Written by Dick Davis AKA Rbaileydav


As many of you already know, I have been a volunteer football coach for 6th, 7th and 8th grade kids for the last 7 or so years. Over the years there is one game on the schedule that always gets my heart beating fast and my adrenaline pumping, in some ways it is my favorite spot on the schedule. Now this could be due to the fact that I have never in these 7 years lost this game or it could be I just like playing that “bye” team. That open weekend has by tradition been my fall camping and fishing weekend and as much as I love coaching the kids it still is my most favorite weekend of the fall. This year my 14 year old son Drew decided he would go with me. This was great as no matter how much I love camping by myself, camping with your kids is even better. Normally I do a backpack trip to a remote stream that I have never fished before. Over the years these have been trips to a virtual “ who’s who” of southern small streams, each a memory that lasts for a lifetime or at least the month or two it takes me to get them written up and posted. But this year since his freshman football season had just ended and he had a few weeks before lacrosse practice started my son decided that he didn’t want to go through the physical hardship of a backpack trip but he wanted to do a lazy man’s car camping trip instead. The part of me that loves virtual solitude and nature unbroken by the sounds of man was kinda bummed about that… … … but the part of me that remembered walking four miles up hill in both directions carrying 50 pounds of stuff was kinda happy. Oh well ya gotta sacrifice for your kid … …. And I didn’t even have to feel like a wuss for taking the easier car camping approach. Now the key was finding a spot that would appeal to both sides of me, remote and beautiful but with car camping access, great fishing and as few other people as possible. Well over the years I have gotten tons of information from internet boards and from internet friends about some fantastic fishing spots so I went to work asking questions to try and determine this year’s destination. And as usual I got great information from multiple sources and found the place where that information crossed each other and that was this year’s target (thanks Petey and Hugh H.). The only bad news was that I had to buy the high priced out of state TN license but oh well somebody has to support those poor Vols. I grabbed a few quick map downloads off the internet shoved the car camping stuff in the Suburban……….. and We headed out Friday afternoon after school.

The drive up the mountains was uneventful but gorgeous. The leaves at the lower elevations were just beginning to have the early fall colors bleed into visibility. The farms nestled into the foothills brought flashbacks and images of a perceived simpler time … …


This was a perfect match for the Marty Robbins Gunfighter album coming out of the car stereo speakers … … requested by a 14 year old no less, I guess they do take after us a little bit even if we don’t notice it. As we got higher up into the hills the fall colors began to burst forth like eruptions of fire almost lighting the hillside in the fading afternoon light. We drove on in that wonderful contrast of pumping excitement of the trip to come and gentle relaxation of the music and the beauty of the surroundings.


All was proceeding as planned or so we thought. Yet I had a nagging fear something wasn’t right. We kept driving and driving yet I still hadn’t seen any of the land marks the maps had identified for me. I was passing a few landmarks but they weren’t exactly where I thought they should be. Finally, as it fell to almost full dark I found myself driving along a desolate wind swept road high atop a mountain ridge blanketed in a heavy fog, rising and swirling in the beams of my headlights. Now I am not the smartest guy in the world but I was pretty sure that any remote camp ground I was looking for would be on the valley floor not on this ridge top. But I was a man after all so I wasn’t going to admit I was lost and ask for directions even if there had been any one to ask … … which there wasn’t. Eventually even I had to admit I was lost so I turned around and headed back down the mountain mumbling and cursing under my breath but all of the time acting as if I had only missed a turn … … not that I really didn’t have a clue where I was. We stumbled on a park service campground sign, definitely not the one I was looking for, but I decided to do what any other self respecting man would do in this situation … … and act like this was the place I had been looking for all of the time. So we pulled onto the long dirt road heading into the actual campground while I talked the place up … … not knowing what I would find. Well turns out the first thing we found was a campground stacked with row upon row of the most up to date RV’s you have ever seen. The place looked like a mini city with lights popping from everywhere and the sound of TV’s, stereos and generators fighting for airspace and ear space. I turned and looked at my crestfallen son who sat in the glow of RV city with a look of horror on his face and I had to fess up and tell the truth … … I was lost. We stumbled around the RV city for a while till we found the now unmanned ranger check-in station; as it was now well after 9pm. I went up to try and see what I could see. As my panicked mind fought to figure out where I was I saw a forest service map stapled to the wall. In the dim lights of my far away headlights it looked like this map had all of the local campgrounds marked. My salvation, I looked around for a stack of free maps but no such luck … …I tired reading the map on the wall by holding my head at an odd angle and squinting into the headlights glare, but it just wasn’t working … … hey how did that map get from the ranger station walls to my front seat … … man that’s weird. After studying the map for several anxious minutes I saw where I was supposed to be and where I had made my mistake. But it was a long way back to where I wanted to be … there should be a short cut somewhere……. Hey here it was, one of those small weird dashed roads that cut right across to my campground yeah that had to be the ticket for us to quickly get there …. Not that long way around with those solid lines. We were off again.

