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My daughter did research on trees in MRNP last summer. They used GPSrs to find their plots, not flags. If flags are placed for any official purpose they will be marked.
Leaving litter behind because it will make your next trip to a lake quicker is inexcusable.
I was chatting with a back-country ranger once in Montana when she started complaining about people flagging routes. I said “You mean like this?” and I pulled a big handful of flags I’d pulled down earlier that day out of my pocket. She was quite grateful.
Do you mean Packwood Lake? If so, how much snow was around?
By the 13th not much is going to be open high lake wise. The snow pack is really heavy. Better to head east of the mountains. Maybe someone who knows some of those areas better then I do will chime in.
Are you looking at something right away or in the summer? If right away you should head for the desert or the Okanogan. Later in the summer high lakes will be the best choice.
Cairns are little better then flags. They still promote development of tread by sending people on a single path. I have no problem with them on established trails where the trail might disappear in rocks or grass, but don’t like them at all where there is no trail. If there is no trail then a route shouldn’t be marked.
Oh man, you hit one of my hot buttons. Flags are litter, nothing more. If I see flags on a x-country trip and they aren’t marked they are going in my pocket just like any other litter I find. I have seen flags set for future trail re-routing and marked for fire or other boundaries, but the vast majority of flags should never have been hung.
Good catch, Dave. I removed those two posts. The first one was interesting because I’d been watching it when it was first posted and it did not have the signature links. They actually went back and added those later. But it became really obvious when I looked up the IP address and it had been posted from the Philippines.
The second one was a bit less obvious. It was posted from a Virginia IP address, had content that didn’t add to the discussion, but did contain specifics about our site, and the links weren’t as obviously random as most spammers. But a quick google revealed that particular slime had posted these sort of generic posts on boards all over the net.
I am in almost constant battle with these spammers. They seem to come in waves. It was really bad a couple months ago when I was having to delete one or two posts a day. There are major ISPs in some countries like India that are completely banned from posting to the forum at all.
I think we should extend this great question to spoons. What spoons give the best action with the slowest retrieve? Kamloopers and Daredevils are good candidates. The interesting wildcard is the Spin-A-Lure. It has very little action but it draws strikes. I seems to be because of very erratic and seemingly random movements.
Keep some fish for dinner, but don’t be a fish hog. IOW, limit your kill, don’t kill your limit.
The vast majority of high lakes do not have native fish. That means the biological reasons for catch and release don’t apply. Where there are naturally reproducing fish they almost always over-reproduce. You get a lake full of small, skinny fish. In that situation you are doing the lake a favor by keeping as many fish as possible.
So the only reason to not kill fish, and it is a good reason, is to save them for the next angler. In certain small lakes there might be only twenty or fifty fish stocked. It doesn’t take too many fish hogs to completely wipe out a lake like that. Most high lakes are not very productive so it takes a long time to grow a large fish. By letting them go you give them a chance to grow large.
So it is fine to kill the occasional high lake fish, but save some for the next person.
Loch Jah is a special place. Someone spilled the beans on that one and leaked the location. It sits at Township 40N Range 16E Section 31L/K. This is one typical survey:
08/15/1986 (Friday), Jock Highfish 2 CT (18.5″-23″ avg 21″) 1 BT (28.7″-28.7″ avg 28.7″) 3 RB (19″-25″ avg 20″) Excellent fishing, few fish rising, few fish cruising. Fish condition: fat, fry observed. No fish was under 2 lbs. They all had a smile on their face. Successful lures: dry flies, spoons, The hottest was a #6 red wing dead eye. Stomach contents: shrimp, snails, The largest had gold crown in its stomach. Time: 2 days at lake, 4 hours fishing. 1 angler in party, 1 non-angler. Lake Condition: clear. Deep lake with an excellent spawning stream. Stable water level and lots of grass for feed. Camp use light, 1 campsites. Weather: clear, warm, 72°. Comments: After all these years I finally found it. The 3 day, grueling, cross-country hike, which required ropes and pitons was well worth it. The flat grassy campsite with a crystal clear, 5 ft deep, hot spring made me want to stay forever.
Here’s the direct link to the post about how bad this summer has been. I’m a regular reader of Cliff Mass’s blog, too, and I have a copy of his book but I haven’t read it yet.
Skinny has never been more then a colloquial name for the lake. USGS used Wolcott for a lot of the names on their maps. And Wolcott got many of the names he used for high lakes from the Trail Blazers. That’s how a lot of Trail Blazer named lakes show up on USGS maps. Now the process is more formal.
See Wolcott p. 360 and p. 368. He has Big Granite (#4, Upper) at 5000′ and skinny Granite (#3, Lower) at 4500′. So as recently as the late 50s, at least, it was thought that Upper Granite was higher then Lower Granite. I don’t know if old maps were wrong at that point, or if it hadn’t been mapped yet and Wolcott was working purely from aerial photos.
Any list of high lake stocking gives a very distorted view of high lakes available for fishing because there are so many lakes with naturally reproducing fish that don’t show up in those lists.
