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On Sunday July 28th, I drove 2-3 hours each way (traffic got crazy) to spend about 3 hours fishing and sampling bugs in a favorite small stream on the east side of the Cascades, where a meadow in the middle of a hot burn from a few years ago has produced surprisingly large (meaning up to 10") and spectacularly colorful Westslope Cutthroat Trout. It could almost be called a spring creek, at least in the meadow reaches, although the same clear, stable, spring-fed water tumbles through a rocky forest for most of its length.



It is by far the smallest stream I routinely fish, and sometimes it's so narrow the grass overlaps the water from both sides and leaves nowhere to cast. With the combination of close quarters, tight spaces, clear water, and bright sun, it was a real challenge to sneak up on fish and present a fly without spooking them.

Every once in a while it opens up to a "large pool" like this one, which held the biggest fish of the day (about 8.5").



The larger fish I've caught previously were either hiding under the cut banks for the day or living in bigger water downstream. It's possible I've seen them up this high in the past because I fished it about a month earlier and they were up there spawning. I explored the forested reach below for just a little while and caught one still in spawning colors:




I was as interested in bug collecting on this trip as in the fish themselves, because I figured the altitude (around 5,000 feet) and spring-fed nature of the system might offer something new to find. It didn't disappoint. By far the most abundant large nymphs in my kicknet sample were Drunella coloradensis, and I collected my first adults of this species as well.



Among the dozens of nymphs of that species, I found a single specimen of a really unique-looking mayfly nymph that got me excited, the ultra-spiky Drunella spinifera:



I also collected my first adult of the extremely common caddisfly genus Rhyacophila:



And sweeping around the grass overhanging the stream turned up a few specimens of Dolichopodidae, or Longlegged Flies.

Thursday (July 25th), I took a tolerably short drive out of Seattle to a little-known stream on the east slope of the Cascades. The fishing was slow at first during midday in the pocket water of the broad, rocky channel, but as I worked my way upstream valley tightened up into a canyon with shallower bedrock (meaning a lot more water flowing on the surface and less through the gravel) and deep pools created by large boulders.



The combination of depth, shade, and the advancing hour improved the action, and I caught a few dozen rainbows, westslope cutthroat, and coastal cutthroat trout as I moved up through the canyon. There were a surprising number of 9- to 12-inchers for a creek small enough that I "wet waded" without getting my feet wet until they got hot and I wanted to cool down.

Toward the top of the canyon I reached a barrier waterfall around 8 feet high.



I could have crossed the creek below it and scrambled up the boulders to keep fishing, but it was getting late and I wanted to see what looked on Google Earth like some very different water above the canyon. So I climbed up a steep slope of loose dirt to the height of the treetops, where the road/trail wound along above the canyon, and I dropped back to the river just past the canyon. Here it was a completely different stream, meandering and low-gradient with small gravel, ankle-deep riffles and inviting little pools at each bend.



Despite the skinny water, it was hard to drop a fly anywhere without a trout smashing it. I caught a few dozen more in just an hour or two, all westslope cutthroat. Apparently the falls in the canyon were an impassible barrier that blocked the other species. I called it quits when the fishing was still hot, because I wanted light to walk out and collect some bugs.

There wasn't a lot of insect activity to get the fish rising, although in the evening there were sporadic rises in most pools. The few adult bugs I nabbed were collected on the trail above the river. Collecting nymphs with my kicknet before leaving was very productive, as I found good specimens of for uncommon species that weren't yet represented on this site (or at least not by my closeups). Among others, these included exquisitely colored nymphs of Attelella delantala:



The distinctive Drunella pelosa, which has only been collected a few times in Washington:



And a male spinner of Paraleptophlebia sculleni. This species has only previously been reported from Oregon, but I'm fairly confident in the ID from both the pictures and putting a few specimens under the dissecting microscope.

My wife and I drove up to the nearest trout stream for some quick evening fishing. I hoped to put her on some fish in the pools that allowed easier casting, but they seemed oddly devoid of fish. The ones I caught were rising sporadically, tight against cover that would snag most flies and required precise presentation. Retention is allowed on this stream, so I think maybe the easy pools got fished out.

Little green stoneflies (likely Alloperla) were common in the air in this fast-water reach, and I saw several on the water too.

In the past month I've added a large number of new specimens to the insect encyclopedia, photographed on trips to the Montana/Wyoming/Idaho area for the last two summers. I haven't learned my Western hatches very well yet, so I'm relying on expert help (or slowly trudging my way through keys as time allows) to identify most of them.

To make this process easier and also catch up on specimens that have fallen through the cracks over the years, I created a page that automatically lists specimens that aren't identified as specifically as one could reasonably expect. I'll use this to guide my own ID attempts and I hope it helps some of the other experts who like to weigh in here.

The new page is called identification needs, and it's linked from the top of the Aquatic Insect Encyclopedia page for easy access once this post falls off the front page.

Recently I've been fishing entirely with barbless flies, and I've pinched down the barbs on everything in my fly boxes. To some extent this is because I'm sure it helps a little bit with survival; the scientific research is mixed on whether this is a big enough difference to matter to whole populations, but I know I used to damage a fish once in a while because the barb made the hook hard to remove, and now I don't. However, my main motive is a form of laziness: I fish places that require barbless hooks sometimes, and it's easier to de-barb everything and err on the side of caution than to keep track of the rules about that.

I found an interesting blog post recently by John Newbury talking about barbless hooks for Czech nymphs and how retention wasn't very good on barbless hooks that were manufactured using the same designs as barbed hooks but minus the barbs. I assume the same reasoning would apply to pinched barbs, too. As an alternative, he suggested hooks designed for retention when fished barbless such as the Hanak 333 BL and Fulling Mill Czech Hook. I've never used either of those, but the recently-started Montana brand Firehole Sticks seems to use similar design principles and I have fished those with some success.

However, I haven't really had an opportunity to do a side-by-side comparison between those designed barbless hooks and de-barbed hooks using similar flies. I'm curious if anybody else here has done enough of that to form an opinion.