THE FISHING CHRONICLES, MONDAY, JANUARY 19TH, 2009

The weather inversion is killing us. Jenn and I are determined to get up into the mountains above the muck, Lou in tow. With barely a dollar between us, we certainly can't afford lift tickets to ski. But that's okay, because we have annual pass to any Utah State Park. We had our hearts set on the Jordanelle Reservoir to fish the open water on the south end, still not frozen. But Jenn's folks had gone up the day before and reported a "pretty frozen" lake. Hoping that they were just plain wrong, we headed up and, to our dismay, found no place to cast our fishing lines. Jenn wanted to try the Middle Provo River. I was against it because I was unsure about where the bait and catch restrictions were in effect and also I knew there would be a lot of fly fisherman around, and they intimidate me. I insist that we go check out Deer Creek Reservoir and even become slightly grumpy when I sense I'm not going to have my way, which I apologize for. Upon approach, we see a very, very frozen lake. Ice fisherman abound. We round the mountainside and thankfully spot open water. Jenn and I had been up a month earlier and were forced to hike down from the guard shack, the road down to the boat ramp having been unplowed. We are delighted to discover that this time there had been some snow removal and we were able to drive all the way down to the top of the ramp. We got four lines out into the water with power bait on treble hooks. Another guy had two lines out nearby. We were there for two hours and didn't catch a thing! I'm starting to think there's something to the solunar chart, which forecasted and average day (every time I've fished on days rated excellent, I've caught at least one and had all sorts of action on my line). But catching a fish was not our goal. We simply wanted to get away from the air pollution, so mission accomplished. Plus Lou looked to have a great time with his sled on the tiny incline above the lake...

On our way up we were talking about how nice it is to escape the smog, but what a bummer it is to have to descend back into it. But never did we imagine it would be as bad as what we saw pictured below. Brownish yellow mucky haze extending all the way past East Canyon, BLECH!