Joseph Creek Oregon June 18-20, 2010

After several weeks of high water Joseph Creek was dropping last week and looked like it might be fishable by the weekend. I began planning for another exploration. My first into Joseph Creek I hiked in too far down stream and caught smallmouth bass even though the water temperatures were below 50 degrees. The second trip in was much higher but I found squawfish to be the primary occupant of this section. I decided if any public section of the creek was going to hold mainly trout it had to be on the upper end of the Forest Service ground where there are several small tributaries that are spring fed. My hope being that these small tributaries help keep this section of the creek cooler in the hot summer months.

Having no good information to rely on I looked at my maps and picked a ridge that looked “hike-able.” I had not scouted the road that leads to the canyon rim on this section, but I had noted a tree blocking the road where it first leaves FS Rd. 4650 so threw my chainsaw in.

I headed out Friday afternoon and found where road number 080 took off. To my surprise someone had drug the tree out of the road so I didn’t even have to get out the chain saw. I had planned on driving to the end of this road and hiking down the ridge between Bull Canyon and S. Fork Cliff Creek. As I came near the edge of the canyon I noticed that there was a road of sorts going off to my right that the map had labeled as a “jeep trail.” I thought I had better check it out for any future hikes. A ways down the jeep trail it kind of disappeared but I saw what looked like a nice ridge to hike down so I drove my jeep across the hillside and parked at the top.

Plan B. I didn’t see any reason not to hike down this ridge. So I did. This ridge ran between N. Fork Cliff Creek and Rim Creek and was really a pretty nice ridge to walk down. It was a beautiful day and I reached Joseph Creek sometime after six. After hiking down, looking at that beautiful canyon, the creek was kind of a let down. I knew it was not going to be clear, but that murky water made my heart sink a little. I am used to seeing the clear water of the Wenaha and the S. Fork of the Walla Walla and after hiking down a canyon like that, you expect to see clear water even if you know better.

I found a decent place to pitch my tent at the bottom of the ridge. I noted that there were several decent spots for a hammock tent as well. By the time I got camp set up and firewood gathered I still had an hour or so of light left so I grabbed my fly rod and headed to the creek. I tied on a woolly bugger followed by a couple of nymphs. I caught a few rainbows right off before sticking my flies in a bush across the creek. There was a lot of insect activity so I decided to try a couple of dry flies.

I tied on some sort of foam terrestrial and an elk hair caddis. No disappointment there. The rainbows were happy to nail the hell out of the elk hair caddis. The fish were still all under 10”. After rising and catching quite a few rainbows I decided I had better head back to camp. I felt good though. There was definitely more rainbows in this section of the creek. Perhaps I had finally found the trout Shangri-La my book had spoken of. Tomorrow I would ply the waters more thoroughly in search for the 18 inchers.

Saturday was a beautiful morning and I was thinking to myself that I was happy when the weathermen were wrong. After some quick breakfast and coffee I headed downstream. I still had the elk hair caddis on and decided to leave it on there for a bit. It produced similar results to the evening before, but I didn’t hike down a steep canyon to hook fish up to 10.” I tied on another olive woolly bugger, a caddis emerger, and a mayfly emerger. Those fish loved the woolly bugger. I tried quite a few different combinations of nymphs behind the woolly bugger, but the woolly bugger out fished them all. Twelve inches was about the biggest of the trout I caught, but I did not catch any squaw fish and it wasn’t until I had worked my way downstream a couple of miles until I caught a sucker fish.

Swamp Creek is one of the major tributaries to Joseph Creek and I wanted to see exactly how big it was and whether or not the water was clear. I had fished my way down to Swamp Creek by early afternoon. It was a decent creek but not really fishable. Or I should say, not really cast-able. You would be dabbing flies off the end of your rod. The water was a disappointing murky color as well. It surprised me a little bit. Most of Swamp creek and Davis Creek (a main tributary to Swamp Creek) run through a pretty steep canyon with no roads. At the very upper end you actually cross the two creeks on FS rd. 46. At this spot the creeks are only about 2 feet wide. I measured the water temperature and swamp creek was running at 58 degrees to Joseph Creek’s 63 degrees. I also took a peek at the “trail” that is supposed to run beside Swamp Creek. I could see where it was, but it was definitely not worn. I followed it upstream until it went into some thick brush. It does not look like anyone maintains the trail this far down.

