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Thread: The big Payoff

  1. #21

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    Sixth photo: While this photo will be the least interesting to most I was very excited to get it. I'm standing on the side of a canyon wall about 20' up. In the photo is two bull trout. One female and one male. The trout may not look all that exciting in this image but if you notice the pebbles in this photo...they're not pebbles. I estimated these two trout to be some where in the neighborhood of 30". Not the biggest that I saw but fun to sit up there and watch these two effortlessly streamline in the currents.

    20170903_184323(0).jpg
    * Warning: I bite AND I do not play well with others! -hellkat-

  2. #22
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    Those pictures are beautiful!! What a view! Nice trip. I am one of the jealous.
    " Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt. "

  3. #23

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    Thx MG. Loved the pics and the mixed activity trip. Yes, that was sharing an out of the box adventure, TU! Didn't know the river looked so scenic. You did portage around the suck hole? Those are big trout. Did they take readily? Were you using nymphs, streamers, dry flies...? You seem like a large guy. Is that the small Alpaca packraft?

  4. #24

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    Right on gamer! Looks good, thanks for posting.

  5. #25

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    Quote Originally Posted by Lnj View Post
    Those pictures are beautiful!! What a view! Nice trip. I am one of the jealous.
    I often wonder if the people who spend so much money to travel abroad realize we have our own garden(s) of Eden here in N. America. I too am jealous...wished I lived in Montana. Oh well, another decade and I get these darn pesky kids out of the house and I'm free!

    Quote Originally Posted by Dogwood View Post
    Thx MG. Loved the pics and the mixed activity trip. Yes, that was sharing an out of the box adventure, TU! Didn't know the river looked so scenic. You did portage around the suck hole? Those are big trout. Did they take readily? Were you using nymphs, streamers, dry flies...? You seem like a large guy. Is that the small Alpaca packraft?
    Yeah, definitely portaged quite a bit in the gorge. Youtube is a good source for video but nobody has beta of the entire run. There are no huge falls but the hydraulics and obstacles would be almost impossible to survive.

    I didn't target any bull trout. The bull season is very limited (catch and release only) and the species is threatened and endangered so I didn't even put a fly in if I saw any. I was aiming for cutties mostly. I cary a small fly box with a mix of about a hundred miscellaneous flys. I change up my rig a lot so I really couldn't say what I was using at any one time. In the gorge some of the depths in the narrows reached 30'-40' so I practically had to treat it as spin fishing. Other times it was nymphing, hopper-dropper, and dry topwater.

    [funny to me- probably not to you so hold your nose] Funny story. On the Fifth day I came across this beautiful stretch of sandy beach perfect for camping. It was kind of early in the afternoon and I hate to stop early but I couldn't pass it up. The location had a large stretch of seams and pools great for trout so I decided to just to call it an early day. I setup camp, pulled out the rod and got to work. After about half an hour I had this deep urging to do something different. The day was so nice that I stripped down buck naked and fished for the next hour or so just like that. It was fantastic. Nobody else around, beautiful wilderness, pair of osprey working the same stretch to take back a bounty to a nest, peaceful-rythmic sounds of the river...it was sublime.

    Alpackaraft is the Llama, open design, with cargo fly. Hope to get setup with self-bailer by my next trip.



    +-+-+ Rocketsocks +-+-+ (you asked not to be quoted so this is my pseudo quote)

    Thanks for sticking with me even though I'm a butt-munch. I know I'm a curmudgeon but I still have a heart (sometimes.)
    * Warning: I bite AND I do not play well with others! -hellkat-

  6. #26

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    I setup camp, pulled out the rod and got to work. After about half an hour I had this deep urging to do something different. The day was so nice that I stripped down buck naked and fished for the next hour or so just like that. It was fantastic. Nobody else around...

    Language is xxx rated. I think you started a competitor to hike naked day...fish naked day. Lol

    Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G900A using Tapatalk

  7. #27

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    Now that this thread has some depth to it I’m going to bury a marvelous little secret into it. A secret hidden waterfall that flows through a natural arch. A natural wonder that has never been published to the public of wilderness enthusiast

    First, let me attach a bit of relevance to the original posting and how I got here. Whiteblaze is a site that is firmly rooted in the Appalachian trail (duh, everyone know this.) Most thru-hikers go on to do other National Scenic Trails like the CDT and one of the more interesting geological features of the CDT is the Chinese Wall. That’s how I got interested in the Bob Marshall and what led me to packrafting. I wanted to go see the Wall but got sidetracked by seeing all these people packrafting the South Fork Flathead River.

    So, in my many hours of research of Montana, and more directly the Bob, I came across this interesting account of a waterfall that had a unique natural arch rock formation too. Now, I’ve seen waterfalls and I’ve seen natural arches but I couldn’t recall ever seeing the two paired.

    At first I though it would be interesting to see this place but I couldn’t find any other accounts of it. I kept digging and digging but nothing else surfaced. I almost wanted to write it off but the resource was from a naturalist who was working for the US government so I had to give it some legitimacy. This made me decide that I was going to have to track down the naturalist who documented the existence of this place if I ever wanted to find out more.

    A few weeks of emailing various National Forest Service contacts led me to a particular rabbit hole of enlightenment. I only had a last name for the original published document so I wasn’t exactly sure who I was looking for, but a peculiar response grabbed my attention. The respondent didn’t concede or deny knowledge of the existence of this place, but they did respond.

    At first she acknowledged that she did work as a naturalist in the Bob but sort of sloughed off any knowledge of this wonder. Then, email after email I chiseled away until I had her trust. She relinquished to me that this place does really exist. (Understandably, I already knew this. I had the documented photo from her report.) So, I too conceded. I promised not to reveal the exact location of this wonder to anyone. Not in person, not by direction, and not by any coordinate location if she would just give me some hint as to its vicinity.

    Then in her own twisted acceptance of it’s revelation she sent me a Google Earth image screen shot of its location. I say twisted because oddly enough it was. She sent me a zoomed in image of a miniscule amount of forest that would have taken IBM’s Watson some time to overlay and match up precisely, and that’s if Watson knew to reserve its search criteria to the Bob only. Here’s the real kicker, whether or not on purpose, the Google image was turned 90 deg. counter clockwise. Basically a zoomed in image of wilderness turned sideways.

    I countered.

    Embedded in the image was the GPS location of the center of the image. Five minutes later I emailed her back the location and how to get there.

    So to conclude, this place does exist. It’s not on a trail. You will need some climbing gear or cojones to get there. But if you’re ever in the Bob and you’re looking to see a natural wonder that’s not been published in Backpacker magazine…. go find yourself a natural arch waterfall!

    Natural_Arch_Waterfall_(7205003040).jpg
    * Warning: I bite AND I do not play well with others! -hellkat-

  8. #28

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    Brilliant!...and in true WB CSI fashion, nice yob mon.

  9. #29

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    Oh yeah, I know where that is. The Boy Scout troop was there last week installing a rope swing. He he

    Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G900A using Tapatalk

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