Michael Wright: Searching for crane flies on the Yakima River

YAKIMA CANYON – At first, it was a faint roar, just loud enough to wake me up.

Then the roar kept building, growing louder until it filled the soundless desert canyon threaded by the Yakima River.

A horn blew and I finally realized what it was – a train rumbling down the tracks along the river between Ellensburg and Yakima. It took longer than it should have for me to remember that my tent was in a developed campsite across the river from the train, not directly on the tracks.

When the sound faded, I went back to sleep. At least until the next locomotive arrived.

I counted three that night, though it’s possible I imagined at least one of those. Point is, one of the trains blared its horn about the same time a sliver of sunlight appeared in the canyon, which meant it was time to get moving.

Joe Zimbric and I had big plans. There was a two-person pontoon boat stuffed in the truck along with an assortment of fly rods. We were going to drive upstream, launch the boat and float and fish our way down to the campsite. It was going to be hot, so we wanted an early start.

I was hoping we’d find trout interested in eating crane flies – slender, long-legged bugs that look like oversized mosquitoes. They hatch in the fall and trout will chase them down and eat them, occasionally in spectacular fashion.

Despite their visual appeal, crane flies rarely get much attention from fly anglers, who are more inclined to fret over mayflies and stoneflies. The Yakima River is one of the few streams where crane flies are taken seriously as trout food.

I’d never fished with crane flies until late last September, when a clerk at Red’s Fly Shop said that he’d been catching fish by skating them across the river. They looked like a cross between a stonefly and a brown drake, with an extended body, legs and long wings.

I bought a few and convinced a handful of fish to swipe at them over the next few days. There were also long, slow periods that made me think the hatch was over and that the fish had started looking elsewhere for calories. Timing is everything.

Crane flies popped back into my head when Joe moved to Tacoma this summer, putting us nearly equidistant from the lovely desert canyon. I wanted another shot at fishing with the giant mosquitoes and a reason to use the pontoon boat, so we commenced the usual haggling over the calendar. We picked a date a few weeks earlier than I’d been there last year, which I hoped meant we’d catch the front end of the hatch.

The line between right on time and too early is thin, and it turned out we were still early.

A guide at Red’s on Sunday told me crane flies had been seen upstream but not yet in great numbers in the canyon, where we planned to float. But, in a show of standard fly shop optimism, he did say the “cranes” could come out basically any day. Not that they’d absolutely hatch the next day or the day after that or even this week, just that they eventually would.

It’s the same logic that sells lottery tickets. He was saying we had a chance.

The parking lot at the put-in Monday morning was nearly empty. A couple of guys launched their drift boat just ahead of us and one angler was wading just downstream of the launch. Otherwise there was no activity. Crowds are the expectation on the Yakima, which has a well-deserved reputation as the state’s premier fly-fishing stream. Even on a shoulder season weekday, I expected a line of trucks and trailers at the ramp.

The river was low and bony. A little more than a week earlier, dam operators conducted the annual “flip-flop” – cutting the flows out of reservoirs in the upper Yakima basin and increasing the flows from reservoirs that meet the river farther downstream. Bureau of Reclamation officials do this every year as part of managing downstream irrigation demand and improving conditions for spawning chinook salmon in the fall.

For anglers and fish in the canyon stretch, it means high flows all summer and low flows the rest of the year. A month earlier, the river had been about three times as high. That was OK with us. Anchoring the boat and wade fishing would be easier.

I took the first shift on the oars. While I dodged rocks, Joe stood up front and casted toward the bank.

An encouraging sign came early. He was fishing a crane fly with a nymph underneath when a big trout rose for the dry fly. It missed, but showed enough of its body to get us excited.

There had to be more.

By lunch, the excitement dissipated. No other fish had chased the dry fly. Crane fly magic just wasn’t going to happen. I landed a decent 12-incher on the nymph dangling underneath the crane fly and hooked two others. The third fish was a fat, strong and brightly colored rainbow. I got it close to the boat once, and then it made a run upstream and spat the hook.

Even more desperate measures didn’t work. Joe dredged deep holes with a stonefly nymph and a smaller mayfly nymph to no avail. Neither of us ever tied on a streamer, though there’s no reason to think that would have helped. It just wasn’t our day.

Tough fishing forced us to look elsewhere for satisfaction. Floating through a geological marvel makes that easy. We stared at the Yakima Canyon’s massive basalt rock faces, with their intricate patterns of folds and breaks. Halfway up one of the shorter rock faces, we saw a pair of pigeons huddled in a tiny cave. At one point, Joe pointed out a white stripe on a hillside – a layer of Mazama ash, placed there by the eruption of the ancient volcano that formed Crater Lake.

At times, it felt like we had the canyon to ourselves. We saw more great blue herons than drift boats. I forgot at times about the highway that runs along the river.

I don’t even remember hearing any trains.