I was hoping to make it back to camp in time to fish upstream as well, but a breeze picked up and soon some gray clouds appeared at the rim of the canyon in the north. I picked up my pace, remembering that the weather forecast had called for rain and thunderstorms. At last, perhaps the weatherman was not wrong today after all.

Along this section of Joseph Creek there is a trail. Most places it is fairly easy to follow. Some places it splits into several game trails then disappears for a distance. If you keep your eye out, you will pick it up again. On my walk back I ran across two rattlesnakes. Counting the one alongside the river earlier in the day, that made three rattlesnake encounters for the day.

I made it back to camp at 4:30 just in time for the first rain drops. I shed my waders and hopped into the tent, hoping the rain would be short lived. I laid back on my sleeping pad listening to the plop, plop of the rain and soon fell asleep. Around 6:30 I woke and the rain had stopped. Not for long though. I no more than boiled water for dinner and the rain was at it again. Around 7:30 I began to notice that my tent was not so waterproof. I seemed to have moisture running down the inside walls and beginning to form small puddles inside my tent. Damn! I thought. I tried to decide if I could hike out before dark. It would be cutting it close and after already hiking quite a few miles today, I would probably be slower. I have hiked in the dark. I have hiked into strange places I have never been before and up out of steep canyons with no trails in the dark. I have not really enjoyed any of those experiences that much so I decided to stay put and hope that the rain would let off.

What is it they say about hope? Never mind. Soon it was good and dark and the rain was loud hitting my small tent, but not near as loud as the thunder. There were a few times that I could really feel the thunder it was so close. I did not sleep well. Between the rain and thunder I was in and out, but mostly out, of sleep most of the night. The cloud cover must have been pretty dense as well. Whenever I opened my eyes I couldn’t see a thing. Usually you can see something, even if it isn’t very clear. This was pitch black. Around 3:30 in the morning the rain began to let up and I could begin to see inside my tent a little. The lull in the rain finally let me get some sleep.

There were small puddles inside my tent everywhere and my sleeping bag was a bit wet by the morning. If it weren’t for the sleeping pad making an island, I would have been soaked. During a break in the rain I got out and made breakfast and coffee. But I had to eat and drink the coffee inside the tent because it began raining again. That tent was beginning to feel way too small. I had been in it about sixteen hours.

I finally gave up on the whole idea of the rain stopping anytime soon and simply got out and got a good soaking. I just threw all of my stuff into my pack wet. That is a great benefit of the rain as well, it made my pack weight heavier hiking out. By the time I got to the top there wasn’t a dry spot on me.

What to say about Joseph Creek? I feel a bit let down by my Angler’s Guide to Oregon. On Joseph Creek it says it “ranks among the best wild rainbow trout streams in the region. Trout here reach at least 18 inches and typically range from 8 to 14 inches.” There may be trout up to 18 inches, but the average or typical is much closer to 8 inches or less. I must say it is difficult to judge a section of river by one day of fishing. At least I finally found the right section of water to fish. If you ever fish Joseph Creek, I highly recommend staying above Swamp Creek until they get the summer water temperatures under control.

Perhaps I will ply its waters again. Maybe this fall when the water temperatures drop again, or perhaps next spring if it drops down before any of the other streams. For this spring my explorations of this creek are over. The Wenaha is calling me.

