I spent 'Turkey Week' in Pennsylvania. My plan to spend a day seining in the upper Allegheny was abandoned by it being mostly too darn cold to drag out a photo tank. That said, there were plenty of other opportunities to get cold and wet, in-between time with family and friends. I spent a day on the Lake Erie tribs for steelhead (yeah, I know they aren't native, but I'm too much of a fish junkie to not harass them anyway), an afternoon on a watercress-choked limestone spring creek near Chambersburg, and a couple of afternooons chasing native brookies in Michaux State Forest.

Here's a couple fun photos...

The abundance of steelhead in many of the tribs to Lake Erie is simply amazing (Nate and Todd, you really missed out). Almost every deeper pool shelters a bunch of overwintering fish, and while they likely do prey on the occasional native small-bodied fish, they probably have much less impact overall than gobies do...

I'm always impressed with sexual dimorphism in salmonids, like the color and kype on this male...

and their absence in this bright female


Back in 1992 and 1993, I spent a lot of time on this spring creek -- mostly floating facedown in a drysuit while trying to watch sculpins spawn (a hard way to learn that most of the spawning activity is at night...). There's three species (Potomac, Blueridge, and "checkered") here, but checkereds are orders of magnitude more abundant than the others, a pattern reversed just a little ways downstream. This sculpin biomass produces some surprisingly large browns, but this is one of the largest and prettiest I've seen come out of here.

There were also a couple of pearl dace crusing around a small pool in the spring creek. I tried for about 30 min to get a decent photo, but my Olympus wanted to focus on the vegetation instead.

I've always had a strange fondness for fallfish, and I particularly like the reflection of this little guy...


but this is what I was after, and it took hiking way upstream and crawling through a couple km of laurel patch to get to the nicest water. I've heard through the grapevine that this watershed has been hit hard by acid rain. While there's still some fish holding on, the acid neutralizing capacity of the watershed is gone, and depressed stream pH during snowmelt events result in low survival of larval trout (sculpins and minnows, which are more sensitive to low pH, have already dropped out of this part of the watershed). Too bad we can't get some of the abundant limestone from the valley bottoms way up here...

Nice report and those pictures are great. Whew, looks a bit too chilly for my liking, but I guess when you're fishing none of that matters. I love the pics, particularly the ones of my favorite Salmonid - Brook trout

Duuuuuuuuude. The fish-on-the-line pics are amazing! Thanks for posting (even tho it rubs it in a little bit ).

Todd

Nice report Dave,

I love those photos, especially the fallfish!

Blake

Beautiful pics and some really nice fish!

Great pictures as always... I like the fall fish and the middle brookie picture.

Fantastic. What a great way to spend the holiday.

but this is what I was after, and it took hiking way upstream and crawling through a couple km of laurel patch to get to the nicest water. I've heard through the grapevine that this watershed has been hit hard by acid rain. While there's still some fish holding on, the acid neutralizing capacity of the watershed is gone, and depressed stream pH during snowmelt events result in low survival of larval trout (sculpins and minnows, which are more sensitive to low pH, have already dropped out of this part of the watershed). Too bad we can't get some of the abundant limestone from the valley bottoms way up here...

Which stream were you referring to about the acid rain impact. This my neck of the woods, so I'm just kinda curious.
Harry Knaub

Those line picture are awesome Dave! I never thought of doing that.