The wind had really picked up by now and it was darker than dark by the time I turned off the paved road onto the rutted trail that bore the FS road # that I was looking for. Now let me remind you I wasn’t driving the 4 wheel drive Scout of my youth or even the 4 by 4 pickup truck of many of my contemporaries but was instead driving a giant of a two wheeled drive domestic Suburban … … that belonged to my wife … … who had promised to cut off body parts if I damaged her vehicle, and even if I don’t use them as much as I want to I am still very, very fond of those particular body parts, oh well here goes the short cut. I was feeling pretty good as we hit the first couple switchbacks and began to gain elevation, even commenting about the storm damage of downed trees that seemed to litter the area … … just as rounded the corner to see a tree lying across the two track rutted trail that the forest service called a road. I thought about turning around, ruled that out, thought about just camping here tonight, ruled that out and finally said a future goodbye to some of my favorite body parts and hit the gas, while listening to that unique “branch on metal” screech that made those very same body parts shrivel in anticipation of the knife. Well somehow we made it past that tree … … and the next and the next… … till they all began to blur into a headlight glare induced nightmare of switchbacks, nighttime stream crossings and tree jumping and branch scraping. What seemed like hours were only minutes but the minutes became miles and still no sign of the campground. The theme song form Gilligan’s Island now began to rattle through my feverish brain… … A three hour cruise … … Thoughts of being lost were obviously floating in the car as my son said “dad just admit your lost and pull over we will sleep in the car till morning and figure out where we are” … … Ah son, I thought I had taught you better than that… … real men just keep driving… … even if we don’t know where we are going or even if we can make it past the next turn of the road… … we just keep driving. Just as I was about to give up, I saw a strange glow in the distance. A light heading straight for us, in the fog of my despair and the unrelenting bad luck of the night, UFO’s popped into my head followed closely by the sound of “dueling banjos” so it took a few seconds for me to realize that this was another vehicle on this same lost rut of a road. I pulled off into the only space wide enough for me to clear the road while the other vehicle passed us. Turns out it wasn’t a car or truck like I had thought but a guy on a four wheeler. As he passed he gave me a wild eyed stare as if awed at the stupidity of a man who had just taken a full sized suburban through this backcountry maze of downed trees. I rolled down the window and mentioned the campground I was looking for and was rewarded with only a glazed look and a mumble of non-recognition, my heart dropped till I thought I would cry, but the man seemed to notice my near panic and did mention that he thought there was a campground just about a mile up this “track”, as he called it. So as he faded from site, Drew and I pushed on up the road, till we suddenly rounded the corner and saw the prettiest sight I had seen in ages … … a brown forest service campground sign … … I didn’t even care which one it was as long as it was a place to stop for the night. Even more amazing was the fact that as we got close enough to read the sign it was the very campground I had been looking for. We turned into the campground unsure what to expect but there wasn’t another car in site. As I pulled into the last spot on the loop and opened my door to get out and quickly set up camp, I was greeted by the prettiest sound I had heard in ages rising through the utter blackness of the night, silence, utter silence, broken only by the magical sound of a rivers rushing, tumbling water. As my mother used to say to me “God protects babies, drunks and idiots … … now which one are you” . Well I am over forty, hadn’t been drinking at least not that night … … so that leaves only one, but we made it.

I felt more than heard the dawn of the morning, laying comfortably warm and dry sealed in our tent. I dozed back off to sleep for a while till Drew’s anticipation of fishing and an excitement to see where we were drove us from our sleeping bags. It is a strange sensation to crawl out of a tent with no clue what the surrounding scenery will hold. Dang not bad… … not bad at all…………

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That was the tent and the stream a few yards away. We quickly cooked our breakfast and strung our rods. I was using a bamboo I hadn’t gotten to fish before a Bob Malucci 7’6” 4 wt Quad and Drew was using a bamboo rod that I hadn’t gotten to fish before either a 6’6” Orvis Midge 3 wt. Both rods test casted beyond perfection so we set off to try our fishing luck. This was one of the last weeks of October but we thought the stream was small enough for dry droppers to still potentially be effective so that is what we had tied on, each to their own specific preference of patterns but in the same general 14 dry and 16-18 dropper. I of course thought that by now this trip was jinxed so I assumed the stream wouldn’t hold any fish but the first ten or so casts quickly proved me wrong as Drew caught one of the prettiest colored rainbows I had ever seen. We spent a few minutes alternatingly trying to pose the fish and letting it swim for a second or two until I had just the perfect shot. … … ever the Picasso of fish photos…..