Trip Notes:

-Ridge length: about 2 miles
-elevation change: 2200 ft +/-
-Streamflow from DOE website at mouth: 150 cfs

Write-up by Grant

Joseph Creek, Wallowa County, Oregon May 29-30, 2010

Bad weather reports didn’t keep me from exploring Joseph Creek again May 29 and 30. Thursday there was a flood advisory here locally for small creeks and poor drainage areas. And it rained a lot. Joseph Creek raised 55 CFS in about a day and a half. Friday it was supposed to rain, Saturday it was only a 40% chance of rain, and Sunday was supposed to be a pretty nice day. Friday afternoon I headed into the mountains above Joseph Creek. Since it was raining pretty good on Friday, I decided that I would sleep in my Jeep at the top of the ridge that night and then hike down Saturday morning, staying until Sunday afternoon.

The weekend before, I hiked down the Warm Springs trail and found more warm water fish than trout. This weekend I decided to try about 14 river miles upstream at the northern limit of the Forest Service ground. I was hoping that this would be far enough upstream to get out of the sucker fish and smallmouth bass water. Here there is no trail. All of my maps show a trail going down and on my forest service map it is labeled #1725. This trail is supposed to start north a ridge or two from Pole Patch Canyon. Let me assure you, there is no trail there.

When I arrived Friday evening I got out my Delorme PN-40 and found where the old trail was supposed to start. I wandered around that area looking very closely for any old paths. I found none. I worked my way down the ridge a little bit to see what I had in store for me the next morning before heading back to the jeep for some dinner and bed.

The next morning the weather was not particularly bad but not particularly good. It was overcast and looked as though it might rain at anytime. I used my Delorme PN-40 GPS again to follow the alleged trail down into the creek bottom. A very short distance down I came to a drop off of about a 100 feet or so. The ridge to the south of me looked much better and it was fairly easy to side hill over to it. So I abandoned the trail my maps show and simply made my way down what looked like the easiest path. There is a fence near the top of the canyon so if someone wanted to ride a horse in they would have to start down the ridge I ended up on. At the top of it there is a gate.

When I got to the bottom of the ridge I found an interesting tree. It was hollowed out in the middle and I could stand quite comfortably inside of it. The inside was charred along with many other trees on the creek bottom. I decided to leave my pack at the hollow tree and walked down by the creek to find the best spot to pitch a tent for the weekend. I explored upstream and downstream and only found one fire ring right beside the river. It did not appear to be in a spot where someone would have been camping. Again I found old farm implements lying about here and there.

Upstream a little ways I saw an old stove sitting in the middle of a flat area beside the river. I thought it was a really strange place for a stove just to be sitting there beside the river. I walked up and began to inspect it and realized that the couple of rotten logs on two sides of the stove were the remains of a cabin. Either that was a very old cabin for the rest of it to have completely rotted away or the logs were salvaged or perhaps burned in the fire that had charred a great many of the trees.

I finally decided to pitch the tent just below the ridge I hiked down. After setting up camp I took a few steps toward Joseph Creek and heard that all too familiar rattling sound that makes my heart jump. Not ten feet from where I pitched my tent a good sized rattlesnake was sunning itself. To say the least, I did not let the rattlesnake share the campsite.

I fished downstream from camp working my way down to the northern end of the forest service boundary. This section was another disappointment. The rainbow’s that allegedly grew to at least 18” were sparse once again. Or perhaps I should say that rainbows much over 10” were impossible to find. I fished a woolly bugger followed by two nymphs on my way downstream and caught a pretty good batch of squawfish. I did manage to land a few more suckers as well, but the squawfish seemed to outnumber the suckers in this section. I caught some other fish as well that closely resembled a squawfish in body but the mouth was not the same. This mouth was almost square and oriented more towards the bottom like a sucker, although it did not have a sucker type of mouth. The fish baffled me. I am not up to snuff on my non-game warm water fish. Whatever it was, it grew to decent size.

On my way back to camp I fished two dries followed by a dropper. The dries rose lots of four to six inch trout and the dropper (Barr’s emerger) caught the bigger fish in the eight to ten inch range. When I got back to camp I was a bit disappointed again. I had done a lot of walking to prepare for exploring this creek and I was getting paid back in squawfish and suckerfish.

