By Casey Santee
csantee@journalnet.com
After driving for what seemed like an eternity on a series of dirt roads that wound through rural Bingham County last Saturday morning, my son, Sage, and I arrived at remote Brush Creek.
The small stream flows through a lava rock canyon filled with pines and willows. Our journey was long and dusty, but I’d promised Sage on his 11th birthday last month to take him fishing there for native Yellowstone cutthroat trout. I’ve fished Southeast Idaho’s backcountry streams for as long as I can remember, and I’ve never found a better place to catch the golden fish with red slash marks under its jaw than Brush Creek, located about 75 miles from Pocatello.
We started our angling adventure near the road and worked our way down to where the stream pours into the Blackfoot River.
As I retrieved our poles, tackle and net from the trunk of my car, Sage searched intently for grasshoppers. I told him the trout hit fast and hard on lures, so there was no need for bait, but he was determined.
A few minutes later, I caught a 6-inch cutthroat-rainbow hybrid, or “cutbow,” and Sage abandoned his effort and switched to a yellow Panther Martin spinner with a silver blade — the same lure I was using. He quickly caught a small cutthroat in a clear, deep pool.
We continued from one hole to the next, eventually losing count of the fish we had landed. The closer we got to the confluence with the Blackfoot, the bigger the trout were. About 100 yards before we reached the river, we cut through the dense brush near the bank to a waterfall at the mouth of the canyon.
I discovered the deep pool at the base of the fall is filled with fat cutthroat up to 16 inches long.
A veteran angler himself despite his age, Sage’s eye’s lit up when he saw the heavily oxygenated hole.
We took turns casting upstream and retrieving our lures.
Seldom did we drag them back 5 feet before, WHAM! Fish struck the spinners, stripping our line from the reels as they darted back and forth through the water, on nearly every cast for 15 minutes before the action slowed.
We each scooped our share into the net. Two of the brilliantly colored cutthroat I caught were 15 to 17 inches long and stout. We soon navigated our way to the Blackfoot, which was slightly murky. We stopped where Brush Creek pours into the river, and Sage began casting into a slow spot near the bank. Experience told me it would be a productive spot, and I wanted him to get the first crack at a lunker. He quickly caught a 14-inch cutthroat, his biggest fish of the day to that point. A few casts later, he hooked another fish. This one put his skills to the test. It ran upstream, pulling more line from his reel every time he got it close to the boulder on which he was standing.
After a valiant fight, Sage managed to work the trout close enough that I got it into the net. When I pulled it from the water, his eye’s began to sparkle again. The 18-inch rainbow was thick. It must have weighed 2 or 3 pounds. As is customary on our fishing trips, his trout was the biggest of our outing.
We stayed long enough to catch several more cutthroat and cutbows before heading back to the car with one cutbow and Sage’s monster trout on the stringer.
Our legs and arms were scratched from the brush, and our dog Sandy’s hair was matted with river mud and cow manure, but we didn’t care.
As the sun set, we headed back to Pocatello along the dusty roads with smiles and a camera full of photos as proof that our day wasn’t just a big fish story.