A Bear Ate My Lunch - Literally 30Aug16

I'm camping in Taylor River Canyon below Taylor Park, in a nice, developed campground ~ and overnight a bear ripped the rear side window off the Crusher, climbed in and ate all my food! He destroyed my food box and cooler. He forgot to clean his paws and claws on entering my vehicle so some of my stuff got bear-scuzzed... like my fishing hats and backpacks. As if the Crusher could get more ghetto - it now features a duct-taped rear window. So, I had no food and "had to" head to High Alpine Brewery for their excellent pizza and Green Gate IPA.

It must've been good luck despite my hour-delayed start for cleanup and repairs as I had a good day on the Gunnison River fishing. Too, here's a trout lesson featuring browns from the Gunnison River: we have two primary strains of brown trout in NAmerica. The German browns (Von Behr) have orange/red spots and the Scottish strain (Loch Levens) has black spots - both were brought over in the mid-late 1800s and now run prevalent around the west. While it's a cool bear story - there's some trepidation regarding my return to the site tonight with new food - he "knows" the Crusher.

Weird but good day wading the Gunny. I started at Neversink and my "first" fish was a big 19" Scottish brown, close to my put in, on a squirmy worm at ~10am. It was a nice spot and I reeled 6 more browns this morning. My best fly was the quasimodo, a BHFB curved version of the pheasant tail that I'd begun to use instead of a BHFBPT. Seemingly a trico hatch or midge hatch had preceded my arrival and the mating balls were epic - I thought I'd missed it and would need to change to spinners - grrrr. Then a BWO hatch started and I caught more on the quasimodo and rainbow warrior underneath. I even got hits on the red chernobyl ant I used as an indicator. I dined on Subway (since the bear ate my chipotle turkey) and enjoyed another Treasure Chest (saving boobies while enjoying grapefruit/hibiscus/prickly pear-infused IPA). I moved downstream to Cooper Ranch and strangely caught 6 rainbows! Here I was using nymphs led by the stonefly - like the Ark, the upper Gunny runs like a big freestone. I fished so little of this great watershed today (and saw no Kokanee) but will move to it's major tributaries the Taylor and the East for the next days.