The next day was beautiful. The sun was shining and it didn’t seem to matter too much that the fishing was turning out to be less than expected. After all the rain and overcast days, the sun felt like heaven. I fished a mile or so upstream with similar results to the day prior. There was a nice spring with good flow coming down from the draw below the viewpoint. This spot did hold a few more rainbows. When I was done fishing for the day I walked up the hillside a ways and followed game trails back downstream towards camp. I did manage to startle two groups of turkeys on my way back as well. I got back to camp in early afternoon and packed up for the hike out. There is nothing like a nice 2500 foot climb out of a canyon at the end of a day filled with catching big suckers and squawfish and rainbows up to 10”.

From the water I covered so far, the rainbows have been almost all in the riffles while the slower pools and runs seem to hold good size pods of squawfish or suckers. I am not ready to give up on the creek yet. I am hoping that upstream may hold some better water still. There is a section farther upstream, but still on Forest Service ground, that has several small spring fed creeks feeding Joseph Creek. I am hoping this section may stay colder in the hot months of summer and therefore harbor the elusive 18”+ trout. Both times I have fished the creek, the water has been pretty murky as well. I have no problem fishing off-color water as long as there is enough visibility for a fish to see my fly if it gets in their strike zone. Perhaps clearer water might help though. I have no particular reason to believe it will other than I want Joseph Creek to be a decent trout fishery and it has been disappointing so far.

Trip Notes:
-Access by Highway 3 going north from Enterprise, FS RD 46, FS RD 4650, FS RD 150, on FS Rd 150 park anywhere you want to start down a ridge
-Distance from road on top to Creek: about 1.5 miles
-elevation change on hike: +/- 2,250 ft
-Flow from DOE site at mouth: 140 cfs
-Water clarity is definitely not good at 140 cfs, but it was fishable.

Write up by Grant

Joseph Creek

As a kid I remember stopping at the Joseph Creek Viewpoint on our way to Enterprise and peering down into the steep canyon with awe. Later in life as I was perusing the waters on a map I would look at the continuous switchbacks of the creek and wonder how much water was in the bottom of it and whether there was any good fishing to be had. Last year I decided to try and start exploring more waters and I bought “Complete Angler’s Guide to Oregon.” Under Joseph Creek it says that there are rainbows up to 18” primarily because of the sheer remoteness of the creek. The book also says you have to either have deep pockets to pay for access at the end of the road on private property or you had better have “the lung capacity and stamina of a mountain goat.” Deep pockets, no. Lung capacity of a mountain goat . . . I’m not sure.

Reading about Joseph creek peeked my long lingering interest and I began to think seriously about hiking into it. I first gathered the right maps. I had good topo maps from my mapping program from my Delorme handheld GPS. To get more detail of property boundaries and roads that get close to the creek I ordered a BLM map of the resource area and a Forest Service map of the Ranger district. Armed with these I had an excellent picture of Forest Service & BLM ground on the creek.

As I went through last fall and winter my interest would peek and then wane in cycles. I had a hard time deciding if I had the lung capacity and stamina of a mountain goat. But sometime in January I made up my mind and began training. Since January I have been hiking up ridges on the South Fork of the Walla Walla that gain around 2300 feet elevation, going up to 4 times per week. Most of them gain that elevation in roughly a mile. I began packing 30-40 pounds of rocks in my pack as well to get my legs in shape for the hike out. By early May I felt like I could give a mountain goat some competition even if I couldn’t beat him.

If you have googled Joseph Creek you have found, as I have, that there is not a lot of information. Your access points are limited. There is Ninebark Outfitters who own the property at the upper end of the creek and they own the ground that the county road dead-ends on. To access Joseph Creek on their property will cost you a minimum of $900. To some that may be well worth it.

There is the Chico Trail which is somewhere around 12 miles long. This trail drops down from Highway 3 to Davis Creek, climbs a ridge, drops down to Swamp Creek, and then winds its way down to the confluence of Swamp Creek and Joseph Creek. According to the Forest Service office in Enterprise, The Back Country Horsemen of Oregon go through and maintain this trail once a year. This trail is a bit long for a weekend fishing trip powered by your own two feet, but I do plan on making a trip down this trail with some other mode of transportation.

