Submitted by Mark.Taylor on Fri, 2016-05-27 08:48 Conservation Fly Tying Climate Change Public lands not for sale Vote Up Down 0 + P4220019.JPG fish_your_park.png Editor's note: This summer marks the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service, and the formal creation of the uniquely American national park system. Trout Unlimited is celebrating with the National Park Service by sharing stories from staff, volunteers and other anglers who chase wild trout inside the protected lands of national parks from coast to coast. Check back often, as stories from our "Fish your park" series will appear regularly on the TU blog. By Doug Jessie I’m not your young, hipster, fashionable guy. Nor your canvas, tweed, bamboo, seen-it-all fellow. I’m in my late 50s. Grew up on fiberglass. Got out of the game for too long, came back with a passion. Now the kids are grown and out of the nest and my wife lets me do as I please. Within reason. Part of the “within reason” is to fish with a buddy (almost) every time. You know, stuff happens. And I still do a lot of fishing where I don’t act my age. The whole risk/reward thing is real. And there is the problem. I can’t find many guys my age who want to do a stupid amount of work to catch beautiful little fish. P4230026.JPG So most of my regular fishing partners are younger, in their 20s, 30s or 40s, and that was the makeup of our group of four hiking into a tumbling stream in Shenandoah National Park in late April. We knew there would be plenty of water in the stream, but in Shenandoah National Park there is the also the risk of plenty of pressure. Many of the streams have trails alongside. If you like to be asked about 50 times “Are you catching anything?” or look up stream to see you’ve been high-holed, you can find that on some park water. That’s why I prefer to fish it in the off season or on weekdays when I won’t have as much contact with my fellow man. Some streams have good bottom access, but many only have top access from the Skyline Drive, the winding road that runs along the ridge the entire length of the park. P4220021.JPG In January a 20-something buddy and I hiked down 3 miles to fish a creek, then back up a mile and walk back out. We were the only idiots on the water, and had an awesome day. You have to put in the work. But this was a Friday-Sunday trip, so for this adventure we selected a stream section where the trail left and climbed hundreds of feet above the river. We backpacked in a couple of miles, set up camp and immediately got into fish. A good start. After a great meal of beef stew, a cool night’s sleep, and delicious camp coffee the next morning, two fellows went up the trail to the high stretches while another and I headed directly upstream from camp. A light rain fell off and on as fish came to hand. We started to hit bigger boulders to maneuver around, big deadfalls to scramble over and eventually waterfalls to enjoy, then climb around. P4230079.JPG The gorge got steeper and the fish kept coming. Beautiful, fat brook trout. They were colored up in the spring as only a high-quality stream can produce. A couple of cold beverages, summer sausage, a pouch of tuna, some trail mix and the promise of another fish in the next run kept us going higher and higher. Neither of us carry a GPS, but the big falls we traversed gave us a decent fix on our location. We determined that we probably weren’t going to make the trail-at-stream junction above before the day was way long. So we snipped off our flies and angled our way uphill. The trail was up there. Somewhere. P4230029.JPG After about a half hour we stumbled out onto it and headed downhill, finding a new wildflower along the path here and there. And we noted the evidence of man and beast on the trail. Little to none of which we had seen along the stream we just fished. You have to put in the work. And keep doing it until you can’t do it anymore. If you bump into an old dude fishing old glass in the middle of nowhere, you’re doing it right. Doug Jessie is the president of the TU’s Smith River chapter. He lives in Roanoke, Va., about an hour north of the Smith River and two hours south of the hundreds of miles of wild trout water in Shenandoah National Park.