Yuku free message boards

My bride of 14 years and I just returned from our first camping/fishing weekend alone ala no kids, since 2004. We really enjoy the family trips but a weekend by ourselves to do what we want on our own schedule was a really good thing

Our destination was Beaver Creek State Park in the very Southeast corner of Minnesota. For anyone that has been following the recent weather for this part of the country, this area was pounded by heavy rains a week ago and most of the rivers that we drove past on the way from our home about 70 miles away were still flooded on Friday afternoon. When we saw in the news papers the devastation, especially in Iowa, it made us feel pretty selfish about worrying about the water conditions for our trip so we had decided to show up and we'd deal with the conditions presented to us.

The camp ground we stayed at in the state park had been flooded earlier in the week, but the East Beaver is a very small spring fed creek and surprisingly to us, it was flowing gin clear when we arrived Friday. This was good from the aspect that it was "fishable", but concerning from the aspect that: the fish are all naturally reproducing and have a reputation for being very spooky, the tall grasses that may have otherwise provided some cover to approach the runs were blown flat by the flood waters, this was our first time fishing this water, my wife and I are both very rusty and only wanted to fish dry flies (but lowered our standards to include beetles and ants as acceptable)……..and did I mention…..the stream was GIN CLEAR and had been flooded less than 3 days earlier…..well, all of these factors combined resulted in us "fishing" but not "catching", but in the end it was a great weekend and along the way we rediscovered a prior interest of hiking and macro-photography which pre-dates the kids and digital cameras for that mater. If the fishing had been good we would have missed out on seeing some really neat examples of nature's miniature wonders...

Well, here it is, a snap shot of our weekend of "fishing" but not "catching":

Our gear was far more able than we were, and the Baby Hermann will have to just wait for next trip for it's first catch

Wanted to use these....


To fish natural browns in this..................................






Along the way stumbled on this.....


Walked in the tracks of this.......


And soon realized that when trying to match wits with these trout we were in over out heads.....
So we went hiking and saw and sampled a few of these....


We enjoyed seeing many of these......



Tried not to step on any of these.................


We marveled at the complexity of this (note the hundreds of small black ball ended fungi growing under the main white corral shaped fungi)...


We were suprised to see a stowaway in this...............


And didn't know what to think about these.....




And at the end of the weekend ran across a real fly with a built in strike indicator.....



It was a cool trip even without the "catching"

Mark B