The other options are a bit more rugged. According to the book, there was a trail leading from the viewpoint on Highway 3 at some point in time. But I have found no secondary source to confirm it. All of my maps do show an old packer’s trail that drops down from a ridge across the canyon from the viewpoint. Basically you would need to find a ridge that looks hikeable and try it out.

In one of my google searches I did finally find some good information. I found that the Nez Perce tribe was given 15,000 acres of ground on Joseph Creek. What I found online was a 23 page management plan that called for open access to the public and building a trail down into the canyon from Rye Ridge Road. The plan was almost 10 years old and I could not find any other information about public access to this ground or whether or not they had built a trail into the canyon. There is also a trail that begins on Forest Service ground on the east fork of Tamarack Creek that leads onto the Nez Perce ground.

Joseph Creek apparently gets pretty warm in the summer and it is best to fish it right after runoff or in the fall. The head waters of Joseph Creek are actually quite low so as other rivers were beginning to rise and swell, Joseph Creek was dropping and looking like it might be fishable by the opening day of fishing. The only trouble then was deciding which spot to try and access first. I decided on the Rye Ridge Road access point, not knowing whether or not they had actually constructed a trail. This spot did have a pretty gentle ridge that I could walk down though.

As May 22 approached the weather forecasts were looking bad. Rain and possible snow showers were in the forecast. My plan was to hike in Friday afternoon, fish Saturday and Sunday exploring up and down stream and then hike out Sunday afternoon. Thursday night when I checked the weather forecast again it had a special alert for overnight lows to be close to freezing and snow levels down to 2500 feet. At that point I don’t think a forecast for tornadoes could have stopped me. I had been waiting and planning for this trip all winter. I called Jeff and asked to borrow his good GoreTex coat that he had bought last fall and luckily my new waders showed up Friday morning as well so I wouldn’t have to worry about leaky waders.

Friday afternoon I hit the road. On the drive over it rained, snowed, and hailed. I was definitely wondering if I had also inherited the brain power of a mountain goat with all the hiking I had done this winter. The weather was much better once I dropped down into Elgin. It was still cloudy and rainy looking, but it wasn’t a fierce storm anyway.

I found the spot where the Nez Perce ground intersected with the road without a problem. They had built the trail after all and it is called Warm Springs trail. There was a nice sign there welcoming me. I had been a little worried about parking my rig in some random spot on the road all weekend, so I was really relieved that there was kind of a trailhead area.

I threw on my pack and hit the trail. It was cloudy and looked like it could rain at anytime but it held off for the walk down. The trail the tribe constructed does not look like it gets heavy traffic. I lost it several times on the way down where game trails diverged and were more heavily worn than the manmade trail. I found my way to the bottom and sure enough there was warm water running out from under the rocks at the bottom. This spring smells a bit bad to be honest, a bit like rotten eggs or something. It must have something to do with the minerals in the water. My brother lived on a place on Grouse Flats (above the Grande Ronde River) and when you heated the water it smelled the same.

I walked to the edge of a small drop off and looked at the creek. I could see fish all over the place. There were quite a few in the shallow gravel beds and they appeared like they might be spawning. I knew the fish were definitely not trout, but could not quite tell what they were. I only had a few hours until dark so I began hunting for a good place to hang my Hennessy hammock tent.

It took a bit of hunting to find two trees of a big enough size and close enough together to hang a hammock. I had expected the fir and pine trees to go all the way to the bottom of the canyon but they don’t this far down the creek. After some searching I finally found some sort of scrub brush/tree about a half mile downstream I could hang my hammock on. I set up camp and had about an hour left of daylight so I took a walk downstream to see what the trail and creek was like.