And naturally after that one shot the fish flipped free and dashed to safety away from these mad men with a camera. Oh well so much for my “mad” camera skills it is still a pretty fish even if I did chop the head off. So with the skunk spray out of range I left Drew to his own fishing devices and did a little exploring. Taking some photos and doing some fishing on my own. I soon came to this gorgeous stretch of water lite as much by the color of the leaves as the rising sun, and then on to this even prettier stone bridge. A bridge I had driven across the night before and not even noticed.

The best part is that the fish were in abundance in all of the places you would think and a few that you wouldn’t which is exactly why we love fishing. We didn’t catch anything large but we did catch a lot of wild and frisky rainbows, eagerly willing to rise or to slash at a fly and to me that is about as good as it can get especially in these beautiful fall colors.

I caught back up with Drew to check on his progress about lunch time and found that he had been having a great day with lots of fish, so we headed back to camp laughing about the bad luck of last night turning into the wonderful experience of this morning. Sometimes the pain of getting here can make the experience that much more fun … even if it was stupidity , self induced pain. After lunch we decided to venture back to the vehicle and try to drive up higher on this stream to a section that veered away from the road and was rumored to hold a healthy population of Brook Trout. Well we drove for a while looking for where I thought the right place to start would be, when we came upon a giant camp; about 12 tents sitting on both sides of the road by the bend of the river with men, boys and dogs galore all ablaze in orange and obviously looking to run deer. They waved peaceably as we drove through and headed on up the road. We hadn’t gone far when I realized that the creek had veered away from the road like I had heard so we parked the car and strung the rods. We busted some brush till we came across a creek branch. It wasn’t quite big enough to fish but close. It looked like it might be just split and would come together upstream a little ways so we busted more brush upstream only to find it getting smaller. The nice cool fall day is getting pretty hot since I am encased in waders and a fleece while fighting my way through seemingly impenetrable maze of underbrush. We decide to fight our way back downstream to see where this branch meets the main flow. The panic feelings from last night return as we bust brush through turn after meandering turn, expecting at any minute to break out on a larger stream with enough clearance for fishing but instead only seeing a trickle of water and a tangle of rhodo and hemlock leaves and branches. I would have given up at this point but it would have been a half hour of brush bustin just to get back tot the car so we plunged on sweating and cussing. Suddenly we break into a clearing and find ourselves in the midst of the deer camp. We get some funny looks as we splash into camp. There is more orange standing around than a Saturday at Neeland stadium and probably about as many teeth…. …and trust me that weren’t many (sorry Vol’s fans I couldn’t resist that one). But they were a nice lot and after talking for a few minutes we found out that the tributary we were searching for was just down the creek a few hundred yards and they weren’t hunting that area today and we would be fine. So reassured we took off up this new branch of the stream. It broke out of the canyon in a couple hundred yards to a beautiful meadow with plenty of casting room and series of beautiful holes. Our spirits were soaring like the sound of the stream. After all of our lost and found experiences, here we were alternating holes fishing together, enjoying the beauty of the afternoon and luxury of each others company and catching some very nice size wild browns and an occasional brookie. I can’t remember when I have enjoyed just being out fishing as much. It wasn’t the catching that was phenomenal today it was the total package, the warmth of the sun on parts of my body while other parts were cooled by the shade and the autumn breeze, the leaves in an infinite array of colors and combinations, flowing in the breeze and on the current and best of all, my son fishing along with me and obviously enjoying it as much as I was.

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As the afternoon shadows lengthened and we tired and slowed down we stumbled out of the river bed onto a well used easy to hike trail that paralleled the river leading us right back to within a few hundred yards of our car. The same car we had spent an hour and fifteen minutes busting brush away from to get to the river earlier in the day. I guess on some trips you are just destined to do it the hard way.

Soon enough we were back at camp with a healthy camp fire adding it’s glow to the autumn leaves surrounding us and chasing the chill from the air. As I sat in my high backed chair, feeding chainsaw cut firewood to the fire, smoking a Cuban cigar and drinking cold beer from a cooler the advantages of car camping quickly rushed to my head. But we also had the place to ourselves and the scenery that surrounded us in the fading light was beyond compare. This tree was just overhead and this was the scenery. I guess for this weekend at least Drew and I had gotten the best of both. We sat around the fire talking and cooking dinner. Making fishing plans for tomorrow and enjoying each other’s company until the fire scene faded from this To this

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And the night filled with more stars than a person could imagine ever existed. Leaving us to gape in awe at the heavens, and leaving little wonder at why we use that phrase as this was as close to heaven as I can imagine as I fade off to sleep dreaming about another day of fishing in this wonderful place………a place I hope to come back to someday ………….. As long as I don’t get lost… … again

PS it turns out when we wen the right way we were only about 15 minutes from the road where we had started and the 6 hour trip was only about 3 hours.... oh well sometime "lost is found ".......

Written by Dick Davis AKA Rbaileydav