callie had joined us at river’s edge. “Yum,” she said. “Slow cook, with rosemary and red potatoes, a salad. Bon appétit.”
There is a lot of canyon to explore here. You will likely spot bighorn sheep traversing a steep canyon wall in single file. On several small mesas above the river bottom we found rock walls, built, we discovered after consulting an anthropologist at Oregon State University, by Basque shepherds. We found pictographs on some of the huge basalt stones and caves once inhabited by fisher-folk like ourselves, though they’d been here for salmon, steelhead and lamprey.
You might want to consider eating locally. Space for supplies in the boats is dearly limited. Ice likely won’t make the cut (although we managed dry ice) and meat won’t last very long. Harvesting fish and partridge to provide a protein-rich entree to accompany the carbs, hardy kale and chard brought from our gardens at home worked well. The upland hunting season had just opened and several of us brought light-gauge shotguns and were able to add fresh game to each night’s meal. We ate only a single meal of bass to comply with recommendations concerning mercury in the watershed.
Callie kept us well fed with pan-fried bass and partridge and Cajun-blackened quail. Kneeling in the sand, she made fresh tamales from a sack of masa and we ate our share of beans.
Steve helped out, dressing whatever fresh game we might have for the day. Callie is highly self-reliant; she once soloed 72 days in the Patagonian wilds for the Alone TV series. Perhaps the best meal we had was that jackrabbit cacciatore. It was fall-off-the-bone delicious after roasting half a day in the Dutchie.
At night, after cleaning up, we would settle onto still-warm sand and Callie would bring out her ukulele. We’d build up the fire with sticks of bone-dry juniper as the mercury dropped and Steve would bake a surprise dessert in the oven. And always there was the song of the river, changing subtly from one camp to the next.
My wife, a yoga practitioner, occasionally references a Zen koan about “original face,” as in, “What is your original face before your parents were born?” Leaving the house one day, I quipped that I was going to look for my original fisherman. The Owyhee is a good place to find it if you’re missing yours.
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