This section of the creek was mostly riffles and pocket water. Just a ¼ mile from where I camped there was an old homesite. The roof was completely gone from the cabin and the log walls were leaning a bit. There were several pieces of old horse drawn farm equipment there as well. It seemed strange to me that someone tried to farm that creek bottom. The flat parts with decent soil are pretty narrow and short. They would have had to drag their equipment across the creek constantly to get to the next field. I guess I am just used to modern agriculture where farmers work fields that are thousands of acres instead of small acre plots. There was a sickle and hay rake down there though and I wondered where they were taking that hay. Perhaps there was a big barn somewhere down there that I did not see. I would have hated to try and haul hay out of that canyon.

The next morning I set out with great anticipation. I was anxious to revisit the water below the warm springs to see if the unidentified fish were still there. According to the DOE’s website, Joseph Creek was running at 115 cfs that day. The water was off color but not brown. I checked the water temperature that morning as well and found it to be about 48 degrees. I tied on a woolly bugger and a couple of nymphs and cast downstream to where I knew those fish were holding. First swing and wam, I had a fish on. “Man”, I thought, “that sure feels like a rainbow.” And it was a nice 12” rainbow. After releasing him I cast a few more times and had a second rainbow on. After releasing a second decent rainbow I began hooking into some larger but definitely different feeling fish. Pretty soon I got one landed and saw that all those fish I was seeing were suckers. The creek was full of them. They seemed to be spawning and the rainbows seemed to be waiting behind the suckers for eggs.

I worked my way upstream catching a rainbow here and there but hooking a lot of heavier fish that I did not get landed. Presumably these were suckers since when I did land one of the heavy ones it was a sucker. As I came around the bend of the creek to a deep long pool, I stood there just looking at how pretty it was, and a post-spawn steelhead came floating down towards me and swam right beside me on its way downstream. I also began to see small pods of small fish with dark tails. I knew I should know what they were but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what species they were. As I fished the upper end of one of the pools I hooked a decent fish that did not feel like a sucker. It got close to the surface and it did not look like a rainbow either, it was much browner. I did not get that one landed, but upstream my suspicions were confirmed. It was smallmouth bass. This section of creek was full of suckers and smallmouth bass.

I was a little disappointed, but I had a great time anyway. It was my first camping trip of the year and I forgot how good it feels to get out, stretch your legs, and do some exploring on new water. And the smell of my first campfire of the year, it was heavenly laying there in my hammock at night with a warm fire beside me. Sure it rained most of the time I was down there, and sure I was catching mostly suckers, but I was out where the world feels right. I got to hike down a beautiful canyon, and to boot, Sunday was a beautiful clear day.

I had planned on fishing Sunday as well, but decided to hike out early and spend the rest of the day exploring other access points for Joseph Creek. After hiking out I basically drove around the mountains all day seeing how close to the ridge roads led me and seeing what ridges looked like good prospects for another weekend. Stay tuned. I will be trying to explore Joseph Creek every weekend until the Wenaha is wadeable. So, probably most of June I will be hiking into Joseph Creek.

Some Trip Notes:

For those who just like to hike and explore it would make for a fun hike to go down the Warm Springs trail, hike a few miles down stream to the East Fork Tamarack Creek Trail and then hike out. This would make a great 2 day hike. The Trail going down the East Fork Tamarack Creek is actually a road that leads to some buildings owned by the tribe. The public is welcome to hike or ride horses or bikes (no motors) on this road. After the road reaches the buildings the trail is not visible from google earth. I have no idea if it is maintained by anybody the rest of the way to Joseph Creek. But that last part is fairly short. There is about a 2500 feet elevation difference between where you park your car and where you reach warm springs. The trail is about 2.5 miles long, or if you simply follow the nose of the ridge you will cut off roughly a half mile.

Upstream from warm springs there is another old cabin that is pretty neat. This one has the roof partly intact and is still mostly furnished although not usable. There is a big wood cook stove in there that is half sunk into the floor and part of the roof is on it as well. There is also an old bed, stools, and shelves in there still.

Write-up by Grant