They burned the hillside maybe a week ago, reducing felled cedar to burned boles and ash. It still smells of soot.

I put off a visit for the first few weeks of March, mostly because of snow and cold. I had time today, between showers, before dark. It rained all morning, and the day before, and the creek is skirted by fens and wetland that moderate runoff. Even still, it'd only be a few hours before the creek ran from stained to muddy. Time for unstructured fun is filling up fast with life- with gardens and yardwork and tree planting, or replaced with scouting for turkeys and mushrooms and white bass, smallmouth, and carp.

I tied on a woolly bugger- yellow chenille with an olive tail and hackle. It's the first fly I remember tinkering with, changing up the standard colors to look a little more like the crawdads and darters around my part of the world. I missed two fish early, LDR'ed a couple more, and finally brought a couple to hand.