Small Stream Dreams and the Waters of Lake Superior

Tom spent the summers of his youth climbing over stones on the beaches of Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula, a place that might be nearly a physical opposite of Chicago, where he lives today. You can drive fifteen miles in the middle of the day and not pass a car coming toward you. There are miles of pristine bays along the shoreline, some as small as 10 feet wide nestled into cliffs that whole years without a human footprint being pressed into their gravel. For his birthday he loaded up the Kayak and jumped in the car on a Thursday evening and turned north. He spent two full days from sunup to sundown skipping swiftly over fallen trees in the woods like a deer, rushing toward trout streams feeding into lake superior with fishing rod in hand.

Birthday Breakfast, a small Copper Country brook trout

Several small brook trout were landed from small overgrown pools and large holes carved into the bedrock by waterfalls, time hiking between pools was spent eating wild berries and watching Kingfishers dart from branch to branch above.

A small but aggressive fish that was swiftly released back to the cold pool it was taken from

In years fighting brown trout on Lake Michigan that could eat a school of brook trout this size for a single meal, I'd forgotten that inland trout are never about size, every single fish is precious and beautiful. The smallest trout have beautiful patterns as the ones above, and the big ones are just as amazing. The hiking over boulders and log jams is equally rewarding, a wonderful break from the hours spent paddling into the infinity of a Lake Michigan horizon.

Logging roads spider through the wilderness, and provide remote launches for kayaks,

Time not spent chasing trout and foraging wild berries and mushrooms was used kayaking on Lake Superior. No fish were caught, but little effort was expended in any meaningful way while fishing mid-afternoon around underwater boulder-fields and cliffs. The geology of the area makes for fantastic scenery beneath the kayak, visibility can be 20-30 feet at times and there are house sized boulders littering the bottom against shields of layered sandstone that resemble massive strips of bacon. Truly a beautiful place to escape the stoplights and shoulders of other city dwellers.

A small bay perfect to stop and eat lunch at and watch the sky reflect and distort on the lake.

With the dog days of summer coming to an end we have a deluge of big mean fishing heading our way even as I type this post. Time to tune up the tackle box and catch up on sleep; endless days of plying the lake for staging fall-run salmon are ahead.