Authors: Kevin Searock
But a glance at a Wisconsin road map shows an interesting thing. Interstate highways 90 and 94 join together near Madison in south central Wisconsin, but then these main arteries of travel and commerce detour north for many miles before splitting again and turning due west across the prairies of Minnesota and the Dakotas. By doing this the interstates avoid land that the glaciers never touched, a strange land that doesn't quite seem to fit with the rest of the Badger State, even though it conferred the name
badgers
on Welsh and Cornish lead miners who lived there in holes beneath the hills. Residents insist that the region has no mountains, just valleys; places where you can get quite lost on a foggy morning because one valley looks eerily like the next. It is a country of limestone and sandstone bluffs, mysterious caves, trilobites and crinoids, rattlesnakes, jackrabbits, and little rivers that emerge full blown out of the ground. It is trout country, my country. It is the Driftless Area of southwest Wisconsin, and I've roamed and fished and loved it for more than thirty years.
To be fair, the Driftless Area extends into southeast Minnesota and northeast Iowa, but Wisconsin lays claim to most of it. Anglers visiting the region for the first time are struck by the rugged topography of high ridges that suddenly fall away into deep, secluded valleys sometimes called
coulees
. One coworker I took to Timber Coulee for some trout fishing looked around wide-eyed and asked me if we were still in Wisconsin. On misty mornings the Kickapoo Valley looks more like the Appalachians or the Ozarks than the supposedly flat country of the Midwest. This ridge-and-valley landscape markedly affects the pace of life among its residents. Live here awhile and you'll quickly notice that no matter where your destination may be, the road trip will take you an hour or two. A crow has to fly about fifty miles from our home in the Baraboo Hills to Viroqua, but if the crow has to drive my truck he'll log eighty miles if he knows the short cuts.
Residents often define themselves and their families by the valley that they live in rather than the nearest town. People will tell you that they live in Wyoming Valley, Mormon Coulee, Norwegian Hollow, or Durwards Glen. It is essentially a nineteenth-century landscape that has somehow survived into the twenty-first century. When the Civil War began in 1861, most Americans lived on farms or in small towns. In southwestern Wisconsin this is still true, largely because of the inconvenience of narrow winding roads in an area equidistant from Chicago and MinneapolisâSaint Paul. If you want to find the best fishing in the Driftless Area, or indeed anywhere, explore places that are damned inconvenient to get to.
What few straight roads there are tend to follow the tops of the ridges or the floodplains of the larger valleys. Several record floods in recent years have cut people off from the outside world for surprisingly long periods of time. It got so bad in the 1970s that people in Soldiers Grove decided to move the entire town to higher ground, away from the moody Kickapoo River. By 2008 several nearby towns wished they'd done the same thing. For the angler, the straighter roads on the ridge tops are trout alleys. Drive on the high ground along Highways 14, 61, or 18/151, then turn right or left onto a town road or lettered county highway. Within a few miles you'll find yourself driving along a trout stream.
Fishing the Driftless Area means fishing in small or very small streams. There are few natural lakes, and most of them are on the floodplains of the larger rivers. Impoundments behind earthen dams can be found in a few valleys, but agricultural runoff tends to degrade these small reservoirs and the fishing is inconsistent: fantastic in some, mediocre to downright bad in others. Most streams have trout somewhere along their courses. Some streams are dominated by trout but others, especially in the Grant-Platte and Sugar-Pecatonica watersheds, have a mix of smallmouth bass, catfish, walleye, and other warm-water species in their lower reaches. Expect to wade the streams that you're fishing. Wisconsin's Public Trust Doctrine states that anglers may fish navigable streams that cross private land as long as they keep their feet wet. Leaving the stream to go around obstacles, including deep water, is OK as long as you return to the stream immediately by the shortest route.
What makes Driftless Area trout streams special is that they're spring creeks. Spring creeks get most of their water from flowing springs that emerge from limestone bedrock wherever the local surface topography intersects the water table. As a result, a spring creek's volume and temperature stay more constant than freestone streams that get their water primarily from surface runoff. Percolation through limestone formations also raises the pH of the water, and alkaline trout streams support a higher density of aquatic insects, crustaceans, and other trout foods per acre than acidic streams. These factors come together to make spring creeks the premier trout streams in their regions, no matter where on earth they occur. From England's hallowed Rivers Test and Itchen to France's legendary Risle, from Croatia's hauntingly beautiful Gacka to Pennsylvania's historic Letort Spring Run, and west to Montana's Paradise Valley, most world-famous trout streams are spring creeks.
