Trees and Fishing

April 1^st is the day every trout angler in New York State has circled on their calendars. It’s the first day of trout season, where every body of water in the state is open for business. That’s 49 days away and I’m starting to go stir crazy being cooped up in my room, while back home friends are enjoying weekends out on the mighty Niagara River catching rainbow, brown, and lake trout.

So what’s a crazy fishing guy to do when the fish are trapped beneath the ice of up-state New York? He prowls the internet looking at the newest equipment and trying to find secret honey holes. This past week I spent more hours on google earth, than actually doing school work, and I came to a really cool realization. The Adirondacks are wild!

I know that last statement sounds obvious to most people but for someone who spends as much time on google earth as I do looking for new fishing spots it was pretty amazing. In Southern Ontario it’s really easy to find new streams because you can just look for the green ribbon of trees cutting through the farm fields. Farmers leave these trees alone because they can’t farm that close to a river, but also because the trees help hold the banks in place. In Southern Ontario there are two main uses for the land, farming, and development.

We talked in class about how unsuitable the Adirondacks are for farming and therefore how undeveloped they are. If the region’s settlers had had their way the area would look much the same as Southern Ontario does today. The failure of farming in the Adirondacks was a victory for the natural resources of the park, and I’m not referring to minerals or lumber. I mean that the functioning natural ecosystem of the park is a resource, used to draw in money, not ship it out.

To put it in a fisherman’s perspective, the trees draw in a lot of the precipitation preventing sediments from being washed into the lakes and rivers. These same trees also keep the ground cooler so that any runoff which makes it into the waterways is also cooler. Cool, clean water is the cornerstone of any successful trout fishery and the Adirondacks are full of it. Needless to say the dense forest and remoteness of the locations add to the romantic aspect of fishing.

Sitting here on my computer writing this I have often had to resist the urge to pull up google earth or the state’s registry of remote fishing locations. I can see my growing list of things to do before fishing season sitting on the corner of my desk, but this post reminds me of the reason I’m fortunate enough to fish an area like this. The Adirondacks pushed industry and development aside, and welcomed those who seek to explore the forever wild.