A little quick math shows that southwest Wisconsin boasts 625 spring creeks distributed across fifteen counties, which when added together total an astonishing 2,150 miles of prime trout water. Wild brown trout abound, but native brook trout seem to gain more ground each year and even rainbow trout can be found in some streams. Southwest Wisconsin is also the best place in the world to hunt for tiger trout, a rare and beautiful hybrid produced when a male brook trout spawns with a female brown. Combine attributes like these with inspiring country and you'd think that the Driftless Area would be a major destination for America's trout anglers. Some folks would like to believe that it could be, but that won't ever happen and I'll tell you why: Wisconsin spring creeks are too darned small. They can be nasty little buggers to fish, especially when the riparian vegetation reaches its late-summer peak and the streams get low and clear. As a red-faced, frustrated Montana angler asked me pointedly one hot July afternoon, “What's
big
about the Big Green?” Visiting anglers whose home waters are in America's eastern and western mountains will drive right over a Wisconsin spring creek and never even see it.
So demanding are the spring creeks of southwestern Wisconsin that many resident fly anglers give up and become
casual
fly fishers: people who fish for trout only a few times a year, and usually on more forgiving streams in Wyoming or Montana. But the survivors, hardcore fisherfolk who never give up even years or marriages after they should have, are molded and shaped to fit these maddeningly difficult, heart-breakingly beautiful trout streams. If you know what to look for you can spot a Driftless Area trout hawk every time.
First off, they fish graphite fly rods that have twenty-five-year or lifetime guarantees against breakage, because they know that the game usually requires casting in jungles where bamboo rods fear to tread. I break a fly rod every couple of seasons. The usual scenario involves a battle-wagon brown who lives under a low bridge. A
very
low bridge; in fact, the lower and snaggier the bridge, the bigger the trout will be. This may require some creeping and crawling so that I can get into position for a short cast. Long, lyrical casts on small, overgrown spring creeks keep a lot of professional fly tiers in business. Finally I'm in position and the big brown is still on station. Sadly, I now realize that the foliage I've been cheek-by-jowl with for the past thirty yards is rife with poison ivy and wild parsnip. But no matter; the sole task at hand is to put a fly over the fish. This I do by judiciously employing the signature Badger State cast known as the bow-and-arrow cast. The fly is launched, but the distance is still too great. Give me some cams and a couple of pulleys and I might try a compound bow-and-arrow cast. But on the second try the fly lands true and the trout-of-my-dreams slurps it confidently. Even wily brown trout that live in impossible places can be easy to catch if you can just get a fly or lure (or, heaven forbid, bait) to them somehow. With a practiced flick of my bone-spurred wrist I set the hook and battle is joined. The rod bends into a hula-hoop, and for a few seconds time stands still. Then the hook pulls out, said brown trout disappears beneath a log on the bottom, I fall over backward into the stream, and the rod rebounds upward (smack!) into the concrete above me and breaks neatly six or eight inches below the tip-top. I actually carry my receipts in my fly vest so that I'm prepared if I need to stop by Cabela's in Prairie du Chien to exchange the broken stick for a new one. If any maker of hand-crafted split bamboo fly rods is willing to do the same, including living in Prairie du Chien (loosely translated from the French as “Prairie Dog”), I'd be happy to do all this with a cane rod.
Coulee country anglers wear the cheapest breathable hip waders on the market, the feet of which are firmly laced inside ultralight wading boots. Cheap, because I can unerringly walk plumb-dumb into the only loop of rusty barbed wire sticking out of an anthill in an eighty-acre pasture. I have proved this many times. Torn waders or not, the ultralight boots keep my fifty-year-old legs in the game despite the miles and miles and miles of rough walking that Driftless Area trout fishing demands.
Time and distance mean nothing to trout hawks. I recall a day when my good trout compadre Peter Grimm suggested that we hike smartly into a secluded hollow guarded by rattlesnakes, fish hard until midday, and then hike out in time for lunch at the Unique Cafe in Boscobel. The first part of the plan went well, including a fancy bit of high-stepping over a four-foot timber rattler. It was a miracle that neither of us was bitten. Once we reached the stream and began fishing there was a good mixed hatch of mayflies and caddis, the water level was perfect, and scads of good-sized brown trout were up and feeding aggressively: a rare day when we caught trout at will. Eventually we trudged out of the hollow just in time to see a burning orange sun set behind the bluffs that towered over the Mississippi.
Finally, trout hawks of the coulees wear a variety of funny hats to keep the August sun from burning their ears to tanned leather, and they can rebuild a tree-tangled leader in no time flat. They can tie blood knots in the dark without a flashlight. They relish sarcasm and ironic humor. When faced with a hatch of #32 Cream Midges, they'll likely match it with a #10 Pass Lake or Black Flying Ant on the end of a 3x or 4x tippet. They catch more trout than you can possibly imagine, and they've seen more sunrises and sunsets, more scarlet tanagers and American redstarts, more waterfalls, trilliums, and rainbows than any other folks around.
A late-summer sun blazed across a clear sky on the day I first encountered a tiger of the valleys. In pastures beside the river a steady, hot wind out of the south scorched the grass and rattled the ranks of tall corn in nearby fields. It was August 11, 1993. Waves of rising air shimmered over the pastures as I trudged back downstream toward the truck and a cool drink at noon. I'd made the predawn drive west to Vernon County's Timber Coulee in search of the steady dry fly action that comes with the “trico” hatch: tiny, white-winged, black-bodied mayflies of the genus
Tricorythodes
that seem to pick the hottest, muggiest weather to emerge from the stream. I'd played a hunch that the tricos would hatch out in force on that searing August morning, and I wasn't disappointed. There were already clouds of mayflies dancing over the cool waters of Timber Coulee when I walked down to the stream at sunrise. So many insects were in the air at once that from a distance they looked like patches of mist or smoke drifting over the stream for hundreds of yards. The wild brown trout of Timber Coulee were rising steadily, taking full advantage of this insect horn of plenty, and I was after the trout with fine tippets and tiny dry flies.
By noon the trico hatch had tapered off and bank-side temperatures were passing the ninety-degree mark. It was time for a lunch break in an air-conditioned diner, up the ridge in Westby or Cashton. But no trout addict can pass by good-looking water without a cast or two; maybe I could draw out something large from one of the many “lunker structures” installed along the banks of Timber Coulee in recent years. So I hiked beside the rushing stream, enjoying the heat of the summer sun on my neck and shoulders in a way that Wisconsinites dream about during January cold spells. But I also stopped here and there to cast a team of weighted nymphs into the bubble lines, drifting the flies deep beneath the cut-banks wherever the creek made a hairpin bend. As the flies swung around one particularly deep, dark corner, my orange indicator vanished suddenly and I struck the solid, thumping weight of a good trout. The fish bored deep in an effort to snag the leader or rub out the fly. I remember it as a very spirited fight, and I was surprised that when I brought the trout to the net it was only about eleven inches long.
The trout was incredibly beautiful, exceptional even among trout, whose beauty of form and color have inspired more writers than any other fish. Waves of bright carmine-red splashed across its sides below the lateral line. Instead of dark spots, this trout sported ovals and curlicues of black and olive along the top of its back. It had the bright white leading edges on the pectoral, ventral, and anal fins so characteristic of wild trout, especially native brook trout, but this fish wasn't a brookie. Nor was it a brown or a rainbow. After a minute or two I had to admit that this was a kind of trout I had never seen before; but then I remembered an entry in
McClane's New Standard Fishing Encyclopedia
, a monstrous reference book that's been a good companion on many a snowbound winter evening. The trout in my net was a tiger trout, the first I'd ever seen in more than twenty years of trout fishing.
A tiger trout is a hybrid resulting from a mating between a female brown trout (
Salmo trutta
) and a male brook trout (
Salvelinus fontinalis
). Interestingly, trying to fertilize a female brook trout's eggs with brown trout milt simply doesn't work. Such hybridization between species that do not belong to the same genus is very rare in nature, and viable offspring from such a cross are rarer still.